Two years went by in the way years go by on a homestead, which is to say that they did not go by at all but were pulled through by hand, one furrow and one fence post and one bucket at a time.
Pastor the mule turned out to be better than he looked and worse than he was priced. He would plow from dawn until noon without complaint, and at noon exactly he would stop in the furrow and refuse to take another step until he had been watered, fed, and spoken to, in that order. Ketti decided he was a Lutheran and began calling him Pastor Mule, and then Reverend, and by the second spring she had him trained to come to the fence when she sang the first line of A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, which made Nils laugh harder than anything had in years.
The oats came in heavy that first fall and he paid off Brisbin's note by Christmas. The second year a hailstorm took half the wheat in August, and he went into debt again, a smaller debt, and paid it off in the spring by hiring himself and the mule out to break sod for a family of Missourians who had taken up a claim on Lawyer Creek. Ketti went to school three months each winter at the log schoolhouse at Cottonwood, riding behind him on the mule in the cold, and the rest of the year she kept the house and the garden and the chickens and read everything that came into the cabin, including the almanac, the Lewiston paper, the Book of Concord, and a water-stained copy of Ivanhoe that Gudny had brought from Norway, which she read so many times that the spine gave out and Nils had to sew it with harness thread.
The people at Mount Idaho did not forget about the horse. Nobody spat at him and nobody refused his money. But there was a way that men stopped talking when he came into Brisbin's store, and a way they moved down the bench at church to give him more room than he needed, and once, at a barn raising on the Missourians' place, a man named Coker who had lost a cousin on the Salmon walked up to him with a cup of cider in his hand and said, quite pleasantly, "Ordway, I've always wondered. You ever find out which buck rode her?" and walked off again before Nils could answer.
Nils did not answer. He had no answer. He went home that night and sat on the step with the lamp out and looked at the dark field and thought about Gudny.
He thought about her more in those two years than he had in the two years right after she died. It was something about Ketti growing, the way she was getting her mother's long jaw, her mother's habit of saying a thing once, clearly, and then refusing to say it again. It was something about the empty lean-to where the mare had stood. And it was something about the spring.
The spring was at the north corner of the claim, a quarter mile from the cabin, where the prairie dropped into a shallow draw lined with chokecherry and serviceberry. The water came up cold out of a crack in a ledge of gray basalt and ran perhaps forty yards before it sank back into the ground. Around it, every May, the camas bloomed so thick and blue that from a distance the draw looked like a pool of water itself, and on the drier ground above, where the soil was thin over the rock, the kouse came up in its low clumps of feathery leaves and little white-yellow umbels.
When they had first taken up the claim in the spring of 1873, Nils had wanted to put the cabin by the spring, where the water was. Gudny had said no. She had walked the whole hundred and sixty acres with her skirts pinned up and her boots soaked through, and she had come back and stood with her hands on her hips and said, "Not by the spring. The house goes here, on the rise. We will dig a well."