the weather to do the dirty work, and he wanted the deed before that happened.

When she refused, his eyebrows rose slightly, as if stubbornness in a poor woman was more irritating than admirable.

Others in the store tried not to stare, but prairie settlements were too small for privacy.

By the time Anna walked back to her wagon, people already knew she had turned down what many would have considered a salvation.

Before long, they gave her effort a nickname: the two-dollar straw shack.

Some said it pityingly.

Others said it with laughter.

A few said it with that peculiar satisfaction people feel when they are certain someone else’s pride will soon be punished.

What none of them saw was how methodical Anna had become.

She laid the willow roof poles close and low, supporting them with a center brace she shaped from salvaged timber.

Over the poles she spread braided grasses, then packed on mud and more cut sod, roots upward on the outermost layer so rain would shed instead of sink.

She sealed around the stove pipe with clay and tin from an old lard can.

She tamped the dirt floor hard, mixed ash into the surface, and smoothed it until it felt almost finished beneath bare feet.

She carved niches into the wall for a lamp and a Bible.

She fashioned pegs from willow for coats and blankets.

She built a narrow sleeping platform from the wagon boards so the children would not lie directly on the ground.

The first windstorm tested everything.

It came after sundown in a long shuddering rush, flattening grass, rattling the wagon, and finding every weakness in the world.

Anna crouched inside with the children pressed against her while the stove throbbed red and dust sifted from the roof seams.

Once, a handful of dirt fell onto the floor and Greta whimpered.

Anna rose, pushed more clay into the crack with her bare thumb, and sat back down.

By morning the house was still there.

The wagon canvas had nearly torn loose, but the little sod room held.

That was the morning Anna allowed herself, for the first time, to believe they might survive.

Hinrich came by two days later.

He dismounted, walked around the house in silence, and ran a knuckled hand along the wall.

From a distance the place looked crude, almost like a rise in the ground with a stovepipe.

Up close it revealed its intelligence.

The walls were thicker than most newcomers bothered to make them.

The house sat low enough that the wind slipped over it.

The door opened on the leeward side.

The window, though tiny, pulled in light and a little warmth.

Inside, the air smelled of fresh earth and smoke, but it was noticeably warmer than outside even with the stove nearly cold.

Hinrich stood in the doorway a long moment.

Then he nodded once, a gesture so small that another person might have missed its importance.

The next week he returned with a sack of potatoes, not as charity, he insisted, but as a trade for the help Fritz had given gathering stray fence wire from the creek bank.

Anna understood the truth and accepted the fiction because pride mattered to both of them.

Later, his wife sent over a crock of