Two Cabins, One Line

Kitty Harbison told Henry Schnoor she'd marry him if he'd put a bay window on his cabin, for her geraniums. He built it, on the south end, for the sun. Remember that window. The Harbisons came to this valley in eighteen ninety-six. That November Annie and her mother walked over the range in eighteen inches of snow, leading a pair of animals called Jersey and Lady. Annie and Kitty filed on homesteads side by side and put up a cabin on each, one for the kitchen, one for sleeping. Two years on they raised a big cabin square across the line between them. Everybody agreed their brother Rob was lazy. The sisters ran the Lone Star Dairy, and Annie put out a Sunday dinner for a dollar. As the wedding came close, Kitty saw that Annie couldn't run that ranch alone. She told Henry so, and that was the end of it. He married somebody else. His wife couldn't abide the valley, and she left him with two small girls. He tried an orphanage in Denver, but the smaller one was too weak to lift her head. So the Harbisons took them in, and that child was carried indoors from the wagon on a pillow. Henry's girls, raised by the woman who'd turned him down. When he remarried, Beatrice went home to him. Mamie stayed. When the park men came buying, the sisters called them city slickers and made them send a go-between, and Kitty rode the boundaries herself. In November of nineteen thirty-eight pneumonia took hold of them both. Kitty went first, on Election Day, the eighth. Annie had refused to go to bed until she'd cooked a good dinner, and with a fever near a hundred and five she held on five more days. No one told her Kitty had gone. Some say it was pneumonia took her. Others say a broken heart. They were buried together on the fourteenth. The ranch went to Mamie, the child on the pillow, and this road crosses that ground, at the south end of this valley. Six men carried the sisters. One was an old carpenter, past seventy, who'd once built a window for a girl's geraniums.