As Tony said, she had been talked about. She
was accused of making Ole Benson lose the little sense he had--and that at
an age when she should still have been in pinafores.
Ole lived in a leaky dugout somewhere at the edge of the settlement. He
was fat and lazy and discouraged, and bad luck had become a habit with him.
After he had had every other kind of misfortune, his wife, `Crazy Mary,'
tried to set a neighbour's barn on fire, and was sent to the asylum at
Lincoln. She was kept there for a few months, then escaped and walked all
the way home, nearly two hundred miles, travelling by night and hiding in
barns and haystacks by day. When she got back to the Norwegian settlement,
her poor feet were as hard as hoofs. She promised to be good, and was
allowed to stay at home--though everyone realized she was as crazy as ever,
and she still ran about barefooted through the snow, telling her domestic
troubles to her neighbours.
Not long after Mary came back from the asylum, I heard a young Dane, who
was helping us to thresh, tell Jake and Otto that Chris Lingard's oldest
girl had put Ole Benson out of his head, until he had no more sense than
his crazy wife. When Ole was cultivating his corn that summer, he used to
get discouraged in the field, tie up his team, and wander off to wherever
Lena Lingard was herding.
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