Spring Came on Forever by Bess Streeter Aldrich

For Seven years after Ida Carter's marriage to Matthias she worked side by side with him in the store, never missing a day nor a chance to help her husband earn a penny. On hot summer mornings she rose with the sun and was ready to go with him through the dusty streets when he left for work. On winter mornings she was up long before daylight, breaking the ice in the pitcher for washing, dressing in her flannels and woolen dress, and was off with him in the dark and the cold.

There were hard times for town people as well as the country folks in those years after the Meier marriage. Every grasshopper cast its tiny reflection into Matthias' store, until the whole became a dark shadow over the counters. Drouth took its toll of the customers and so of Matthias himself. The little town had seen its citizens go out to fight a prairie fire which came rolling in with no apparent regard for the capital's importance. It had seen an uprising among the convicts in the penitentiary several miles away so that Matthias shouldered a gun with other citizens and went out to help quell the riot. It had seen the burning of the Atwood House with its big twenty-thousand-dollar loss.