In the little peach orchard where there were a few half-ripe peaches, the very first fruits of the orchards in this untamed land, the hard peach stones, from which the meat was eaten away, hung on their stems among the leafless branches. The weed-grown bed of Grass River was swept as by a prairie fire. And for the labor of the fields, nothing remained. The cottonwood trees and wild plum bushes belonged to a mid-winter landscape, and of the many young catalpa groves, only stubby sticks stood up, making a darker spot on the face of the bare plains.
For three days the Saint Bartholomew of vegetation continued. Then the pest, still hungry, rose and passed to the southeast, leaving behind it only a honey-combed soil where eggs were deposited for future hatching, and a famine-breeding desolation.
In days of great calamity or sorrow, sometimes little things annoy strangely, and it is not until after the grief has passed that the memory recalls and the mind wonders why trifles should have had such power amid such vastly important things. While the grasshopper was a burden, one loss wore heavily on Virginia Aydelot’s mind. She had given up hope for vines and daintier flowers in the early summer, but one clump of coarse sunflowers she had tended and watered and loved.
“It is our flower,” she said to Asher, who laughed at her care. “I won’t give them up. I can get along without the101other blooms this year, but my sunflowers are my treasure here—the only gold till the wheat turns yellow for us.”
“You are a sentimental sister,” Asher declared. But he patiently carried water from the dwindling well supply to keep the drouth from searing them. When they fell before the ravenous grasshoppers, foolish as it was, Virginia mourned their loss above the loss of crops—so scanty were the joys of these women state builders.
The day after the pests left was the Sabbath. When Asher Aydelot read the morning lesson in the Sunday school, his voice was deep and unfaltering. He had chosen the eighth chapter of Deuteronomy, with its sublime promises to a wilderness-locked people.
Then Pryor Gaines offered prayer.
“Although the figtree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines”—the old, old chant of Habakkuk on Mount Shigionoth—“the labor of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation. The Lord God is my strength, and He will make my feet like hind’s feet, and He will make me to walk upon mine high places.”
So the scholarly man, crippled and held to the land, prayed; and comfort came with his words.
Then Jim Shirley stood up to sing.
“I’m no preacher,” he said, holding the song book open a moment, “but I do believe the Lord loves the fellow who can laugh at his own hard luck. We weren’t so green as Darley Champers tried to have us believe, because the hoppers didn’t bite at us when they took every other green102and growing thing, and we have life enough in us to keep on growing. Furthermore, we aren’t the only people that have been pest-ridden. It’s even worse up on Big Wolf Creek, where Wyker’s short on corn to feed his brewery this fall. I’m going to ask everyone who is still glad he’s in the Grass River settlement in Kansas to stand up and sing just like he meant it. It’s the old Portuguese hymn. Asher and I learned it back on Clover Creek in Ohio.
How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord,
Is laid for your faith—in His excellent word!”
Every man and woman rose at once.
“The ‘ayes’ have it,” Jim declared.
Then strong and sweet the song floated out across the desolate drouth-ridden, pest-despoiled prairie. The same song was sung that day, no doubt, where many worshipers were met together. The same song, sung in country chapel and city church; in mining villages, and in lonely lumber camps; on vessels far out at sea, and in the missionary service of distant heathen lands; by sick beds in humble homes, and beneath the groined arches of the Old World cathedrals.
But nowhere above the good green sod of Christendom did it rise in braver, truer worship from trustful and unconquered hearts than it rose that day in the little sod schoolhouse on the Kansas prairie, pouring its melody down the wide spaces of the Grass River Valley.
103CHAPTER VIIThe Last Bridge Burned
...Scores of better men had died.
I could reach the township living, but—He knew what terrors tore me—
But I didn’t! But I didn’t! I went down the other side.
—The Explorer.
Pryor Gaines never preached a better sermon than the one that followed the singing of that old Portuguese hymn; and there were no doleful faces in that little company when the service closed. The men stopped long enough to discuss the best crops to put in for the fall, and how and where they might get seeds for the same; to consider ways for destroying the eggs left by the grasshoppers in the honey-combed ground, and to trade help in the wheat-breaking to begin the next day. The women lingered to plan a picnic dinner for the coming Saturday. Jim Shirley hummed an old love tune as he helped Pryor Gaines to close the windows and door for the week. Only little Todd Stewart, with sober face, scratched thoughtfully at the hard earth with his hard little toes.
“Can’t there be no more little children where there’s grasshoppers and Darley Champerses?” he asked his mother.
“Yes, yes, Todd. You won’t be lonesome long,” his mother assured him. “Some time when you are a man you can say, ‘I was the only little boy the grasshoppers and Darley Champers didn’t get.’ You stout little Trojan!”
And then Todd, too, caught the spirit of the day and104went singing blithely away. Across the bare hollow of Grass River, and beyond the sand dunes into the brown wastes that had been grassy prairies, his young voice came trailing back still singing, as he rode behind his father, following the long hot trail toward their home. And the other settlers went their ways, each with courage renewed, for the new week’s work.
Yet, they were lonesomely few in number, and the prairies were vast; they were poverty-stricken, with little means by which to sustain life through the coming season; on every hand the desolate plains lay robbed of every green growth, and to this land they were nailed hand and foot as to a cross of crucifixion. But they were young. They believed in the West and in themselves. Their faces were set toward the future. They had voted themselves into holding on, and, except for the Aydelots, no one family had more resource than another. The Aydelots could leave the West if they chose. But they did not choose. So together they laughed at hardship; they made the most of their meager possessions; they helped each other as one family—and they trusted to Providence for the future. And Providence, albeit she shows a seamy side to poverty, still loves the man who laughs at hard luck. The seasons following were not unkind. The late summer rains, the long autumn, and the mild winter were blessings. But withal, there were days on days of real hunger. Stock died for lack of encouragement to live without food. And the grim while of waiting for seed time and signs of prosperity was lived through with that old Anglo-Saxon tenacity that has led the English speaking peoples to fight and colonize to the ends of the earth.105
“Virginia,” Asher said one noontime, as the two sat at their spare meal, “the folks are coming up tonight to hold a council. I saw Bennington this morning and he had heard from the men over Todd Stewart’s way. Dust the piano, polish up the chandelier, and decorate with—smiles,” he added, as he saw the shadow on his wife’s face.
“I’ll have the maid put the reception room in order,” Virginia replied, with an attempt at merriment.
Then through the long afternoon she fought to a finish with the yearning for the things she missed daily. At supper time, however, she was the same cheery woman who had laughed at loss and lack so often that she wondered sometimes if abundance might not really make her sad.
In the evening the men sat on the ground about the door of the Sunflower Inn. Their wives had not come with them. One woman was sick at home; little Todd Stewart was at the beginning of a fever, and the other women were taking turns at nursing. Virginia’s turn had been the night before. She was weary now and she sat in the doorway listening to the men, and remembering how on just such a moonlit September night she and Asher had sat together under the Sign of the Sunflower and planned a future of wealth and comfort.
“The case is desperate,” Cyrus Bennington was saying. “Sickness and starvation and the horses failing every day and the need for all the plowing and getting winter fuel. Something must be done.”
Others agreed, citing additional needs no less pressing.
“There are supplies and money coming from the East right now,” Jim Shirley declared. “A hunting party crossed south two days ago. I was down on lower Plum106Creek searching for firewood, and I met them. They said we might get help from Wykerton if we went up right away.”
“Well, you are Mr. Swift, Jim,” one of the men exclaimed. “If you knew it two days ago, why in thunder didn’t you report. We’d have made a wooden horse gallop to Wykerton before night.”
“How’d I round up the neighborhood? I didn’t get home till nearly noon today. And, besides, they said Darley Champers has the distributing of the supplies and money, and he’s putting it where it will do the most good, not giving to everybody alike, he says.”
A sudden blankness fell upon each face, as each recalled the last words of Champers when he left them on the Sabbath day in August.
“Well, you said a wooden horse could have galloped up to Wykerton.” Jim Shirley tried to speak cheerfully. “A horse of iron might, too, but who’s got a critter in Grass River Valley right now that could make a trip like that? Mine couldn’t. It took me two days and a half to haul up a load of stuff, mostly sunflower stalks, that I gathered down south.”
“Aydelot’s black mare could do it if anything could,” Pryor Gaines declared, trying to speak cheerfully, yet he was the least able to meet the hardships of that season.
“Yes, maybe,” Shirley commented. “She’s a thoroughbred, and they finally win, you know. But knowing what you do, who of you wants to face Darley Champers?”
Again a hopeless despair filled the hearts of the little company. Todd Stewart clinched his hands together. The husband of the sick woman set his jaws like iron. Pryor107Gaines turned his face away and offered no further word. Asher Aydelot sat looking out across the prairie, touched to silvery beauty by the pitying moonlight, and Jim Shirley bowed his head and said nothing.
“I will go to Wykerton,” Virginia Aydelot’s soft voice broke the silence. “I’ll take Juno and go tomorrow morning. If Darley Champers refuses me, he would do the same to you.”
“Oh, Mrs. Aydelot, will you go? Can you try it? Do you think you could do it?” The questions came from the eager settlers.
“We’ll try it, Juno and I,” Virginia replied.
“Thoroughbreds, both of ’em,” Jim Shirley murmured under his breath, and Pryor Gaines’ face expressed the things he could not say.
“I believe that is the best thing to do,” Asher Aydelot declared.
Then the settlers said good night, and sought their homes.
As Virginia Aydelot rode away in the early morning, the cool breeze came surging to her out of the west. The plains were more barren than she had ever seen them before, but the sky above them had lost nothing of its beauty. No color had faded from the eastern horizon line, no magnificence had slipped away from the sunset.
“‘The heavens declare the glory of God,’” Virginia said to herself. “Has He forgotten the earth which is His also?”
She turned at the little swell to the northward to wave good-by to Asher, standing with arms folded beside a corral post, looking after her.108
“Is he thinking of Cloverdale and the big cool farmhouse and the well-kept farm, and the many people coming and going along that old National pike road? He gave it all up for me—all his inheritance for me and this.”
She looked back once more at the long slope of colorless land and the solitary figure watching her in the midst of it all.
“I’ll tell him tonight I’m ready to go back East. We can go to Ohio, and Asher can live where his boyhood days were spent. My Virginia can never be as it was in my childhood, but Asher can have some of the pleasures of his eastern home.” She pushed back the sunbonnet from her face, and let the west breeze sweep across it.
“I used to wear a veil and was somewhat acquainted with cold cream, and my hands were really white and soft. They are hard and brown now. When I get home I’ll put it straight to Asher about going back to civilization, even if there are only a few dollars waiting to take us there, and nothing waiting for us to do.”
With a sigh, half of anticipation and half of regret, she rode away toward the little town of Wykerton in the Big Wolf Creek settlement.
There were few differences between the new county seat and Carey’s Crossing, except that there were a few more houses, and over by the creek bank the brewery, by which Hans Wyker proposed to save the West. There was, however, one difference between the vanished Carey’s Crossing and this place, the difference between the community whose business leaders have ideals of citizenship, and the community wherein commerce is advanced by the degradation of its citizens. Wykerton had no Dr. Carey nor John109Jacobs to control it. The loafers stared boldly at Virginia Aydelot as she rode up before the livery stable and slipped from her saddle. Not because a woman in a calico dress and sunbonnet, a tanned, brown-handed woman, was a novelty there, but because the license of the place was one of impudence and disrespect.
The saloon was on one side of the livery stable and the postoffice was on the other side. Darley Champers’ office stood next to the postoffice, a dingy little shack with much show of maps and real estate information. Behind the office was a large barren yard where one little lilac bush languished above the hard earth. The Wyker hotel and store were across the street.
Virginia had been intrusted with small sums for sundry purchases for the settlement, especially for the staple medicines and household needs—camphor and turpentine, quinine and certain cough syrups for the winter; castor oil, some old and tried ointment, and brand of painkiller; thread and needles and pins—especially pins—and buttons for everybody’s clothes. One settler had ridden back at midnight to ask for the purchase of a pair of shoes for his wife. It was a precious commission that Virginia Aydelot bore that day, although to the shopper in a Kansas city today, the sum of money would have seemed pitifully small.
In the postoffice, printed rulings and directions regarding the supplies were posted on the wall, and Virginia read them carefully. Then with many misgivings and a prayer for success, she crossed the street to Darley Champers’ place of business.
In spite of her plain dress, Virginia Aydelot was every inch a lady, and Darley Champers, dull as he was in certain110lines, felt the difference her presence made in the atmosphere of his office when she entered there.
“I understood, Mr. Champers, that you have charge here of the supplies sent into the state for the relief of those who suffered from the grasshoppers,” she said, when she was seated in the dingy little room.
“Yes, mom!” Champers replied.
“I am Mrs. Asher Aydelot, and I represent the Grass River settlement. I have come to ask for a share of this relief fund, and as I must start back as soon as possible after dinner, perhaps we can make all arrangements now.”
She never knew how near her gentle manner and pleasant voice came to winning the day at once. Champers’ first impulse was to grant her anything she asked for; his second was to refuse everything; his third, his ruling principle always, was to negotiate to his own advantage. He dropped his eyes and began to play for time.
“I don’t know as I can help you at all, madam,” he said, half sympathetically. “The supplies and money is about gone, except what’s promised, and, well—you ought to have come sooner. I’d a been glad to help you, but I thought you Grass River folks had about everything you needed for the winter.”
“Oh, Mr. Champers,” Virginia cried, “you know that nobody could foretell the coming of the plague. We were as well off as hundreds of other settlers this dry summer before the grasshoppers came.”
“Yes, yes, madam, but the supplies is gone, about.”
“And you cannot promise that any more will be coming soon?” The pathos of the woman’s voice was appealing.111
“If you could only understand how poor and how brave those settlers are!”
“I thought your man had some little means to get you and him away, if he’d use it that way.”
The sorrow of failure here and the suffering that must follow it made Virginia sick at heart. A homesick longing suddenly possessed her; a wish to get away from the country and forget it altogether. And Champers was cunning enough to understand.
“You’d just like to get away from it, now, wouldn’t you?” he asked persuasively.
“I surely would, when I think of the suffering there will be,” Virginia replied. “Our staying won’t help matters any.”
“Not a bit! Not a bit,” Champers asserted. “It’s too bad you can’t go.”
Virginia looked up wonderingly.
“Madam, I haven’t no supplies. They’re all gone, I think. But if you’ll come in right after dinner, I’ll see if I can’t do something. I’m a humane man.”
“I’ll be here at one o’clock,” she replied.
It was the last hope, and anything was better than utter failure in her errand.
When she registered her name at the hotel for dinner, Virginia’s eye was caught by the two names on the page. Both belonged to strangers, but it was the sharp contrast of the writing that made her read them. One recorded in a cramped little hand the name of Thomas Smith, Wilmington, Delaware. The other in big, even, backward slanting letters spelled out the name of John Jacobs, Cincinnati, Ohio.112
The dining room was crowded with men when Virginia entered. Whoever is hunting for evidence of good breeding and unselfishness, must not expect too much in any eating-house, be it dining car on the Empire Limited or grub shack on the western frontier, if only men are accustomed to feed there. The best places were filled with noisy talkers and eaters, who stared at her indifferently, and it was not until Gretchen Wyker, tow-haired, pimpled, and short-necked like her father, chose to do so, that she finally pointed out a chair at a shabby side table and waved her empty tin waiter toward it. Virginia was passing the long table of staring men to reach this seat, when a man rose from the small table at the other side of the room and crossed hastily to her.
“Excuse me, madam,” he said politely. “Will you come over to our table? We are strangers to you, but you will get better service here than you might get alone. My name is Jacobs. I saw you in the store this morning, and I know nearly every man in your settlement.”
It was a small service, truly, but to Virginia it was a grateful one in that embarrassing moment.
“You can take Dr. Carey’s place. He’s away today, locating a claim on the upper fork of Grass River somewhere. He hasn’t been back a month, but he’s busy as ever. Tell me about your neighborhood,” Jacobs said.
Virginia told the story of the community that differed little from the story of the whole frontier line of Kansas settlements in the early seventies.
“Do you have hope of help through Mr. Champers?” Jacobs asked.113
“I don’t know what to hope for from Mr. Champers. He seems kind-hearted,” Virginia replied.
“I hope you will find him a real friend. He is pretty busy with a man from the East today,” Jacobs answered, with a face so neutral in its expression that Virginia wondered what his thought might be.
As she rose to leave the table, Mr. Jacobs said:
“I shall be interested in knowing how you succeed this afternoon. I hope you may not be disappointed. I happen to know that there are funds and goods both on hand. It’s a matter of getting them distributed without prejudice.”
“You are very kind, Mr. Jacobs,” Virginia replied. “It is a desperate case. I feel as if I should be ready to leave the West if I do not get relief for our neighborhood today.”
Jacobs looked at her keenly. “Can you go?” he asked. “I wonder you have waited until now.”
“I’ve never wanted to go before. I wouldn’t now. I could stand it for our household.” The dark eyes flashed with the old Thaine will to do as she pleased. “But it is my sympathy for other people, for our sick, for discouraged men.”
Jacobs smiled kindly and bowed as she left the room.
When she returned to Champers’ office Mr. Thomas Smith was already there, his small frame and narrow, close-set eyes and secretive manner seeming out of place in the breezy atmosphere of the plain, outspoken West of the settlement days. In the conversation that followed it seemed to Virginia that he controlled all of the real estate dealer’s words.
“I am sorry to say that there ain’t anything left in the114way of supplies, Mrs. Aydelot, except what’s reserved for worthy parties. I’ve looked over things carefully.” Darley Champers broke the silence at once.
“Who draws the line between the worthy and the unworthy, Mr. Champers?” Virginia asked. “I am told the relief supply is not exhausted.”
“Oh, the distributin’s in my hands in a way, but that don’t change matters,” Champers said.
“I read the rulings in the postoffice,” Virginia began.
“Yes, I had ’em put there. It saves a lot of misunderstandin’,” the guardian of supplies declared. “But it don’t change anything here.”
Virginia knew that her case was lost and she rose to leave the room. She had instinctively distrusted Darley Champers from their first meeting. She had disliked him as an ill-bred, blustering sort of man, but she had not thought him vindictive until now. Now she saw in him a stubborn, unforgiving man, small enough to work out of petty spite to the complete downfall of any who dared oppose his plans.
“Sit down, Mrs. Aydelot. As I said this mornin’, it’s too bad you can’t go back East now,” Champers said seriously.
“We can.” Virginia could not keep back the words.
Champers and Smith exchanged glances.
“No, mom, you can’t, Mrs. Aydelot. Let me show you why.”
He opened the drawer of his rickety desk and out of a mass of papers he fished up a copy of theCincinnati Enquirer, six weeks old. “Look at this,” and he thrust it into Virginia’s hand.
The head-lines were large, but the story was brief. The115failure of the Cloverdale bank, the disappearance of the trusted cashier, the loss of deposits—a story too common to need detail. Virginia Aydelot never knew until that moment how much that reserve fund had really meant to her. She had need of the inherited pride of the Thaines now.
“The papers are not always accurate,” she said quietly.
“No, mom. But Mr. Smith here has interests in Cloverdale. He’s just come from there, and he says it’s even worse than this states it.”
Virginia looked toward Mr. Smith, who nodded assent.
“The failure is complete. Fortunately, I lost but little,” he said.
“Why hasn’t Mr. Aydelot been notified?” she demanded.
“It does seem queer he wasn’t,” Thomas Smith assented.
Something in his face made Virginia distrust him more than she distrusted Darley Champers.
“Now, Mrs. Aydelot, seein’ your last bridge is burned, I’m humane enough to help you. You said this mornin’ you wanted to get away. Mr. Smith and I control some funds together, and he’s willing to take Shirley’s place and I’ll give you a reasonable figger, not quite so good as I could ’a done previous to this calamity—but I’ll take the Aydelot place off your hands.” Champers smiled triumphantly.
“The Aydelot place is not for sale. Good afternoon.” And Virginia left the office without more words.
When she was gone Champers turned to Smith with a growl.
“It’s danged hard to turn agin a woman like her. What made you so bitter?”
Smith half grinned and half snarled in reply:116
“Oh, her neighbor, Shirley, you know.”
Hopeless and crushed, Virginia sat down on the bench before the Wyker House to wait for Juno to be brought to her from the stables. The afternoon sun was beginning to creep under the roof shading the doorway. Before her the dusty street ran into the dusty trail leading out to the colorless west. It was the saddest moment she had known in the conflict with the wilderness.
“Thy shoes shall be iron and brass,” ran the blessing of Asher through her mind. “It must be true today as in the desert long ago. And Asher lives by the memory of his mother’s blessing.” The drooping shoulders lifted. The dark eyes brightened.
“I won’t give up. I’m glad the money’s gone,” she declared to herself. “We did depend on it so long as we knew we had it.”
“What luck, Mrs. Aydelot?” It was John Jacobs who spoke as he sat down beside her.
“All bad luck, but we are not discouraged,” she replied bravely, and Jacobs read the whole story in the words.
A silence fell. Virginia sat looking at the vacant street, while the young man studied her face. Then Juno was brought to the door and Virginia rose to mount her.
“Mrs. Aydelot,” John Jacob’s sharp eyes seemed to pierce to her very soul as he said slowly, “I believe you are not discouraged. You believe in this country, you, and your neighbors. I believe in it, and I believe in you. Stewart and I had to dissolve partnership when Carey’s Crossing dissolved. He took a claim. It was all he could do. I went back to Cincinnati, but only for a time. I’m ready to start again. I will organize a company of town117builders, not brewery builders. You must not look for favors in a whisky-ridden place like this. There’ll be no saloon to rule our town.”
Virginia listened interestedly but not understandingly.
“What of this?” Jacobs continued. “I have some means. I’m waiting for more. I’ll invest them in Grass River. Go back and tell your homesteaders that I’ll make a small five-year loan to every man in the settlement according to his extreme needs. I’ll take each man’s note with five per cent interest and the privilege of renewing for two years if crops fail at the end of the term. I am selfish, I’ll admit,” he declared, as Virginia looked at him incredulously, “and I want dollar for dollar—always—sometimes more. My people are popularly known as Shylocks. But you note that my rate of usury is small, the time long, and that I want these settlers to stay. I am not trying to get rid of them in order to speculate on their land in coming days of prosperity—the days when you will be landlords over broad acres and I a merchant prince. I say again, I believe in the West and in you farmer people who must turn the West from a wilderness to a land of plenty. I’m willing to risk something on your venture.”
“Oh, Mr. Jacobs,” was all Virginia could say, and, womanlike, the tears filled her eyes and ran down her cheeks.
“Tell the men to send a committee up here with their needs listed,” Jacobs said hastily, “or better, I’ll go out there myself the day after tomorrow. I want to see what kind of a claim Carey has preempted. Good-by, now, good-by.”118
He hurried Virginia to her horse and watched her ride away.
Down at the ford of Wolf Creek the willow brush fringed the main trail thinly for a little distance and half hid the creek trail, winding up a long canyon-like hollow, until a low place in the bank and a steep climb brought it up to the open prairie. It was the same trail that Dr. Carey had spoken of as belonging to an ugly little creek running into Big Wolf, the trail he had wanted to avoid on the day he had heard Virginia singing when she was lost on the prairie one cold day.
Virginia paused in this semblance of shade to let Juno drink. She pushed back her sunbonnet and sat waiting. Her brown face grew radiant as she thought of the good news she was bearing to the waiting home-makers of the Grass River Valley. A song came to her lips, and as she sang a soft little measure she remembered how somewhere down a tributary to this very creek she had sung for help in pleading tones one cold hopeless day three years before. So intent was she on the triumph of the hour she did not even look up the willow-shadowed creek trail.
Dr. Horace Carey, coming in from a distant claim, had dropped into this trail for the bits of shade here and there and was letting his pony take its way leisurely along the side of the creek bed. There were only a few shallow pools now where the fall rains would soon put a running stream, and as the doctor’s way lay along the moist places the pony’s feet fell noiselessly on the soft ground. As he rounded a bend in the stream he caught sight of Virginia, her face outlined against the background of willow sprays, making a picture worth a journey to see, it was such a119hopeful, happy face at that moment. Dr. Carey involuntarily checked his pony at the sight. His own countenance was too pale for a Kansas plainsman, and he sat so still that the low strain of Virginia’s song reached his ears.
Presently Juno lifted her head and Virginia rode away out on the Sunflower Trail, bordered now only by dead pest-ridden stalks. Suddenly lifting her eyes she saw far across a stretch of burned prairie a landscape of exquisite beauty. In a foreground lay a little lake surrounded by grassy banks and behind it, on a slight elevation, stood a mansion house of the old Colonial style with white pillared portico, and green vines and forest trees casting cool shade. Beyond it, wrapped in mist, rose a mountain height with a road winding picturesquely in and out along its side. Virginia caught her breath as a great sob rose in her throat. This was all so like the old Thaine mansion house of her childhood years.
“It’s only the mirage,” she said aloud. “But it was so like—what?” She held Juno back as she looked afar at the receding painting of the plains. “It’s like the house we’ll have some day on that slope beyond the Sunflower Inn. The mountains are misty. They are only the mountains of memory. But the home and the woods and the water—all may be real.”
Then she thought of Asher and of the dull prairie everywhere.
“I wonder if he would want to go back if he could see this as I see it,” she questioned. “But I know he has seen it daily. I can tell by that look in his gray eyes.”
It was long after moonrise when Asher Aydelot, watching by the corral, heard the sound of hoof-beats and saw120the faint outline of a horse and rider swinging in from the northward as once before he had watched the same horse and rider swinging over the same trail before the cool north wind that beat back the September prairie fire.
“I have supper all ready. See what grew just for you!” Asher said as he and his wife entered the house.
A bunch of forlorn little sunflowers in a brown pitcher graced the table. They could scarcely be called flowers, but to Virginia, who had hardly seen a blossom through the days of drouth, the joy they brought was keener than the joy that the roses and orchids gave in the days of a later prosperity.
“I found them in the draw where the wild plums grow,” Asher said. “How they ever escaped the hoppers is a miracle.”
“We will christen our claim ’The Sunflower Ranch’ tonight, and these are our decorations for the ceremony. It is all we have now. But it is ours,” Virginia declared.
And then she told the story of the bank failure at Cloverdale.
“The last bridge is burned surely,” Asher commented as he looked across the table at Virginia. “This is the only property we have except youth and health and hope—and—each other.”
“And the old Aydelot heritage to stand for principle, and your mother’s belief in the West and in you, and the Thaine stubbornness about giving up what they want to keep,” Virginia declared.
“As our days so shall our strength be,” Asher added, as he saw his wife’s face bright with hope and determination, and remembered the sweet face of his mother as it121had looked that night on the veranda of the old farmhouse by the National pike road.
For a long time down by the willows thinly shadowing Wolf Creek a white-faced man sat looking out toward the west, where a horse and rider had vanished into the mellow tones of distance.
122CHAPTER VIIIAnchored Hearthstones
Dear Mother of Christ, who motherhood blessed,
All life in thy Son is complete.
The length of a day, the century’s tale
Of years do His purpose repeat.
As wide as the world a sympathy comes
To him who has kissed his own son,
A tenderness deep as the depths of the sea,
To motherhood mourning is won.
No life is for naught. It was heaven’s own way
That the baby who came should stay only a day.
Living by faith, which is the substance of things hoped for, is good for the spirit but reducing to the flesh. Yet it was much by faith that the frontier settlers lived through the winter after the grasshopper raid. Jim Shirley often declared in that time between crops that he could make three meals a day on Pryor Gaines’ smile. And Todd Stewart asserted that when the meat was all gone from their larder his family lived one whole week on John Jacobs’ belief in the future of their settlement. For the hardship of that winter was heavy. All the more heavy because the settlers were not stupid pauper-bred folk but young men and women of intelligence and culture, whose early lives had known luxuries as well as comforts. But the saving sense of humor, the saving power of belief in themselves, and the saving grace of brotherly love carried them through.
The winter was mercifully mild and the short grass of the prairies was nourishing to the stock that must123otherwise have perished. Late in February a rainfall began that lasted for days and Grass River, rising to its opportunity, drowned all the fords, so that the neighbors on widely separated claims were cut off from each other. No telephones relieved the loneliness of the country dwellers in those days, and each household had to rely on its own resources for all its needs. March came raging in like a lion. All the rain turned to snow and the wind to a polar blast as the one furious blizzard of that season fell upon the plains and for many hours threshed the snow-covered land.
On the night before the coming of the blizzard the light did not go out in the Aydelot cabin. And while the wind and rain without raved at door and window, a faint little cry within told that a new life had come to the world, a baby girl born in the midst of the storm. Morning brought no check to the furious elements. And Asher, who had fought in the front line at Antietam, had forced his way through a storm of Indian arrows out of a death-trap in the foothills of the Rockies, had ministered to men on the plains dying of the Asiatic plague, and had bound up the wounds of men who returned to the battle again, found a new form of heroism that morning in his own little cabin—the heroism of motherhood.
“You must go for help, Asher,” Virginia said, smiling bravely. “Leave the baby beside me here. We’ll wait till you come back. Little Sweetheart, you are welcome, if you did come with the storm, a little before you were expected.” The young mother looked fondly at the tiny face beside her.
“I can’t leave you alone, Virgie,” Asher insisted.
“But you must.” Virginia’s voice was full of courage.124“You can go as far as Pryor Gaines’ and send him on for you. Little daughter and I will be all right till you come back.”
So Asher left her.
Pryor Gaines was waterbound across Grass River. Of the three women living east of the stream one was sick abed, one was kept at home with a sick husband, and the third had gone with her husband to Wykerton for supplies and was stormstaid somewhere along the Sunflower Trail.
“I must go for Jim. Any neighborhood is blessed that has a few good-hearted unmarried folks in it,” Asher thought as he braced himself against the driving rain and hurried away.
When he reached home again the fire was low, the house was very quiet, and Virginia’s face was white against her pillow.
“Our little daughter is asleep,” she said, and turning away she seemed not to hear her husband’s voice assuring her that Jim would bring the doctor as soon as possible.
The blizzard was just beginning in the early evening when Jim Shirley fairly blew down the trail from the north. He slipped into the kitchen and passed quietly to the next room. Asher was bending over his wife, who lay in a delirium.
Jim Shirley had one of those sympathetic natures that read the joys and sorrows of their friends without words. One look at Asher told him what had been.
“The doctor was away up Wolf Creek, but I left word with his colored man for him to come at once, and he’ll do it,” Jim assured Asher as he stood for a moment beside the bed. “I didn’t wait because you need me.”125
Asher lifted his head and looked at Jim. As man to man they knew as never before the strength of their lifetime friendship.
“I need you. She needs the doctor. The baby—”
“Doesn’t need any of us,” Jim said softly. “I’ll do what I can.”
It is no strange, unreal story of the wilderness day, this fluttering in and out of a little life, where no rosewood grew for coffins nor florists made broken columns of white lilies and immortelles.
But no mother’s hands could have been more gentle than the gentle hands of Jim Shirley as he prepared the little form for burial.
Meantime the wind was at its wildest, and the plains blizzard swirled in blinding bitterness along the prairie. The hours of the night dragged by slowly to the two men hoping for the doctor’s coming, yet fearing that hope was impossible in the face of such a night.
“Carey has the keenest sense of direction I ever knew in a human being,” Jim assured Asher. “I know he will not fail us.”
Yet the morning came and the doctor came not. The day differed from the night only in the visible fierceness of the storm. The wind swept howling in long angry shrieks from the northwest. The snow seemed one dizzy, maddening whirlpool of white flakes hanging forever above the earth.
Inside the cabin Virginia’s delirium was turning to a frenzy. And Asher and Jim forgot that somewhere in the world that day there was warmth and sunlight, health and happiness, flowers, and the song of birds, and babies126cooing on their mothers’ knees. And the hours of the day dragged on to evening.
Meanwhile, Dr. Carey had come into Wykerton belated by the rains.
“The wind is changing. There’ll be a snowstorm before morning, Bo Peep,” he said wearily as the young colored man assisted him into warm, dry clothes. “It’s glorious to sit by a fire on a night like this. I didn’t know how tired I was till now.”
“Yes, suh, I’se glad you all is home for the night, suh. I sho’ is. I got mighty little use for this yuh country. I’se sorry now I eveh done taken my leave of ol’ Virginny.” Bo Peep’s white teeth glistened as he laughed.
“Any calls while I was gone?” Dr. Carey asked.
Bo Peep pretended not to hear as he busied himself over his employer’s wraps, until Carey repeated the question.
“No, suh! no, suh! none that kaint wait till mawhnin’, suh,” Bo Peep assured him, adding to himself, “Tiahd as he is, he’s not gwine way out to Grass Riveh this blessed night, not if I loses my job of bein’ custodian of this huh ’stablishment. Not long’s my name’s Bone-ah-gees Peepehville, no, suh!”
Dr. Carey settled down for the evening with some inexplicable misgiving he could not overcome.
“I didn’t sleep well last night, Bo Peep,” he said when he rose late the next morning. “I reckon we doctors get so used to being called out on especially bad nights we can’t rest decently in our beds.”
“I didn’t sleep well, nutheh,” Bo Peep replied. “I kep127thinkin’ bout that man come heah foh you yestedy. I jes wa’n’t gwine to le’ yuh go out again las’ night.”
“What did he want?” the doctor asked, secretly appreciative of Bo Peep’s goodness of heart as he saw the street full of whirling snow.
“He done said hit wah a maturity case.”
Bo Peep tried to speak carelessly. In truth, his conscience had not left him in peace a moment.
“What do you mean? Who was it?” Horace Carey demanded.
“Don’t be mad, Doctah, please don’t. Hit wah cuz you all wah done woah out las’ night. Hit wah Misteh Shulley from Grass Riveh, suh. He said hit wah Misteh Asheh Aydelot’s wife—”
“For the love of God!” Horace Carey cried hoarsely, springing up. “Do you know who Mrs. Aydelot is, Bo Peep?”
“No, suh; neveh see huh.”
“She was Virginia Thaine of the old Thaine family back at home.”
Bo Peep did not sit down. He fell in a heap at Dr. Carey’s feet, moaning grievously.
“Fo’ Gawd, I neveh thought o’ harm. I jus’ thought o’ you all, deed I did. Oh! Oh!”
“Help to get me off then,” Carey commanded, and Bo Peep flew to his tasks.
When the doctor was ready to start he found two horses waiting outside in the storm and Bo Peep, wrapped to the eyes, beside them.
“Why two?” he asked kindly, for Bo Peep’s face was so full of sorrow he could not help pitying the boy.128
“Please, kaint I go with you all? I can cook betteh’n Miss Virginia eveh could, an’ I can be lots of help an’ you all’ll need help.”
“But it’s a stinger of a storm, Bo Peep,” the doctor insisted, anxious to be off.
“Neveh mind! Neveh mind! Lemme go. I won’t complain of no stom.” And the doctor let him go.
It was already dark at the Sunflower Ranch when the two, after hours of battling with wind and snow and bitter cold, reached the cabin door. Bo Peep, instead of giving up early or hanging a dead weight on Dr. Carey’s hands, as he had feared the boy might do, had been the more hopeful of the two in all the journey. The hardship was Bo Peep’s penance, and right merrily, after the nature of a merry-hearted race, he took his punishment.
Jim Shirley, putting wood on the kitchen fire, bent low as he heard the piteous moanings from the sick room.
“Oh, Lord, if you can work miracles work one now,” he pleaded below his breath. “Bring help out of this storm or give us sense to do the best for her. We need her so, dear Lord. We need her so.”
He lifted his eyes to see Horace Carey between himself and the bedroom door, slipping out of his snowy coat. And beside him stood Bo Peep, helping him to get ready for the sick room.
“I know Miss Virginia back in the Souf, suh. I done come to take keer of this kitchen depahtment. I know jus’ what she lak mos’ suh,” Bo Peep said to Jim, who had not moved nor spoken. “I’se Misteh Bone-ah-gees Peepehville, an’ I done live with Doctah Carey’s family all mah life, suh, ’cept a short time I spent in the Jacobs House129at Carey’s Crossing. I’se his custodian now, suh, and I know a few things about the cookin’ depahtment, suh.”
He looked the part, and Jim accepted him gladly.
It is given to some men to know the power of the healing spirit. Dr. Carey was such a man. His presence controlled the atmosphere of the place. There was balm in his voice and in the touch of his hand as much as in his medicines. To him his own calling was divine. Who shall say that the hope and belief with which his few drugs were ministered carried not equal power with them toward health and wholeness?
When Virginia Aydelot had fallen asleep at last the doctor came into the kitchen and sat down with the two haggard men to whom his coming had brought unspeakable solace.
“You can take comfort, Mr. Aydelot,” he said assuringly. “Your wife has been well cared for. Hardly one man in a thousand could do as well as you have done. I wonder you never studied medicine.”
“You seem confident of results, Doctor,” Asher said gratefully.
“I have known the Thaine family all my life,” Horace Carey said quietly. And Asher, whose mind was surged with anxiety, did not even think to be surprised.
“We did not recognize each other when I found her on the way to Carey’s Crossing three or four years ago, and—I did not know she was married then.”
He sat a while in silence, looking at the window against which the wind outside was whirling the snow. When he spoke again his tone was hopeful.
“Mrs. Aydelot has had a nervous shock. But she is130young. She has a heritage of will power and good blood. She will climb up rapidly with the coming on of spring.”
How strange it was to Asher Aydelot to listen to such words! He had not slept for fifty hours. It had seemed to him that the dreadful storm outside and sickness and the presence of death within were to be unending, and that in all the world Jim Shirley would henceforth be his only friend.
“You both need sleep,” Carey was saying in a matter-of-fact way. “Bo Peep will take care of things here, and I will look after Mrs. Aydelot. You will attend to the burial at the earliest possible time in order to save her any signs of grieving. And you will not grieve either until you have more time. And remember, Aydelot,” he put his hand comfortingly on Asher’s shoulders. “Remember in this affliction that your ambition may stake out claims and set up houses, but it takes a baby’s hand to really anchor the hearthstones. And sometimes it takes even more. It needs a little grave as well. I understood from Shirley that some financial loss last fall prevented you from going back to Ohio. You wouldn’t leave Grass River now if you could.”
Dr. Carey’s face was magnetic in its earnestness, and even in the sorrow of the moment Asher remembered that he had known Virginia all her life and he wondered subconsciously why the two had not fallen in love with each other.
And so it was that as the Sunflower Inn had received the first bride and groom to set up the first home in the Grass River Valley, so the first baby born in the valley opened its eyes to the light of day in the same Sunflower131Inn. And out of this sod cabin came the first form to its burial. And it was the Sunflower Ranch that gave ground for God’s Acre there for all the years that followed. It happened, too, that as Jim Shirley had been the friendly helper at that bridal supper and happy house-warming more than three years ago, so now it was Jim Shirley who in the hour of sorrow was the helper still.
The winter season passed with the passing of the blizzard. The warm spring air was delicious and all the prairies were presently abloom with a wild luxuriance of flowers.
Asher carried Virginia to the sunshine at the west window from which she could see the beautiful outdoor world.
“We wouldn’t leave here now if we could,” she declared as she beheld all the glory of the springtime rolling away before her eyes.
“Bank accounts bring comforts, but they do not make all of life nor consecrate death. We have given our first-born back to the prairie. It is sacred soil now,” Asher replied.
And then they talked of many things, but mostly of Dr. Carey.
“I have known him from childhood,” Virginia said. “He was my very first sweetheart, as very first sweethearts go. He went into the war when he was young. I didn’t know much that happened after that. He was at home, I think, when you were in that hospital where I first saw you, and—oh, yes, Asher, dear, he was at home when your blessed letter came, the one with the old greasy deuce of hearts and the sunflower. It was this same Bo Peep, Carey’s boy,132who brought it to me up in the glen behind the big house. Horace left Virginia just after that.” Virginia closed her eyes and lived in the past again.
“I wonder you never cared for Dr. Carey, Virgie. He is a prince among men,” Asher said, as he leaned over her chair.
“Oh, I might, if my king had not sent me that sunflower just then. It made a new world for me.”
“But I am only a common farmer, Virgie, just a king of a Kansas claim, just a home-builder on the prairie,” Asher insisted.
“Asher, if you had your choice this minute of all the things you might be, what would you choose to be?” Virginia asked.
“Just a common farmer, just a king of a Kansas claim,” Asher replied. Then looking out toward the swell of ground beside the Grass River schoolhouse where the one little mound of green earth marked his first-born’s grave, he added, “Just a home-builder on the prairies.”
The second generation of grasshoppers tarried but briefly, then all together took wing and flew away, no man knew, nor cared, whither. And the Grass River settlers who had weathered the hurricane of adversity, poor, but patient and persistent still, planted, sometimes in tears to reap in joy, sometimes in hope to reap only in heartsick hope deferred, but failed not to keep on planting. Other settlers came rapidly and the neighborhood thickened and broadened. And so, amid hardships still, and lack of opportunity and absence of many elements of culture, a sturdy, independent, God-fearing people struggled with the soil, while they lifted up faces full of hope and133determination to the skies above them. What of the prairies they could subdue they bent to their service. What they could not overcome they defied the right to overcome them. There were no lines of social caste. They were needy or full together. They shared their pleasures; together they laughed at calamities; and they comforted one another in every sorrow.
A new town was platted on the claim that Dr. Carey had preempted where the upper fork of Grass River crossed the old Sunflower trail. The town founders ruled Hans Wyker out of a membership among them. Moreover, they declared their intentions of forever beating back all efforts at saloon building within the corporation’s limits, making Wykerton their sworn enemy for all time. In the new town, which was a ten-by-ten shack of vertical boards, a sod stable, and two dugout homes, the very first sale of lots, for cash, too, was made to Darley Champers & Co., dealers in real estate, mortgages, loans, etc.
One summer Sabbath afternoon, three years after the grasshopper raid of dreadful memory, Asher came again to the little grave in the Grass River graveyard where other graves were consecrating the valley in other hearts. This time he bore in his arms a dimpled, brown-eyed baby boy who cooed and smiled as only babies can and flung his little square fists aimlessly about in baby joy of living.
“We’ll wait here, Thaine, till your mother comes from Bennington’s to tell us about the little baby that just came to our settlement only two days ago and staked out a claim in a lot of hearts.”
Little Thaine had found that his fist and his mouth134belonged together, so he offered no comment. Asher sat down on the warm sod with the baby on his knees.
“This is your little sister’s grave, Thaine. She staid with us less than a day, but we loved her then and we love her still. Her name was to have been Mercy Pennington Aydelot, after the sweet Quaker girl your two great-great-grandfathers both loved. Such a big name for such a tiny girl! She isn’t here, Thaine. This is just the little sod house she holds as her claim. She is in a beautiful mansion now. But she binds us always to the Grass River Valley because she has a claim here. We couldn’t bear to go away and leave her little holding. And now you’ve come and all the big piece of prairie soil that is your papa’s and mamma’s now will be yours some day. I hope you’ll want to stay here.”
A stab of pain thrust him deeply as he remembered his own father and understood for the first time what Francis Aydelot must have felt for him. And then he remembered his mother’s sacrifice and breadth of view.
“Oh, Thaine, will you want to leave us some day?” he said softly, gazing down into the baby’s big dark eyes. “Heaven give me breadth and courage and memory, too,” he added, “when that time comes not to be unkind; but to be brave to let you go. Only, Thaine, there’s no bigger place to go than to a big, fine Kansas farm. Oh! we fathers are all alike. What Clover Creek was to Francis Aydelot, Grass River is to me. Will it be given to you to see bigger things?”
Thaine Aydelot crowed and stretched his little legs and threw out his hands.
“Thaine, there are no bigger things than the gifts of135the soil. I may only win it, but you can find its hundredfold of increase. See, yonder comes your mother. Not the pretty, dainty Virginia girl I brought here as my bride. But I tell you truly, baby boy, she will always be handsome, because—you wouldn’t understand if I told you, but you will some day.”
“Oh, Asher, the new baby is splendid, and Mrs. Bennington is ever so well,” Virginia said, coming up to where he sat waiting for her. “They call her Josephine after Mr. Bennington’s mother. Thaine will never be lonely here, as we have been. After all, it is not the little graves alone that anchor us anywhere, for we can take memory with us wherever we go; it is the children living, as well, that hold our hearthstones fast and build a real community, even in a wilderness. We are just ready to begin now. The real story of the prairie is the story of the second generation. The real romance out here will be Thaine Aydelot’s romance, for he was born here.”