“Read these,” she said, “then promise me that in the hour when Leigh needs my help you will let me help her”
“Read these,” she said, “then promise me that in the hour when Leigh needs my help you will let me help her”
167
“I promise gladly, Miss Aydelot. I see why you are willing to give up little Leigh now,” he said, looking up with eyes filled with sincerest admiration. “You are a wonderful woman. You have the same Aydelot heritage of endurance and patience and the large view of duty that characterizes your cousin Asher. Your setting is different. I hope the time may come soon when Ohio and Kansas will not be so far apart as they are tonight.”
He rose and took her hand in his.
If Doctor Carey’s magnetism made men admire him, it was no less an attractive force with women. As he looked into Jane Aydelot’s gray eyes, he saw a new light there. And swiftly its meaning translated itself to him. He dropped her hand and turned away, and when their eyes met again, the light was gone.
It was still Indian-Summer weather on the prairie when Doctor Carey with little Leigh Shirley reached Careyville. He had a feeling that Jim would prefer meeting Leigh in his own home, so no word had been sent forward as to the time of the coming of the two.
All through the journey, the doctor had wondered how Jane Aydelot could have given Leigh up at all. She was such a happy prattler, such an honest, straightforward little body, such an innocent child, and, withal, so loving that Carey lost his own heart before the first half day was ended. In her little gray wool gown and her gray cap with its scarlet quill above her golden hair, she was as dainty and pretty as a picture of childhood could be.
Down on the Grass River trail, the two came upon Thaine Aydelot trudging in from some errand to a distant neighbor, and the doctor hailed him at once.
“Come, ride with us. We’ll take you home,” he said, turning the wheel for Thaine’s convenience. “This is168Leigh Shirley, who is coming to live with her uncle, Jim. You’ll like to go to the Cloverdale Ranch more than ever now.”
Thaine was only a little country boy, unused to conventionalities, so he took Leigh on her face value at once. And Leigh, honest as she was innocent, returned the compliment. At the Sunflower Ranch, Carey drew rein to let Thaine leave them. Leigh, putting both arms about the little boy’s neck, kissed him good-by, saying: “I have known you always because you are the Thaine”—she caught her breath, and added: “You must come to my uncle Jim’s and see me.”
“I will, I will,” Thaine assured her.
Doctor Carey looked back to wave good-by just in time to see Virginia Aydelot coming toward Thaine, who stood watching the buggy. Instantly the pretty face of Jane Aydelot came to his mind, her face as she had looked on the night when they sat by the wood fire in the Aydelot farmhouse. Against that picture stood the reality of Virginia with her richer coloring.
“Nor storm nor stress can rob her of her beauty,” he thought. “However sweet and self-sacrificing Jane Aydelot may be, the Plains would have broken her long ago.”
He turned about at once and came back to where Thaine stood beside his mother.
“This is Jim Shirley’s little girl, Mrs. Aydelot,” he said, gently patting Leigh’s shoulder.
“That’s my wife,” little Thaine said gravely. “We will go and live at the purple notches when I come home from the war.”
Virginia’s heart warmed toward the motherless little one,169and Leigh understood her at once. Nor once in all the years that followed did the two fail each other.
The Cloverdale homestead never had known such a gala fixing as Jim Shirley had kept there for nearly a week awaiting the doctor’s return. Truly, love is genius in itself, and only genius could have put so many quaint and attractive touches to such common surroundings as now embellished the little four-roomed house in the bend of Grass River.
Doctor Carey tied his horses to the post beside the trail, and, lifting Leigh from the buggy, he said:
“Uncle Jim is up there waiting for you, and oh, so glad, so glad to have you come. Go and meet him, Leigh.”
Leigh smoothed her little gray wool frock down with her dainty little hands. Then, pushing back the gray cap with its scarlet quill from her forehead where the golden hair fell in soft rings, she passed up the grassy way to meet Jim Shirley. He could never have looked bigger and handsomer than he did at that moment. In his eyes all the heart hunger of years seemed centered as he watched the little six-year-old child coming towards him.
Just before reaching the doorway, she paused, and with that clear penetration only a little child possesses, she looked up into the strong man’s face.
“Uncle Jim. My Uncle Jim,” she cried. “I can love you always.”
Jim gathered her close in his arms, and she clung about his neck, softly patting his brown cheek as they passed into the house. While all unseen, the light of love went in with them, a light that should never fade from the hearthstone, driving loneliness and sorrow from it, far away.170
Leigh Shirley’s coming marked an epoch in the annals of the Grass River settlement, for her uncle often declared that he could remember only two events in the West before that time: the coming of Mrs. Aydelot and the grasshopper raid. With Leigh in his home, he almost forgot that he had ever been sad-hearted. This loving little child was such a constant source of interest and surprise. She was so innocently plain-spoken and self-dependent sometimes, and such a strange little dreamer of dreams at other times. She would drive a shrewd bargain for whatever she wanted—some more of Uncle Jim’s good cookies, or a ride all alone on the biggest pony, or a two-days’ visit at the Aydelot ranch, scrupulously rendering back value received of her own wares—kisses, or washing all the supper dishes for her tired uncle, or staying away from her play to watch that the chickens did not scratch in the garden.
But there were times when she would go alone to the bend in the river and people her world with folk of her own creation and live with them and for them. Chief among them all was a certain Prince Quippi, who would come from China some day to marry her and take her away to a house made of purple velvet and adorned with gold knobs. She had to send a letter to Prince Quippi every day or he would think she did not love him. Of course, she loved Uncle Jim best of what she called folks—but Prince Quippi was big and brown and handsome; and, strangely enough, the only kind of letter he could read from her was in a flower.
So Leigh dropped a flower on the waters of Grass River every day to float away to China telling her love to Prince Quippi. And oftenest it was the tawny sunflower, because it171was big and strong and could tell a big love story. Thus she dreamed her happy dreams until one day Thaine Aydelot, listening to her, said:
“Why my papa sent my mamma a sunflower once, and made her love him very much. I’ll be your real Prince Quippi—not a—a paper-doll, thinkish one, and come after you.”
“Clear from China?” Leigh queried.
“Yes, when I’m a big soldier like my papa, and we’ll go off to the purple notches and live.”
“You don’t look like my Prince Quippi,” Leigh insisted.
“But I can grow to look likeanything I want to—like a big elephant or a hippopopamus or a—angel, oranything,” Thaine assured her.
“Well, escuse me from any of the free—a angel or a elephant. I don’t know what the poppy one is, but it’s too poppy,” Leigh said decisively.
There were others in the Grass River settlement who would have envied the mythical Prince Quippi also. For even at six years of age Leigh had the same quality that marked her uncle. People must love her if they cared for her at all; and they couldn’t help caring for her. She fitted into the life of the prairie, too, as naturally as Thaine Aydelot did, who was born to it. The baby gold was soon lost from her hair for the brown-gold like the shimmering sunlight on the brown prairie. The baby blue eyes deepened to the deep violet-blue of overhead skies in June. The pretty pink and white complexion, however, did not grow brown under the kisses of the prairie winds. The delicate china-doll tinting went with other baby features, but, save for the few little brown freckles in midsummer,172Leigh Shirley kept year after year the clear complexion with the peach blossom pink on her cheeks that only rarely the young girls of the dry western plains possessed in those days of shadeless homes.
Thaine Aydelot looked like a gypsy beside her, he was so brown, and his big dark eyes and heavy mane of dark hair, and ruddy cheeks made the contrast striking. From the first day of their meeting, the children were playmates and companions as often as opportunity offered. They sat together in the Grass River Sabbath School; they exchanged days on days of visits, and the first sorrow of their hitherto unclouded lives came when they found that Leigh was too far away to attend the week-day school.
Settlers were filling up the valley rapidly, but they all wanted ranches, and ranches do not make close neighbors. Land-lust sometimes overshadows the divine rights of children. And the lower part of the settlement was not yet equal to the support of a school of its own.
The two families still kept the custom of spending their Sabbaths together. And one Sabbath Thaine showed Leigh the books and slate and sponge and pencils he was to take to school the next week. Leigh, who had been pleased with all of them, turned to her guardian, saying gravely:
“Uncle Jim, can I go to school wif Thaine?”
“You must meet that question every day now, Jim,” Asher said. “Why not answer it and be rid of it?”
“How can I answer it?” Jim queried.
“Virgie, help us with this educational problem of the State,” Asher turned to his wife. “Women are especially resourceful in these things, Jim. I hope Kansas will fully recognize the fact some day.”173
“Who is Kansas?” Virginia asked with a smile.
“Oh, all of us men who depend so much on some woman’s brain every day of our lives,” Jim assured her. “Tell me, what to do for my little girl. Mrs. Bennington and some of the other neighbors say I should send her East for her sake—”
“And for both of your sakes, Jim, I say, no,” Virginia broke in. “The way must open for all of our children here. It always has for everything else, you know.”
“Thaine can walk the two miles. He’s made of iron, anyhow. But Leigh can’t make the five miles ‘up stream,’” Asher declared.
“Jim,” Virginia Aydelot said gravely, “Pryor Gaines will be our teacher for many years, we hope, but he is hardly equal to tilling his ground now. John Jacobs holds the mortgage on his claim still that he put there after the grasshopper loan, which he could not pay. Life is an uphill pull for him, and he bears his burdens so cheerfully. I believe Mr. Jacobs would take the claim and pay him the equity. We all know how unlike a Shylock John Jacobs really is, even if he is getting rich fast. Now, Jim, why not take Pryor into your home and let him drive up to the school with Leigh and the other little folks down your way. We can pay him better wages and he will have a real home, not a lonely cabin by himself, and you will be fortunate in having such a man in your household.”
“Just the thing, Virginia,” Jim declared. “Why haven’t we done it before? He always says I’m his heart and he’s my lungs. We might stack up to a one-man power. Old bachelors should be segregated, anyhow, out here. The West needs more families. And think what Pryor Gaines’174cultivated mind will mean to a little artist soul like Leigh Shirley’s. Glorious!”
“Well, Virgie, if you will also segregate John Jacobs and Dr. Carey, we’ll settle the bachelors once for all. A quartette of royal good fellows, too, State-makers who really make. They ought to be in the legislature, but Carey and Pryor are democrats and Jim and Jacobs are republican. They balance too well for the interests of any party. Anyhow, if Pryor agrees, the school problem is fixed,” Asher asserted.
Pryor Gaines did agree, to the welfare of many children, who remember him still with that deep-seated affection of student for teacher unlike any other form of human devotion. But especially did this cultured man put into Leigh Shirley’s life a refining artistic power that stood her well in the years to come.
175CHAPTER XILights and Shadows
They saw not the shadow that walked beside,
They heard not the feet with silence shod.
—Whittier.
With successive seasons of good crops, combining with the time of the crest between two eras of financial depression, and with Eastern capital easy to reach, a mania of speculation known as “the boom” burst forth; a mania that swept men’s minds as prairie fires sweep along the wide lengths of the plains, changing both the face of the land and the fortunes of the land owners, and marking an epoch in the story of the West. New counties were organized out of the still unoccupied frontier. Thousands of citizens poured into these counties. Scores of towns were chartered and hundreds of miles of railroad were constructed. Colleges and universities sprouted up from the virgin soil of the prairie. Loans on real estate were easy to secure. Land, especially in town lots, took on an enormously inflated valuation and the rapid investment in real estate and the rapid transference from buyer to seller was bewildering, while voting bonds for extensive and extravagant improvements in cities-to-be was not the least phase of this brief mania of the fortune-making, fortune-breaking “boom.”
When Hans Wyker had seen his own town wane as Careyville waxed, he consigned the newer community, and all that it was, to all the purgatories ever organized and some yet to be created.176
Wykerton was at a standstill now. The big brewery had become a flouring mill, but it was idle most of the time. The windows served as targets for the sons of the men who consumed its brewing product in other days, and the whole structure had a disconsolate, dismantled appearance.
There was neither a schoolhouse nor a church inside the corporation limits. The land along Big Wolf was not like the rich prairies west of it, and freeholds entered first with hopes in Wykerton’s prosperity had proved disappointing, if not disastrous, to their owners.
The rough ground, mortgaged now, and by the decline of the town, decreased in value, began to fall into the hands of John Jacobs, who made no effort at settlement, but turned it to grazing purposes. His holdings joined the property foreclosed by Wyker when his town failed, but inhabited still by tenants too poor to leave it. The boundary line between Wyker and Jacobs was the same ugly little creek that Doctor Carey had turned his course to avoid on that winter day when he had seen Virginia Aydelot’s distress signal and heard her singing a plaintive plea for help.
It was an ugly little stream, with much mire and some quicksand to be avoided; with deep earth-canyons and sliding avalanches of dirt on steep slopes, and now and then a stone outcrop jagged and difficult, not to say dangerous, to footways, and impossible to stock. It was called Little Wolf because it was narrower than the willow-fringed stream into which it emptied. But Big Wolf Creek could rarely boast of half the volume of water that the sluggish little tributary held. Big Wolf was shallow, with more177shale and sand along its bed. Little Wolf was narrow and deceivingly deep in places.
One Spring day, John Jacobs and Asher Aydelot rode out to Jacobs’ ranches together.
“You are improving your stock every year, Stewart tells me,” Asher was saying. “I may try sheep myself next year.”
“I am hoping to have only thoroughbreds some day. That’s a good horse you ride,” Jacobs replied.
“Yes, he has a strain of Kentucky blue-blood. My wife owned a thoroughbred when we came West. We keep the descent still. We’ve never been without a black horse in the stable since that time. Do we turn here?”
They were following the lower trail by the willows, when Jacobs turned abruptly to a rough roadway leading up a shadowy hollow.
“Yes. It’s an ugly climb, but much shorter to the sheep range and the cattle are near.”
“How much land have you here, Jacobs?” Asher asked.
“From Little Wolf to the corporation line of Wykerton. Five hundred acres, more or less; all fenced, too,” Jacobs added. “This creek divides Wyker’s ground from mine. All the rest is measured by links and chains. We agreed to metes and bounds for this because it averages the same, anyhow, and I’d like a stream between Wyker and myself in addition to a barbed wire fence. It gives more space, at least.”
They had followed the rough way only a short distance when Asher, who was nearest the creek, halted. The bank was steep and several feet above the water.178
“Does anybody else keep sheep around here?” he inquired.
“Not here,” John Jacobs answered.
“Look over there. Isn’t that a sheep?”
Asher pointed to a carcass lying half out of the water on a pile of drift where the stream was narrow, but too deep for fording.
“Maybe some dog killed it and the carcass got into the creek. My sheep can’t get to the water because my pasture is fenced. That’s on Wyker’s side, anyhow. I won’t risk fording to get over there. It’s as dead right now as it will ever be,” Jacobs asserted.
Their trail grew narrower and more secluded, winding up a steep hill between high banks. Half way up, where the road made a sharp turn, a break in the side next to the creek opened a rough way down to the water. As they neared this, a woman coming down the hill caught sight of the two horsemen around the bend, and made a swift movement toward this opening in the bank, as if to clamber down from their sight. She was not quick enough, however, and when she found she had been seen, she waited by the roadside until the men had passed on.
Asher, who was next to her, looked keenly at her as he bade her good morning, but John Jacobs merely lifted his hat without giving her more than a glance.
The woman stared at both, but made no response to their greetings. She was plainly dressed, with a black scarf tied over her tow-colored hair. She had a short club in one hand and a big battered tin can in the other, which she seemed anxious to conceal. When the men had passed,179she looked after them with an ugly expression of malice in her little pale gray eyes.
“That’s a bad face,” Asher said, when they were out of her hearing. “I wonder why she tried to hide that old salt can.”
“How do you know it was a salt can?” Jacobs asked.
“Because it is exactly like a salt can I saw at Pryor Gaines’ old cabin, and because some salt fell out as she tipped it over,” Asher replied.
“You have an eye for details,” Jacobs returned. “That was Gretchen Gimpke, Hans Wyker’s girl. She married his bartender, and is raising a family of little bartenders back in the hilly country there, while Gimpke helps Hans run a perfectly respectable tavern in town.”
“Well, I may misjudge her, but if I had any interest near here, I should want her to keep on her own side of the creek,” Asher declared.
And somehow both remembered the dead sheep down in the deep pool at the foot of the hill.
The live sheep were crowding along the fence on the creek side of the big range when the two men entered it.
“What ails the flock?” Asher asked, as they saw it following the fence line eagerly.
“Let’s ride across and meet them,” Jacobs suggested.
The creek side was rough with many little dips and draws hiding the boundary line in places. The men rode quietly toward the flock by the shortest way. As they faced a hollow deepening to a draw toward the creek, Asher suddenly halted.
“Look at that!” he cried, pointing toward the fence.
John Jacobs looked and saw where the ground was180lowest that the barbed wires had been dragged out of place, leaving an opening big enough for two or more sheep to crowd through at a time. As they neared this point, Asher said:
“It’s a pretty clear case, Jacobs. See that line of salt running up the bare ground, and here is an opening. The flock is coming down on that line. They will have a chance to drink after taking their salt.”
John Jacobs slid from his horse, and giving the rein to Asher, he climbed through the hole in the fence and hastily examined the ground beyond it.
“It’s a friendly act on somebody’s part,” he said grimly. “The creek cuts a deep hole under the bank here. There’s a pile of salt right at the edge. Somebody has sprinkled a line of it clear over the hill to toll the flock out where they will scramble for it and tumble over into that deep water. All they need to do is to swim down to the next shallow place and wade out. The pool may be full of them now, waiting their turn to go. Sheep are polite in deep water; they never rush ahead.”
“They swim well, too, especially if they happen to fall into the water just before shearing time when their wool is long,” Asher said ironically.
“What did you say Gretchen Gimpke had in that tin can?” Jacobs inquired blandly.
“Oil of sassafras, I think,” Asher responded, as he tied the horses and helped to mend the weakened fence.
“Nobody prospers long after such tricks. I’ll not lose sleep over lost sheep,” John Jacobs declared. “Let’s hunt up the cattle and forget this, and the woman and the scary little twist in the creek trail.”
“It’s a friendly act on somebody’s part.” he said grimly
“It’s a friendly act on somebody’s part.” he said grimly
181
“Why scary?” Asher asked. “Are you so afraid of women? No wonder you are a bachelor.”
Jacobs did not smile as he said:
“Once when I was a child I read a story of a man being killed at just such an out-of-the-way place. Every time I go up that crooked, lonesome hill road, I remember the picture in the book. It always makes me think of that story.”
When the fence was made secure, the two rode away to look after the cattle. And if a Shadow rode beside them, it was mercifully unseen, and in nowise dimming to the clear light of the spring day.
It was high noon when they reached Wykerton, where Hans Wyker still fed the traveling public, although the flourishing hotel where Virginia Aydelot first met John Jacobs had disappeared. The eating-place behind the general store room was divided into two parts, a blind partition wall cutting off a narrow section across the farther end. Ordinary diners went through the store into the dining room and were supplied from the long kitchen running parallel with this room.
There were some guests, however, who entered the farther room by a rear door and were likewise supplied from the kitchen on the side. But as there was no opening between the two rooms, many who ate at Wyker’s never knew of the narrow room beyond their own eating-place and of the two entrances into the kitchen covering the side of each room. Of course, the prime reason for such an arrangement lay in Wyker’s willingness to evade the law and supply customers with contraband drinks. But the infraction of one law is a breach in the wall through which many lawless elements may crowd. The place became, by natural182selection, the council chamber of the lawless, and many an evil deed was plotted therein.
“How would you like to keep a store in a place like this, Jacobs?” Asher Aydelot asked, as the two men waited for their meal.
“I had the chance once. I turned it down. How would you like to keep a tavern in such a place?” Jacobs returned.
“I turned down a bigger tavern than this once to be a farmer. I have never regretted it,” Asher replied.
“The Sunflower Ranch has always interested me. How long have you had it?” Jacobs asked.
“Since 1869. I was the first man on Grass River. Shirley came soon afterward,” Asher said.
“And your ranches are typical of you, too,” John Jacobs said thoughtfully. “How much do you own now?”
“Six quarters,” Asher replied. “I’ve added piece by piece. Mortgaged one quarter to buy another. There’s a good deal of it under mortgage now.”
“You seem to know what’s ahead pretty well,” Jacobs remarked.
“I know what’s in the prairie soil pretty well. I know that crops will fail sometimes and boom sometimes, and I know if I live I mean to own three times what I have now; that I’ll have a grove a mile square on it, and a lake in the middle, and a farmhouse of colonial style up on the swell where we are living now and that neither John Jacobs nor the First National Bank of Careyville will hold any mortgage on it.” Asher’s face was bright with anticipation.
“You are a dreamer, Aydelot.”
“No, Jim Shirley’s a dreamer,” Asher insisted. “Mrs. Aydelot and I planned our home the first night she came a183bride to our little one-roomed soddy. There are cottonwoods and elms and locust trees shading our house now where there was only a bunch of sunflowers then, and except for Jim’s little corn patch and mine, not a furrow turned in the Grass River Valley. We have accomplished something since then. Why not the whole thing?”
“You have reason for your faith, I admit. But you are right, Shirley is a dreamer. What’s the matter with him?”
“An artistic temperament, more heart than head, a neglected home life in his boyhood, and a fight for health to do his work. He’ll die mortgaged, but he has helped so many other fellows to lift theirs, I envy Jim’s ‘abundant entrance’ by and by. But now he dreams of a thousand things and realizes none. Poor fellow! His dooryard is a picture, while the weeds sometimes choke his garden.”
“Yes, he’ll die mortgaged. He’s never paid me interest nor principal on my little loan, yet I’d increase it tomorrow if he asked me to do it,” John Jacobs declared.
“You are a blood-sucking Shylock, sure enough,” Asher said with a smile. “I wish Jim would take advantage of you and quit his talking about the boom and his dreams of what it might do for him.”
“How soon will you be platting your Sunflower Ranch into town lots for the new town that I hear is to be started down your way?” John Jacobs inquired.
“Town lots do not appeal to me, Jacobs,” Asher replied. “I’m a slow-growing Buckeye, I’ll admit, but I can’t see anything but mushrooms in these towns out West where there is no farming community about them. I’ve waited and worked a good while; I’m willing to work and wait a while longer. Some of my dreams have come true. I’ll184hold to my first position, even if I don’t get rich so fast.”
“You are level-headed,” Jacobs assured him. “You notice I have not turned an acre in on this boom. Why? I’m a citizen of Kansas. And while I like to increase my property, you know my sect bears that reputation—”Jacobs never blushed for his Jewish origin—“I want to keep on living somewhere. Why not here? Why do the other fellows out of their goods, as we Jews are always accused of doing, if it leaves me no customer to buy? I want farmers around my town, not speculators who work a field from hand to hand, but leave it vacant at last. It makes your merchant rich today but bankrupt in a dead town tomorrow. I’m a merchant by calling.”
“Horace Greeley said thirty years ago that the twin curses of Kansas were the land agent and the one-horse politician,” Asher observed.
“You are a grub, Aydelot. You have no ambition at all. Why, I’ve heard your name mentioned favorably several times for the legislature next winter,” Jacobs insisted jokingly.
“Which reminds me of that rhyme of Hosea Bigelow:
If you’re arter folks o’ gumption
You’ve a darned long row to hoe.
“I’m not an office seeker,” Asher replied.
“Do I understand you won’t sell lots off that ranch of yours to start a new town, and you won’t run for the legislature when you’re dead sure to be elected. May I ask how you propose to put in the fall after wheat harvest?” Jacobs asked, with a twinkle in his black eyes.
“I propose to break ground for wheat again, and to185experiment with alfalfa, the new hay product, and to take care of that Aydelot grove and build the Aydelot lake in the middle of it. And I’ll be supplying the wheat market and banking checks for hay one of these years when your town starters will be hunting clerkships in your dry goods emporium, and your farmers, who imagine themselves each a Cincinnatus called to office, will be asking for appointment as deputy county assessor or courthouse custodian. Few things can so unfit a Kansas fellow for the real business of life as a term in the lower house of the Kansas legislature. If you are a merchant, I’m a farmer, and we will both be booming the state when these present-day boomers are gone back East to wife’s folks, blaming Kansas for their hard luck. Now, mark my words. But to change the subject,” Asher said smiling, “I thought we should have company for dinner. I saw Darley Champers and another fellow head in here before us. Darley is in clover now, planning to charter a town for every other section on Grass River. Did you know the man who was with him?”
“That’s one fly-by-night calling himself Thomas Smith. Innocent name and easy to lose if you don’t want it. Not like Gimpke or Aydelot, now. He’s from Wilmington, Delaware—maybe.”
“You seem to doubt his genuineness,” Asher remarked.
“I don’t believe he will assay well,” Jacobs agreed. “I’ve doubted him since the day he landed in Carey’s Crossing fifteen years ago. Inside of an hour and a half I caught him and Champers in a consultation so secret they fastened newspapers across the window to keep from being seen.”
“Where were you meanwhile?”186
“Up on the roof, fixing the sign the wind had blown loose. When they saw me through the uncovered upper pane, they shaded that, too. I’ve little interest in a man like that.”
“Does he come here often?” Asher inquired.
“He’s here and away, but he never sets foot in Careyville. My guess is that he’s a part of the ’Co.’ of ‘Champers and Co.’ and that Hans Wyker is the rest of it. Also that in what they can get by fair means, each of the trio reserves the right to act alone and independently of the other two, but when it comes to a cut-throat game, they combine as readily as hydrogen and sulphur and oxygen; and, combined, they have the same effect on a proposition that sulphuric acid has on litmus paper. But this is all only a Jew’s guess, of course. For myself, I have business with only one of the three, Wyker. He doesn’t like my sheep, evidently, because he knows I keep track of his whisky selling in this town and keep the law forever hanging over him. But I’ve sworn under high heaven to fight that curse to humanity wherever I find it threatening, and under high heaven I’ll do it, too.”
Jacobs’ face was the face of a resolute man with whom law was law. Then the two talked of other things as they finished their meal.
John Jacobs was city bred, a merchant by instinct, a Jew in religion, and a strictly honest and exacting business man. Asher Aydelot had been a country boy and was by choice a farmer. He was a Protestant of the Methodist persuasion. It must have been his business integrity that first attracted Jacobs to him. Jacobs was a timid man, and no one else in Kansas, not even Doctor Carey, understood him or appreciated him quite as keenly as Asher Aydelot did.
187CHAPTER XIIThe Fat Years
“The lean years have passed, and I approve of these fat ones.”
“Be careful, old man. That way lies bad work.”
—The Light That Failed.
John Jacobs little realized how true was his estimate of the firm of “Champers & Co.” Nor did he suspect that at this very minute the firm was in council in the small room beyond the partition wall—the “blind tiger” of the Wyker eating-house.
“I tell you it’s our chance,” Darley Champers was declaring emphatically. “You mustn’t hold back your capital now. This firm isn’t organized to promote health nor Sunday Schools nor some other fellow’s fortune. We are together for yours truly, every one of us. If you two have some other games back of your own pocketbooks, they don’t cut any against this common purpose. I’m for business for Darley Champers. That’s why I’m here. I’ve got no love for Doc Carey, ruling men’s minds like they was all putty, and him a putty knife to shape ’em finer yet. And another fellow I’d like to put down so hard he’ll never get over it is that straight-up-and-down farmer, Asher Aydelot of the Sunflower Ranch, who walks like a military captain, and works like a hired man, and is so danged independent he don’t give a damn for no man’s opinion of him. If it hadn’t been for him we’d a had the whole Grass River Valley now to speculate on. I’m something of a danged fool, but I knowed this boom was comin’. I felt it in my craw.”188
“So you always said, Champers,” Thomas Smith broke in, “but it’s been a century coming. And look at the capital I’ve sunk. If you’d worked that deal through, time of the drouth in seventy-four, we’d be in clover and no Careyville and no Aydelots in the way. I could have saved Asher’s little bank stock then, too.”
“You could?” Darley Champers stared at the speaker.
“Yes, if he’d given up right that first trip of yours down there. When he refused I knew his breed too well. He’s as set and slow and stubborn as his old dad ever was. That’s what ailed those two, they were too near alike; and you’ll never catch Asher Aydelot bending to our plans now. I warn you.”
“Well, but about this bank account?” Champers queried.
“Oh, the fates played the devil with everything in two weeks. Doc Carey got in with Miss Jane Aydelot down at Philadelphia, and she came straight to Cloverdale, and, womanlike, made things so hot there I had to let loose of everything at once or lose everything I had saved for myself. Serves her right, for Asher’s pile went into the dump, although there’s naturally no love lost between the two. But this Miss Jane is Aydelot clear through. She’s so honest and darned set you can’t budge her. But she’s a timid woman and so she’s safe if you keep out of her range. She won’t chase you far, but she’s got fourteen rattles and a button.”
“Well, well, let her rattle, and get to pusiness,” Hans Wyker demanded. “Here’s Champers says he’s here yust for pusiness and he wants to get Aydelot and Carey, too.”
“Gentlemen!” Champers struck the table with his fist. “Let’s play fair now, so’s not to spoil each other’s games.189I’ll fix Aydelot if it’s in me to do it, just because he’s stood in my way once too often. But he’s my side line, him and Carey is. I’m here for business. Tell me what you are here for.”
Hans Wyker’s little eyes were red with pent-up anger and malice as he burst out:
“Shentlemen, you know my hart luck. You see where I be today. I not repeat no tiresome history here. Kansas yust boomin’! Wykerton dead! Yon Yacob own all der groun’ right oop to der corporation line on tree side, an’ he not sell one inch for attitions to dis town. He say dere notings to keep town goin’ in two, tree year. What we care? We be rich by den an’ let it go to der devil. But he not sell. Den I go mit you and we organize town company. We mark townsite, we make Grass River sell to us. We boom! boom! boom! We knock Careyville from de prairie alretty, mak’ Yon Yacob go back to Cincinnati where he belong mit his Chews. He damned queer Chew, but he Chew all de same all right, all right. I want to down Yon Yacob, an’ I do it if it take tree hundred fifty years. I’ll kill him if he get in my way. I hate him. He run me off my saloon in ol’ Carey Crossin’; my prewery goin’ smash mit der damned prohibittery law; he growin’ rich in Careyville, an’ me!”
His voice rose to a shriek and he stamped his foot in rage.
“Hold your noise, Wyker!” Champers growled. “Don’t you know who’s on the other side of that partition?”
“I built that partition mineself. It’s von dead noise-breaker,” Wyker began. But Champers broke in:
“It’s your turn, Smith.”190
Dr. Carey had described Smith once as rather small, with close-set dark eyes and a stiff, half-paralyzed right arm and wrist, a man who wrote in a cramped left-handed style. There was a crooked little scar cutting across his forehead now above the left eye that promised to stay there for life. He had a way of evading a direct gaze, suggesting timidity. And when Hans Wyker had threatened to kill John Jacobs he shivered a little, and for the instant a gray pallor crept across his face, unnoted by his companions.
“We propose to start a town in the Grass River country that will kill Careyville. We two put up the capital. You do the buying and selling. We’ll handle real estate lively for a few months. We’ll advertise till we fill the place with buyers, and we’ll make our pile right there and then—and it’s all to be done by Darley Champers & Co. We two are not to be in the open in the game at all.”
Thomas Smith spoke deliberately. There seemed to be none of Champers’ bluster nor Wyker’s malice in the third part of the company, or else he was better schooled in self-control.
“You have it exactly,” Champers declared. “The first thing is to take in fellows like Jim Shirley and Cyrus Bennington and Todd Stewart, and Aydelot, if we can.”
“Yes, if we can, but we can’t,” Thomas Smith insisted.
“And having got the land, with or without their knowing why, we boom her to destruction. But to be fair, now, why do you want to keep yourself in hiding, and who’s the fellow you want to kill?” Darley Champers said with a laugh.
“I may as well let you know now why I can’t be known191in this,” Thomas Smith said smoothly, even if the same gray hue did flit like a shadow a second time across his countenance—a thing that did not escape the shrewd eye of Darley Champers this time.
“Wyker is pitted against Jacobs. You are after Asher Aydelot’s scalp, if you can get it. I must get Jim Shirley, fair or foul.”
Smith’s low voice was full of menace, boding more trouble to his man than the bluster and threat of the other two could compass.
“I paid you well, Darley Champers, for all information concerning Jim when I came here fifteen years ago. I was acting under orders, and as Jim would have known me then I had to keep out of sight a little.”
“Vell, and vot has Shirley ever done mit you that you so down on him?” Hans Wyker asked.
The smooth mask did not drop from Smith’s face, save that the small dark eyes burned with an intense glow.
“I tell you I was acting under orders from Shirley’s brother Tank in Cloverdale, Ohio. And if Dr. Carey hadn’t been so blamed quick I’d have gotten a letter Mrs. Tank Shirley had written to Jim the very day I got to Carey’s Crossing. No brother ever endured more from the hands of a relative than Tank Shirley endured from Jim. In every way Jim tried to defraud him of his rights; tried to prejudice their own father against him; tried to rob him of the girl, a rich girl, too, that he married in spite Of Jim—and at last contrived to prejudice his wife against him, and with Jane Aydelot interfering all the time, like the old maid that she is, managed to get Tank Shirley’s192only child away from him and given legally to Jim. Do you wonder Tank hates his brother? You wouldn’t if I dared to tell you all of Jim’s cussedness, but some things I’m sworn to secrecy on. That’s Tank’s streak of kindness he can’t overcome. Gets it from his mother. I’m his agent, and I’m paid for my work. You both understand me, I reckon.”
“We unterstant, an’ we stay py you to der ent,” Hans Wyker exclaimed enthusiastically. But Darley Champers had a different mind.
“I’ll watch you, my man, and I’ll do business with you accordin’,” he said to himself. “Devil knows whether you are Thomas Smith workin’ for Tank Shirley, or Tank Shirley workin’ for hisself under a assoomed name. Long as I get your capital to push my business I don’t care who you are.” Aloud he remarked:
“So that’s how Jim Shirley got that little girl. She’s a comely youngun, anyhow. But Smith, since you are only an agent and nobody knows it but us, why keep yourself so secret? Where’s the harm in letting Shirley lay eyes on you? Why not come out into the open? How’ll Shirley know you from the Mayor of Wilmington, Delaware, anyhow?”
Thomas Smith’s face was ashy and his voice was hoarse with anger as he replied:
“Because I’m not now from Wilmington, Delaware, any more than I ever was. I’m from Cloverdale, Ohio. You know, Wyker, how I lost money in your brewery, investing in machinery and starting the thing, only to go to smash on us.”
He turned on Hans fiercely.193
“And you know how I lost by you in this town and the land around it. It was my money took up all this ground to help build up Wykerton and you, as my agent, sold every acre of it to Jacobs.”
This as fiercely as Darley Champers.
Both men nodded and Darley broke in:
“I was honest. I thought Jacobs was gettin’ it to boom Wykerton with, or I’d never sold. And him bein’ right here was a danged sight easier’n havin’ some man in Wilmington, Delaware, to write to. That’s why I let him in on three sides, appealin’ to his pride.”
But Thomas Smith stopped him abruptly.
“Hold on! You need money to push your schemes now. And I’m the one who does the financing for you.”
Both men agreed.
“Then it’s death to either of you if you ever tell a word of this. You understand that? I’m not to be known here because I’m a dead man. I’m the cashier that was mixed up in the Cloverdale bank affair. And, as I say, if Jane Aydelot had let things alone Tank Shirley and I could have pulled out honorably, but, womanlike, because she had a lot of bank stock and was the biggest loser of anybody, in her own mind, she pushed things where a man would not have noticed or kept still, and she kept pushing year after year. Damn a woman, anyhow! All I could do at last was to commit suicide. Tank planned it. It saved me and helped Tank. You see, Miss Jane had a line around his neck, too. She was the only one who really saw me go down and she spread the report that I’d committed suicide on account of the bank failure. So, gentlemen, I’m really drowned in Clover Creek right above where194the railroad grade that cuts the Aydelot farm reaches the water.”
Darley Champers wondered why Thomas Smith was so particular in his description.
“I’ve known Jim Shirley all my life. He was as bad a boy as ever left Cloverdale, Ohio, under a cloud. Got into trouble over some girl, I believe, finally. But you can see why I’m out of this game when it comes to the open. And maybe you could understand, if you knew the brothers as well as I do, why Tank keeps me after him. And I’ll get him yet.”
The vengeance of the last words was venomous.
“Well, now we understand each other we’ll not be tramping on anybody’s corns,” Darley Champers urged, anxious to get away from the subject.
With all of his shortcomings he was a man of different mould from the other men. Eagerness to represent and invest large capital and to make by far the best of a bargain by any means just inside the law were his besetments. But he had not the unremitting hatred that enslaved Thomas Smith and Hans Wyker.
Champers’ store of energy seemed exhaustless. Following this council he fell upon the Grass River Valley and threshed it to his profit.
One mid-June evening the Grass River schoolhouse was lighted early, while up from the prairie ranches came the work-worn farmers.
This year the crop outlook was bad, yet somehow an expectant spirit lifted sagging shoulders and looked out through hopeful eyes.
While the men exchanged neighborly greetings, a group195of children, the second generation in the valley, romped about in the twilight outside.
“Here comes Thaine,” they shouted as Asher Aydelot and his boy came down the trail.
“Come on, Thaine,” Leigh Shirley said, reaching for his hand. “We are going to play drop the handkerchief.”
“Thaine’s going to stand by me,” pretty Jo Bennington declared, pushing Leigh boisterously aside.
Josephine, the week-old baby Mrs. Aydelot had gone to see one day nine years ago, had grown into a big, black-eyed, rosy-cheeked girl who lorded it over every other child in the neighborhood. And every other child submitted except Leigh Shirley, who had a quiet habit of going straight ahead about her affairs in a way that vexed the pretty Jo not a little. From the first coming of Leigh among the children Jo had resented her independence. But, young as they all were, she objected most to Thaine Aydelot’s claiming Leigh as his playmate. Thaine was Jo’s idol from earliest memory.
“What’s the row here?” Todd Stewart, Junior, broke in. “You mustn’t fuss or you’ll all have to go in and listen to Darley Champers and I’ll play out here by myself.”
Todd was a young-hearted, half-grown boy now, able to work all day in the hayfield or to romp like a child with younger children in the evening. He was half a dozen years older than Thaine and Jo, a difference that would tend to disappear by the end of a decade.
“We’ll be good, Toddie, if you’ll let us stay and you’ll play with us,” the children entreated, and the game began, with Thaine between Leigh and Jo.196
When Asher Aydelot joined the group inside Darley Champers rapped on the desk and called the men to order.
“Gentlemen, let’s have a businesslike proceeding,” he said. “Who shall preside at the meeting?”
“I move Jim Shirley be made chairman. He’s the best looking man here,” Todd Stewart said, half seriously.
The motion carried and Jim, looking big and handsome and kindly as always, took the chair.
“I’ll ask Mr. Champers to state the purpose of the meeting,” he said.
“Gentlemen,” Champers began with tremendous dignity, “I represent the firm of the Champers Town Company, just chartered, with half a million dollars’ capital. Gentlemen, you have the finest valley in Kansas.”
The same was said of every other valley in Kansas in the fat years of the boom. But to do Darley justice, he had never made a finer effort in his life of many efforts than he was bent on making tonight.
“And this site is the garden spot of it all,” he continued. “The elevation, the water power at the deep bend of Grass River (where at that moment only a trace of water marked the river’s grassy right of way), the fine farming land—everything ready for a sudden leap into prosperity. And, gentlemen, the A. and T. (Arctic and Tropic) North and South Railroad will begin grading down this very stream inside of thirty days. A town here this year will be a city next year, a danged sight bigger city than Careyville will ever be. Why, that town’s got its growth and is beginning to decay right now. The A. and T. will miss it comin’ south, by ten mile.”
He paused and looked at the men before him. They197were farmers, drooped to rest after the long summer day’s work, yet they listened with intense eagerness. Only Asher Aydelot sat in easy dignity, looking straight at Darley Champers with steady interest. The four years’ training in the University of the Civil War had not been overcome by his hold on the plow handles. And no farmer will grow hopelessly stooped in shoulders and sad of countenance who lifts his face often from the clods beneath his feet to the stars above his head.
“You all know crops was poor last year and only moderately promisin’ this year,” Champers continued. “But this is temporary and you are stayers, as I can testify. The Champers Town Company is ready to locate a townsite and start a town right here at the deep bend of Grass River. We propose to plat the prairie into town lots with a public square for the courthouse and sites for the railroad station and grain elevators, a big hotel, an opera house, and factories and foundries that’s bound to come.”
The speaker paused a moment. Then the inspiration of the evening came to him.
“When you first came here, Aydelot, there wasn’t nothing but imagination to make this a farming community. And it looked lots more impossible then than this looks to me now. What’s to prevent a metropolis risin’ right here where a decade and a half ago there wasn’t nothing but bare prairie?”
The appeal was forceful, and the very men who had stood like heroes against hardships and had fought poverty with a grim, unyielding will-power, the same men fell now before Darley Champers’ smooth advances.198
“Our company’s chartered with no end of stock for sale now that in six months will be out of sight above par and can’t be bought for no price. It’s your time to invest now. You can easy mortgage your farms to raise the money, seein’ you can knock the mortgage off so quick and have abundance left over, if you use your heads ’stead of your tired legs to make money out of your land.”
Cyrus Bennington and Todd Stewart and Jim Shirley, with others, were sitting upright with alert faces now. Booms were making men rich all over Kansas. Why should prosperity not come to this valley as well? It was not impossible, surely. Only the unpleasant memory of Champers’ holding back the supplies in the days when the grasshopper was a burden would intrude on the minds of the company tonight. Champers was shrewd to remember also, and he played his game daringly as well as cautiously.
“Maybe some of you fellows haven’t felt right toward me sometimes,” he said. “I hate to tell it now, but justice is justice. The truth is, it was a friend of yours who advised me not to let any supplies come your way, time of the grasshopper raid. I listened to him then and didn’t know no better’n to be run by him till I see his scheme to kill Wykerton an’ build a town for hisself. He’ll deny it now, declare he never done it, and he’ll not do a thing for your town down here. See if he does. But it’s Gawd’s truth, he held me back so’s he could run you his way. It’s your turn to listen to me now and believe me, too.”
And well they listened, especially the men who still owed John Jacobs for the loan of 1874.
“You can have a boom right here that’ll make you all rich men inside of a year. Why not turn capitalists199yourselves for a while, you hard-working farmers. Money is easy and credit long, now. Take your chance at it and make five hundred per cent on your investments. I’m ready to take subscriptions for stock in this new town right now. Why not stop this snail’s pace of earnin’ and go to livin’ like gentlemen—like some Careyville men I know who own hundreds of acres they never earned and they won’t improve so’s to help others?”
“You’re right there,” a farmer sitting beside Asher Aydelot called out. “We all know how Careyville got her start. It’s kept some of us poor doing it. I’ll invest in Town Company stock right now.”
Asher Aydelot turned toward the speaker in surprise.
“Jacobs helped you out as well as the rest of us in the drouth and grasshopper time of seventy-four,” he said. “What’s your grievance against him now?”
“Yes, and hung onto me like a leech of a Jew ever since,” the man muttered.
“Because you never paid either interest or principal. And Jacobs has carried you along and waited your time,” Asher asserted frankly.
But the farmer plunged into the discussion again, not realizing that his grudge against Careyville was the outgrowth of his own shortcomings.
“Take this site right here in the middle of your neighborhood where you’ve already got your church and your schoolhouse, and your graveyard,” Champers declared. “Aydelot here gave part of it and Pryor Gaines the rest. Gaines don’t farm it any more himself, it’s most too big a job for a man of brains like him. And that quarter across the river that used to be all sand, you own that now,200Aydelot, don’t you? What did you think of doin’ with it now?”
“I think I’ll set it in alfalfa this fall,” Asher replied.
“Yes, yes, now these two make the very site we want. You are lucky, for you are ready right now to start things. How much stock do you want, Aydelot, and how will you sell?”
As Asher listened he seemed to see the whole scheme of the town builder bare itself before him, and he wondered at the credulity of his neighbors.
“Gentlemen,” he said, standing before them, “it is a hard thing to put yourself against neighborhood sentiment and not seem to be selfish. But as I was the first man in this valley and have known every man who settled here since, I ought to be well enough known to you to need no certificate of good moral character here. I offer no criticism on the proposition before you. You are as capable of judging as I am. The end may show you more capable, but I decline to buy stock, or to donate, or sell any land for a townsite at the deep bend of Grass River. A man’s freehold is his own.”
Asher’s influence had led in Grass River affairs for years. But Darley Champers had the crowd in the hollow of his paw tonight.
“How about Gaines?” he demanded. “You join him on the south. You ought to know some of his notions.”
“Gaines has no land to consider,” Asher said frankly. “He sold it more than a year ago.”
“You mean the Jew foreclosed on the preacher, don’t you?” someone said sarcastically.
“You’ll have to ask the preacher,” Asher replied201good-naturedly. “I didn’t understand it so at the time. But as for myself, I’m no boomer. I stand for the prosperity that builds from day to day, and stays built. The values here are in the soil, not in the shining bubbles that glitter and burst on top of it. You’ll have to count me out of your scheme. I’m a farmer still. So I’ll wish you all good luck and good night.”
“Good night, I must go with papa,” Thaine Aydelot said, springing up from his play outside.
“No, you’ve got to stay here. Hold him, Leigh,” Jo Bennington commanded, clutching at Thaine’s arm.
Leigh sat calmly disobedient.
“He’s his papa’s boy, I guess, and he ought to go,” she asserted.
“You meany, meany,” Jo whispered, “I don’t like you.”
But Leigh paid little heed to her opinion.
As Asher passed out of the room there was an ugly look in Darley Champers’ eyes.
“No more ambition than a cat. One of them quiet, good-natured fellers that are as stubborn as the devil once they take a stand. Just a danged clod-hopper farmer, but he don’t leave no enemies behind him. That’s enough to make any man hate him. He’s balked twice when I tried to drive. I’ll not be fooled by him always.”
So Champers thought as he watched Asher Aydelot walk out of the room. And in the silence that followed his going the company heard him through the open window whistling some old patriotic air as he strode away in the June moonlight with little Thaine trotting beside him.
“Shirley, where is Pryor tonight?” Cyrus Bennington broke the silence with the query.202“I couldn’t get him to come; said he had no land for sale nor money to invest,” Jim replied.
“Then Jacobs got him at last. Fine friend to you fellers, that man Jacobs. Easy to see what he wants. He ain’t boomin’ no place but Careyville,” Champers snarled. “But the deep bend ain’t the only bend in Grass River. Or do you want to shove prosperity away when it comes right to your door?”
Nobody wants to do that. Least of all did the Kansas settlers of the boom days turn away from the promise of a fortune.
So the boom came to the Grass River Valley as other disasters had come before it. Where a decade and a half ago Asher and Virginia Aydelot had lived alone with each other and God, in the heart of the wide solitary wilderness, the town of Cloverdale was staked out now over the prairie.
Stock in the new venture sold rapidly, and nobody ever knew how much clear profit came to Champers & Co. from this venture. A big slice of the Cloverdale ranch went into the staking of the new city, and prosperity seemed wedded to Jim Shirley. He ceased farming and became a speculator with dreams of millions in his brain. Other settlers followed his example until the fever had infected every man in the community except Asher Aydelot, who would not give up to it, and Pryor Gaines, who had nothing to give up.
Everything fell out as advertised. The railroad grade swelled up like a great welt across the land, seemingly in a day. Suburban additions radiated for miles in every direction. Bonds were voted for light and water and public buildings and improvements. Speculators rushed to invest203and unload their investments at a profit. The Grass River Farmers’ Company built the Grass River Creamery. And because it looked big and good they built the Grass River Sugar Factory and the Grass River Elevator. But while they were building their money into stone and machinery they forgot to herd cattle to supply the creamery and to grow cane for the sugar product and to sow and reap grain to be elevated.
Also, the Cloverdale Farmers’ Company, made up mostly of the members of the Grass River Farmers’ Company, built the Cloverdale Hotel, and the Cloverdale State Bank, and the Cloverdale Office Block. And the sad part of it all was that mortgaged and doubly mortgaged farms and not the price of crops had furnished the capital for the boom building.
It is an old story now, and none too interesting—the story of a boom town, founded on prairie breezes and built out of fortune seekers’ dreams.
Meanwhile, Asher Aydelot, watching the sudden easy prosperity of his neighbors, fought down the temptation to join them and resolutely strove with the soil for its best yield. The drouth and hot winds had not forgotten all their old tricks, and even the interest on his mortgage could not be met promptly sometimes. Yet with the same old Aydelot tenacity with which his father had held Cloverdale in Ohio away from the old farm beside the National pike road, the son of this father held the boundary of the Sunflower Ranch intact, nor yielded up one acre to be platted into a suburban addition to the new Cloverdale in the Grass River Valley in Kansas. And all the while the Aydelot windbreaks strengthened; the Aydelot grove struck204deeper root; the long corn furrows and the acres on acres of broken wheat stubble of the Sunflower Ranch wooed the heavier rainfall, narrowing the sand dunes and deepening the water courses.
For two brief years Cloverdale, in the Grass River Valley in Kansas, had a name, even in the Eastern money markets. Speculation became madness; and riotous commercialism had its little hour of strut and rave.
Then the bubble burst, and all that the boom had promised fell to nothingness. Many farms were mortgaged, poor crops worked tribulation, taxes began to eat up acres of weed-grown vacant town lots, Eastern money was withdrawn to other markets, speculators departed, the strange enthusiasm burned itself out, and the Wilderness came again to the Grass River Valley. Not the old Wilderness of loneliness, and drouth, and grasshoppers, and prairie fires that had dared the pioneer to conquest; but the Prairie, waiting again the kingly hand on the plow handle, gave no quarter to him whom the gilded boom had lured to shipwreck.