274CHAPTER XVIIThe Purple Notches
Two things greater than all things are.
One is Love, and the other War.
And since we know not how War may prove,
Heart of my heart, let us talk of Love.
—The Ballad of the King’s Jest.
The summer ran its hot length of days, but it was a gay season for the second generation in the Grass River Valley. Nor drouth nor heat can much annoy when the heart beats young. September would see the first scattering of the happy company for the winter. The last grand rally for the crowd came late in August. Two hayrack loads of young folks, with some few in carriages, were to spend the day at “The Cottonwoods,” a far-away picnic ground toward the three headlands of the southwest. Few of the company had ever visited the place. Distances are deceiving on the prairies and better picnic grounds lay nearer to Grass River.
On the afternoon before the picnic Leigh Shirley took her work to the lawn behind the house.
What most ranches gave over to weed patches, or hog lots, or dumping grounds along the stream, at Cloverdale had become a shady clover-sodded lawn sloping down to the river’s edge. The biggest cottonwoods and elms in the whole valley grew on this lawn. A hedge of lilac and other shrubbery bordered by sunflowers and hollyhocks bounded it from the fields and trellises of white honeysuckle screened it from the road.
Leigh turned to see Thaine Aydelot looking down at her as he leaned over the high back of the rustic seat
Leigh turned to see Thaine Aydelot looking down at her as he leaned over the high back of the rustic seat
275
In a rustic seat overlooking the river and the prairies beyond, Leigh Shirley bent lovingly above a square of heavy white paper on which she was sketching a group of sunflowers glowing in the afternoon sunlight. Leigh’s talent was only an undeveloped inheritance, but if it lacked training it’s fresh originality was unspoiled.
“The top of the afternoon to you.”
Leigh turned to see Thaine Aydelot looking down at her as he leaned over the high back of the rustic seat. He was in his working clothes with his straw hat set back, showing his brown face. His luminous dark eyes were shining and a half-teasing, half-sympathetic smile was on his lips. But whatever the clothes, there was always something of the Southern gentleman about every man of the Thaine blood. Something of the soldierly bearing of his father had been his heritage likewise.
“May I see your stuff, or is it not for the profane eyes of a thresher of alfalfa to look upon?”
Leigh drew back and held up her drawing-board.
“It’s just like you, Leigh. You always were an artist, but when did you learn all the technique? Is that what you call it? How do you do it?”
“I don’t know,” Leigh answered frankly. “It seems to do itself.”
“And why do you do it? Or why don’t you do more of it?” Thaine asked.
The girl answered, smiling:
“Just between us two, I hope to do a piece good enough to sell and help to lift the price of alfalfa seed a bit.”
“By the way, I brought the first load of seed over just now. Where’s Uncle Jim?” Thaine asked, trying not to let the pity in his heart show itself in his eyes.276
“Uncle Jim is breaking sod—weeds, I mean—for fall sowing. Wait a minute and I’ll get you the money he left for you.”
Thaine threw himself down in the shade beside Leigh’s seat while she went into the house.
“I wish I didn’t have to take that money, but I know better than to say a word,” he said to himself. “Thank the Lord, the worried look is beginning to leave Uncle Jim’s face, though. How could any of us get along without Uncle Jim?”
“What little seed to be worth so much, but it’s the beginning of conquest,” Leigh said as Thaine took the bills from her hand. “And it’s a much more hopeful business to reclaim from booms and weeds than from this lonely old prairie as it was when Uncle Jim and your father first came here.”
“It’s just the same old pioneer spirit, though, and you are fighting a mortgage just like they fought loneliness, and besides, Asher Aydelot had Virginia Thaine to help him to keep his courage up.”
A sudden flush deepened on his ruddy cheeks and he continued:
“Of course you are going to the picnic? You’ll have to start early. It’s a goodish way to ’The Cottonwoods.’ The Sunflower Ranch needs my talents, so I can’t go with the crowd, but I may draggle in about high noon. I’ll drive over in the buggy, and I’ll try to snake some pretty girl off the wagons to ride home with me when it’s all over.”
“Maybe the pretty girls will all be preempted before you get there,” Leigh replied.
“I know one that I hope won’t be,” Thaine said.277
Leigh was bending over her drawing board and did not look up for a long minute. It was her gift to make comfort about her while she followed her own will unflinchingly. The breeze had blown the golden edges of her hair into fluffy ripples about her forehead and the deep blue of August skies was reflected in her blue eyes shaded by their long brown lashes. Thaine sat watching her every motion, as he always did when he was with her.
“Well?” Leigh looked up with the query. “And what’s to hinder your getting the pretty girl you want if she understands and you are swift enough to cut off the enemy from a flank movement?”
“The girl herself,” Thaine replied.
“Serious! Tragical! Won’t you give me that chrome-yellow tube by your elbow there?” Leigh reached for the paint and their hands met.
“Say, little Sketcher of Things, will you be missing me when I go to school next month? Or will your art and your ranch take all your thoughts?”
“I wish they would, but they won’t,” Leigh said. “They will help to fill up the time, though.”
“Leigh, may I bring you home tomorrow night? I’m going away the next day, and I won’t see you any more for a long time.”
“No, you may not,” Leigh replied, looking up, and her sunny face framed by her golden brown hair was winsomely pleasing.
“Why not, Leigh? Am I too late?”
“Too early. You haven’t asked Jo and been refused yet. But you are kind to put me on the ‘waiting list.’”
Thaine was standing beside her now.278
“I mean it. Has anybody asked you specially—to be your very particular escort?”
“Oh, yes. The very nicest of the crowd.” Leigh’s eyes were shining now. “But I’ve refused him,” she added.
“Who was it?”
“Thaine Aydelot, and I refused because it was good taste for me to do it. If it’s his last day at home—and—oh, I forget what I was going to say.”
“I wish you wouldn’t make a joke of it, anyhow. Tell me why you are so unkind to an old neighbor and lifelong pal,” Thaine insisted.
But Leigh made no reply.
“Leigh!”
“Tell me why you insist when by all the rules you are due to snake the prettiest girl in the crowd off the wagon and into your buggy. Why aren’t you satisfied to make the other boys all envy you?” Leigh had risen and stood beside the rustic seat, her arm across its high back.
“Because it is the last time. Because we’ve known each other since childhood and have been playmates, chums, companions; because I am going one way and you another, and our paths may widen more and more, and because—oh, Leigh, because I want you.”
He leaned against the back of the seat and gently put one hand on her arm.
The yellow August sunshine lay on the level prairies beyond the river. The shining thread of waters wound away across the landscape under a play of light and shadow. The clover sod at their feet was soft and green. The big golden sunflowers hung on their stalks along the border of the lawn, and overhead the ripple of the summer279breezes in the cottonwoods made a music like pattering raindrops. Under their swaying boughs Leigh Shirley stood, a fair, sweet girl. And nothing in the languorous beauty of the midsummer afternoon could have been quite so pleasing without her presence there.
She looked down at Thaine’s big brown hand resting against her white arm, and then up to his handsome face.
“It would only make trouble for, for everybody. No, I’m coming home with the crowd on the hayrack.” She lifted her arm and began to pull the petals from a tiny sunflower that lay on the seat beside her.
“Very well.” There was no anger in Thaine’s tone. “Do you remember the big sunflower we found to send to Prince Quippi, once?”
“The one that should bring him straight from China to me, if he really cared for me?” Leigh asked.
“You said that one was to tell him that you loved him and you knew it would bring him to you. But he never came.”
“It’s a way my princes have of doing,” Leigh said with a little laugh.
“If I were in China and you should send me a sunflower, I’d know you wanted me to come back.”
“If I ever send you one you will know that I do,” Leigh said. “Meantime, my prince will wear a sprig of alfalfa on his coat.”
“And a cockle burr in his whiskers, and cerulean blue overalls like mine, and he’ll drudge along in a slow scrap with the soil till the soil gets him,” Thaine added.
“Like it got your father,” Leigh commented.
“Oh, he’s just one sort of a man by himself,” Thaine280declared. “A pretty good sort, of course, else I’d never have recommended him to be my father. Good-by. I’ll see you across the crowd tomorrow.”
He turned at once and left her.
“The Cottonwoods” was a picturesque little grove grown in the last decade about a rocky run down which in the springtime a full stream swept. There was only a little ripple over a stony bed now, with shallow pools lost in the deeper basins here and there. The grasses lay flat and brown on the level prairie about it. Down the shaded valley a light cool breeze poured steadily. Beyond the stream a gentle slope reached far away to the foot of the three headlands—the purple notches of Thaine Aydelot’s childhood fancies.
The day was ideal. Such days come sometimes in a Kansas August. The young people of the Grass River neighborhood had made merry half of the morning in the grove, and as they gathered for the picnic lunch someone called out:
“Jo Bennington, where’s Thaine Aydelot? Great note for him to disappear when this Charity Ball was executed mainly for him.”
“Better ask Todd Stewart. He’s probably had Thaine kidnaped for this occasion,” somebody else suggested.
“I tried to do it and failed,” Todd Stewart assented. “I don’t need him in my business. He can start to school today if he wants to.”
“Well, you don’t want him to go, do you, Jo?”
“Oh, I don’t care especially. I’m going away myself, but not to the University, but I’m not going till papa’s elected,” Jo replied.281
“And if papa’s defeated we stay home all winter, eh?” Todd questioned.
“That all depends,” Jo replied.
“Of course it does. What is it, and who depends on it? Jo, I’ll help you if you must defend yourself.”
Thaine Aydelot bounced down from the rocky bank above into the midst of the company and became at once Jo’s escort by common consent.
“Now life’s worth living, Thaine’s here. Let’s have dinner,” the boys urged.
It was not Leigh Shirley’s fault that Thaine should be placed between her and Jo at the spread of good things to eat; nor Jo’s planning that she should be between Thaine and Todd Stewart. But nobody could be unhappy today.
In the late afternoon the crowd strolled in couples and quartettes and groups up and down the picturesque place.
Thaine had been with Jo from the moment of his coming and Leigh was glad that she had not yielded to his request of the afternoon before. She had become a little separated from the company as she followed a trail of golden sunflowers down the edge of the wide space between the stream and the foot of the headlands towering far beyond it. The sun had disappeared suddenly and the gleam of the blossoms dulled a trifle. Leigh sat down on a slab of shale to study the effect of the shadow.
“Are you still looking for a letter that will bring Prince Quippi back?” Thaine Aydelot asked as he climbed up from the rough stream bed to a seat beside her.
“I’m watching the effect of sunshine and shadow on the sunflowers,” Leigh replied.282
“It will be all shadow if you wait much longer. The clouds are gathering now and we must start home.”
“Then I must be going, too. It’s a lovely, lazy place here, though. Some time I’m going to the top of those bluffs, away off there.”
“Let’s go up now,” Thaine suggested.
“But it’s too late. I mustn’t keep the crowd waiting,” Leigh insisted. “It’s a stiff climb, too.”
“I can drive up. I know a trail through the brush. Let me drive you up, Leigh. It won’t take long. There’s something worth seeing up there,” Thaine insisted.
“Well, be quick, Thaine. We’ll get into trouble if we are late,” Leigh declared.
The trail up the steep slope twisted its way back and forth through the low timber that covered the sides of the bluffs, and the two in the buggy found themselves shut away in its solitary windings.
“What a shadowy road,” Leigh said. “And see that cliff dropping down beyond that turn. How could there be such a romantic place out on these level plains?”
“It was my fairy land when I was a little tot,” Thaine replied. “I came here long ago and explored it myself.”
“I’d like to come here sketching sometime. See how the branches meet overhead. The odors from the bluffside are like the odors of the woodland back in the Clover valley in Ohio. I remember them yet, although I was so little when I left there,” Leigh said, turning to Thaine.
He shifted the reins, and throwing his hat in the buggy before him he pushed back the hair from his forehead.
“Leigh, will you let me take you home? I didn’t ask Jo after all. Todd wouldn’t wait long enough for me to283do that, as I knew well enough he wouldn’t. Don’t be mad at me. Please don’t,” he pleaded.
“Why, I’m glad if you really want me to go with you, but you shouldn’t have staid away this morning.”
“I did it on purpose. I knew Todd wouldn’t let the chance slip—nor Jo neither, if I let him have it.”
“You let him have it merely because you didn’t want the chance today. Your kindness will be your undoing some day,” Leigh said with a smile that took off the edge of sarcasm.
Thaine said nothing in response, and they climbed slowly to the top of the bluff and stood at last on the crest of the middle headland.
Below them lay “The Cottonwoods” and the winding stream whose course, marked by the dark green line of shrubbery, stretched away toward Grass River far to the southeast. To the westward a wonderful vista of level prairie spread endlessly, wherein no line of shrubbery marked a watercourse nor tree rose up to break the circle of the horizon. Over all this vast plain the three headlands stood as sentinels. In the west the sunlight had pierced a heavy cloudbank and was pouring through the rift in one broad sheet of gold mist from sky to earth. Purple and silver and burnt umber, with green and gray and richest orange, blended all in the tones of the landscape, overhung now by a storm-girdled sky.
“This prairie belongs mostly to John Jacobs now and it is just as it was when the Indians called it the Grand Prairie and the old Pawnees came down here every summer to hunt buffalo. Some day, soon, there will be a sea of wheat flowing over all that level plain,” Thaine said.284
“And up here a home with nothing to cut off a fragment of the whole horizon. Think of seeing every sunrise and every sunset from a place like this,” Leigh said, her face aglow with an artist’s love of beauty. “It’s farther to China than I used to think when I dreamed of a purple velvet house decorated with gold knobs beyond these three headlands.”
“I always did want to live on the Purple Notches,” Thaine said reminiscently. “I’m glad we came up here today.”
The sound of singing came faintly up from the valley far away.
“The crowd is mobilized. See the wagons crawling out of the grove and the civilians in citizens’ clothes following in carriages,” Thaine said as he watched the picnic party pushing out toward the eastward. “I’m so glad we aren’t with them.”
Leigh sat leaning forward, looking at the majestic distances lost in purple haze, overshadowed by purple clouds with gold-broidered edges of sunlight.
“The world is all ours for once. We see all there is of it and yet we are alone in it up here on the purple notches I used to dream about,” she said softly.
Thaine leaned back in his buggy and looked at Leigh with the same impenetrable expression on his countenance that was always there when she was present.
“Leigh,” he said at last, “if you didn’t have Uncle Jim what would you do?”
“I don’t know,” the girl answered.
“I never knew one of the fellows who didn’t like you, but you, you don’t seem to care for any of them. Don’t they suit you?” Thaine asked.285
“Yes, but I can’t think much about them.”
“Why not?”
Leigh drew a long breath.
“Thaine, you have always been a good friend to me. Some day I’ll tell you why.”
“Tell me now,” Thaine insisted gently.
Leigh looked up, a mist of tears in her violet eyes.
“Oh, little girl, forgive me. It’s because—because,” Thaine hesitated. “Because deep down where nobody ever knew I’ve loved you always, Leigh. I didn’t know how much until the night of my party and the day we were at Wykerton.”
“Thaine! Thaine! you mustn’t say such things,” Leigh cried, gripping her hands together. “You mustn’t! You mustn’t!”
“But I must, and I will,” Thaine declared.
“Then I won’t listen to you. You are a flirt. Not satisfied with making one girl love you, you want to make all of us care for you.”
“I know what you mean. I thought I loved Jo. Then I knew I didn’t, and I felt in honor bound to keep her from finding it out. But that’s a dead failure of a business. You can’t play that game and win. I’ve learned a good many things this summer, and one of them is that Todd Stewart is the only one who really and truly loves Jo, and she cares as much for him as she does for anybody.”
“How do you know?” Leigh asked as she leaned back now and faced Thaine.
“Because she doesn’t know herself yet. She’s too spoiled by the indulgence of everybody and too pretty. She wants attention. But I found finally, maybe mother helped me286a little, that if she has Todd’s attention she’s satisfied. More, she’s comfortable. She was always on thorns with me. Isn’t that enough about Jo?”
“Well?” Leigh queried.
“No, nothing is well yet. Leigh, let me go away to the University. Let me make a name for myself, a world-wide name, maybe, let me fight on my frontier line and then come back and lift the burden you carry now. I want to do big things somewhere away from the Kansas prairies, away from the grind of the farm and country life. Oh, Leigh, you are the only girl I ever can really love.”
He leaned forward and took her hands in his own, his dark eyes, beautiful with the light of love, looking down into hers, his face aglow with the ambition of undisciplined youth.
“Let me help you,” he pleaded.
“It is only sympathy you offer, Thaine, and I don’t want sympathy. You said that game wouldn’t win with Jo. Neither would it with me. I am happy in my work. I’m not afraid of it. The harder part is to get enough money to buy seed and pay interest, and Uncle Jim and I will earn that. I tell you the mortgage must be lifted by alfalfa roots just as Coburn’s book says it will be.”
There was a defiant little curve on her red lips and the brave hopefulness of her face was inspiring.
“Go and do your work, Thaine. Fight your battles, push back your frontier line, win your wilderness, and make a world-wide name for yourself. But when all is done don’t forget that the fight your father and mother made here, and are making today, is honorable, wonderful; and that the winning of a Kansas farm, the kingdom of287golden wheat, bordered round by golden sunflowers, is a real kingdom. Its sinews of strength uphold the nation.”
“Why, you eloquent little Jayhawker!” Thaine exclaimed. “You should have been an orator on the side, not an artist. But all this only makes me care the more. I’m proud of you. I’d want you for my chum if you were a boy. I want you for my friend, but down under all this I want you for my girl now, and afterwhile, Leigh, I want you for my own, all mine. Don’t you care for me? Couldn’t you learn to care, Leigh? Couldn’t you go with me to a broader life somewhere out in the real big world? Couldn’t we come some time to the Purple Notches and build a home for just our summer days, because we have seen these headlands all our lives?”
Leigh’s head was bowed, and the pink blooms left her cheeks.
“Thaine,” she said in a low voice that thrilled him with its sweetness, “I do care. I have always cared so much that I have hoped this moment might never come.”
Thaine caught her arm eagerly.
“No! no! We can never, never be anything but friends, and if you care more than that for me now, if you really love me—”the voice was very soft—“don’t ask me why. I cannot tell you, but I know we can never be anything more than friends, never, never.”
The sorrow on her white face, the pathos of the great violet eyes, the firm outline of the red lips told Thaine Aydelot that words were hopeless. He had known her every mood from childhood. She never dallied nor hesitated. The grief of her answer went too deep for words to argue against. And withal Thaine Aydelot was very288proud and unaccustomed to being denied what he chose to want very much.
“Leigh, will you do two things for me?” he asked at length. The sad, quiet tone was unlike Thaine Aydelot.
“If I can,” Leigh answered.
“First, will you promise me that if you want me you will send for me. If you ever find—oh, Leigh, ever is such a long word. If you ever think you can care enough for me to let me come back to you, you will let me know.”
“When I send you the little sunflower letter Prince Quippi never answered you may come back,” Leigh said lightly, but the tears were too near for the promise to seem trivial. “What is the other thing?”
“I want you just once to let me kiss you, Leigh. It’s our good-by kiss forever. Hereafter we are only friends, old chums, you know. Will you let me be your lover for one minute up here on the Purple Notches, where the whole world lies around us and nobody knows our secret? Please, Leigh. Then I’ll go away and be a man somewhere in the big world that’s always needing men.”
Leigh leaned toward him, and he held her close as he kissed her red lips. In all the stormy days that followed the memory of that moment was with him. A moment when love, in all its purity and joy, knew its first realization.
The next day Leigh Shirley made butter all the morning, and in the afternoon she tried to retouch her sketch of sunflowers as she had seen the shadows dull the brightness of their petals in the valley below the Purple Notches.
The same day Thaine Aydelot left home for the winter, taking the memory of the most sacred moment of his life with him out into the big world that is always needing men.
289CHAPTER XVIIIRemembering theMaine
The Twentieth Kansas was fortunate in opportunity,
and heroic in action, and has won a permanent
place in the hearts of a grateful people.
—William McKinley.
The sunny plains of Kansas were fair and full of growing in the spring of 1898. The alfalfa creeping out against the weeds of the old Cloverdale Ranch was green under the April sunshine. The breezes sweeping down the Grass River Valley carried a vigor in their caress. The Aydelot grove, just budding into leaf, was full of wild birds’ song. All the sights and sounds and odors of springtime made the April day entrancing on the Kansas prairies.
Leigh Shirley had risen at dawn and come up to the grove in the early morning. She tethered her pony to graze by the roadside, and with her drawing board on a slender easel she stood on the driveway across the lakelet, busy for awhile with her paints and pencil. Then the sweetness of the morning air, the gurgling waters at the lake’s outlet, once the little draw choked with wild plum bushes, and the trills of music from the shimmering boughs above her head, all combined to make dreaming pleasant. She dropped her brushes and stood looking at the lake and the bit of open woodland, and through it to the wide level fields beyond, with the river gleaming here and there under the touch of the morning light.290
She recalled in contrast the silver and sable tones of the May night when she and Thaine sat on the driveway and saw the creamy water lilies open their hearts to the wooing moonlight and the caressing shadows. It was a fairyland here that night. It was plain daylight now, beautiful, but real. Life seemed a dream that night. It was very real this April morning. The young artist involuntarily drew a deep breath that was half a sigh and stooped to pick up her fallen brushes. But she dropped them again with a glad cry. Far across the lake, in the leaf-checkered sunshine, Thaine Aydelot stood smiling at her.
“Shall I stay here and spoil your landscape or come around and shake hands?” he called across to her.
“Oh, come over here and tell me how you happened,” Leigh cried eagerly.
Grass River people blamed the two years of the University life for breaking Thaine Aydelot’s interest in Jo Bennington. Not that Jo lacked for admirers without him. Life had been made so pleasant for her that she had not gone away to any school, even after her father’s election to office. And down at the University the pretty girls considered Thaine perfectly heartless, for now in his second year they were still baffled by his general admiration and undivided indifference toward all of them. His eager face as he came striding up the driveway to meet Leigh Shirley would have been a revelation to them.
“I ’happened’ last night, too late to-wake up the dog,” Thaine exclaimed. “I happened to run against Dr. Carey, who had a hurry-up call down this way, and he happened to drop me at the Sunflower Inn. He’s coming by for breakfast at my urgent demand. This country night291practice is enough to kill a doctor. His hair is whiter than ever, young as he is. He said he is going to take a trip out West and have a vacation right soon. I told him all my plans. You can tell him anything, you know. And, besides, I’m hoping he will beat me to the house this morning and will tell the folks I’m here.”
“Doesn’t your mother know you are here?” Leigh asked.
“Not yet. I wanted to come down early and tell the lake good-by. I have to leave again in a few hours.”
The old impenetrable expression had dropped over his face with the words. And nobody knows why the sunshine grew dull and the birds’ songs dropped to busy twittering about unimportant things.
“Do you always tell it good-by?” Leigh asked, because she could think of nothing else to say.
“Not always, but this time it’s different. I’m so glad I found you. I should have gone down to Cloverdale, of course, if you hadn’t been here, but this saves time.”
A pink wave swept Leigh’s cheek, but she smiled a pleasant recognition of his thoughtfulness.
“I’ve come home to say good-by because I’m going to enlist in the first Kansas regiment that goes to Cuba to fight the Spaniards. And I must hurry back to Lawrence.”
“Oh, Thaine! What do you mean?”
Leigh’s face was very white.
“Be careful!”
Thaine caught her arm in time to save the light easel from being thrown over.
“Don’t look at me that way, Leigh. Don’t you know that President McKinley has declared war and has called292for one hundred and twenty-five thousand volunteers? Four or five thousand from old Kansas. Do you reckon we Jayhawkers will wait till one hundred and twenty thousand have enlisted and trail in on the last five thousand? It would be against all traditions of the rude forefathers of the Sunflower State.”
“Has war really been declared? We haven’t had the papers for nearly a week. Everybody is so busy with farm work right now.”
Leigh stood looking anxiously at Thaine.
“Declared! The first gun has been fired. The call for volunteers has come from Washington, and the Governor has said he will make Fred Funston Colonel of the first regiment of Kansas volunteers, and he sent out his appeal for loyal Kansas men to offer themselves. I tell you again, Leigh Shirley, I’ll not be the one hundred and twenty-five thousandth man in the line. I’m going to be right close up to little Fred Funston, our Kansas boy, who is to be our Colonel. I have a notion that University students will make the right kind of soldiers. There will be plenty of ignorance and disloyalty and drafting into line on the Spanish side. America must send an intelligent private if the war is to be fought out quickly. I’m that intelligent gentleman.”
“But why must we fight at all, Thaine? Spain has her islands in every sea. We are almost an inland country. Spain is a naval power. Who ever heard of the United States being a naval power? I don’t understand what is back of all this fuss.” Leigh asked the questions eagerly.
“We fight because we remember the Maine,” Thaine said a little boastfully. “We are keeping in mind the two293hundred and sixty-six American sailors who perished when our good ship was sunk in the harbor at Havana last February. If we aren’t a naval power now we may develop some sinews of strength before we are through. Your Uncle Sam is a nervy citizen, and it was a sorry day for proud old Spain when she lighted the fuse to blow up our good warship. It was a fool’s trick that we’ll make Spain pay dearly for yet.”
“So it’s just for revenge, then, for the Maine horror. Thaine, think how many times worse than that this war might be. Isn’t there any way to punish Spain except by sending more Americans to be killed by her fuses and her guns?” Leigh insisted.
“There is more than theMaineaffair,” Thaine assured her. “You know, just off our coast, almost in sight of our guns, Spain has held Cuba for all these centuries in a bondage of degradation and ignorance and cruel oppression. You know there has been an awful warfare going on there for three years between the Spanish government and the rebels against it. And that for a year and a half the atrocities of Weyler, the Captain General of the Spanish forces, make an unprintable record. The United States has declared war, not to retaliate for the loss of theMainealone, awful as it was, but to right wrongs too long neglected, to put a twentieth century civilization instead of a sixteenth century barbarity in Cuba.”
Thaine was reciting his lesson glibly, but Leigh broke in.
“But why must you go? You, an only child?”
She had never seen a soldier. Her knowledge of warfare had been given her by the stories Jim Shirley and Dr. Carey had told to her in her childhood.294
“It’s really not my fault that I’m an only child. It’s an inheritance. My father was an only child, too. He went to war at the mature age of fifteen. I’ll be twenty-one betimes.” Thaine stood up with military stiffness.
“Your father fought to save his country. You just want gold lace and a lark. War is no frolic, Thaine Aydelot,” Leigh insisted.
“I’m not counting on a frolic, Miss Shirley, and I don’t want any gold lace till I have earned it,” Thaine declared proudly.
“Then why do you go?” Leigh queried.
“I go in the name of patriotism. Wars don’t just happen. At least, that is what the professor at the University tells us. Back of this Spanish fuss is a bigger turn waiting than has been foretold. Watch and see if I am not a prophet. This is a war to right human wrongs. That’s why we are going into it.”
“But your father wants you here. The Sunflower Ranch is waiting for you,” Leigh urged.
“His father wanted him to stay in Ohio, so our family history runs. But Mr. Asher heard the calling of the prairies. His wilderness lay on the Kansas plains, and he came out and drove back the frontier line and pretty near won it. At least, he’s got a wheat crop in this year that looks some like success.”
Thaine smiled, but Leigh’s face was grave.
“Leighlie, my frontier is where the Spanish yoke hangs heavy on the necks of slaves. I must go and win it. I must drive back my frontier line where I find it, not where my grandfather found it. I must do a man’s part in the world’s work.”295
His voice was full of earnestness and his dark eyes were glowing with the fire of inspiration. By the patriotism and enthusiasm of the youth of twenty-one has victory come to many a battlefield.
“But I don’t want you to go away to war,” Leigh pleaded.
“You don’t want me here.”
Thaine let his hand rest gently on hers for a moment as it lay on top of the easel; then hastily withdrew it.
“Has your alfalfa struck root deep enough to begin to pull up that mortgage yet?” he inquired, as if to drop the unpleasant subject.
“Not yet,” Leigh answered. “We make every acre help to seed more acres. It’s an uphill pull. It’s my war with Spain, you know. But I’m doing something with these little daubs of mine. I have sold a few pieces. The price wasn’t large, but it was something to put against a hungry interest account. Some day I want to paint—”she hesitated.
“What?” Thaine asked.
Leigh was bending over her brushes and paints, and did not look up as she said with an effort at indifference:
“Oh, the Purple Notches. It is so beautiful over there.”
Thaine bit his lips to hold back the words, and Leigh went on:
“Dr. Carey says Uncle Jim couldn’t have held out long at general farming. But the Coburn book was right. The alfalfa is the silent subsoiler, and when the whole quarter is seeded we’ll pull that mortgage up by the roots, all right.”296
She looked up with shining eyes, and Thaine took both of her hands in his, saying:
“I must tell you good-by now. Mother will know I am here and will be dragging the lake for me. This isn’t like other good-bys. Of course, I may come back a Brigadier General and make you very proud of me, or I might not come at all, but I won’t say that. Oh, Leigh, Leigh, may I tell you once more how dear you are to me? Will you promise again to send me the same message you sent to Prince Quippi when you want me to come back?”
“I will,” Leigh replied in a low voice, and for that moment the grove became for them a holy sanctuary, wherein their words were sacred vows.
When Thaine reached home again, Dr. Carey was just leaving, and the way was prepared for the purpose of his own coming, as he had hoped it would be.
“I’ve a call to make across the river. I’ll be back in time to take you up to catch the train. There’s a feast of a breakfast waiting in there for you. I know, for I had my share of it. Good-by for an hour or two.”
The doctor waved his hand to Thaine and drove away.
“So the wanderlust and spirit of adventure in the Aydelot blood got you after all,” Asher Aydelot said as he looked across the breakfast table at his son. “It seems such a little while ago that I was a boy in Ohio, a foolish fifteen-year-old, crazy to see and be into what I’ve wished so often since that I could forget.”
“But you don’t object, Father?” Thaine asked eagerly.
Asher did not reply at once. A rush of boyhood memories flooded his mind, and as he looked at Virginia he recalled how his mother had looked at him on the day he297left home to join the Third Ohio regiment nearly forty years ago. And then he remembered the moonlit night and his mother’s blessing when he told of his longing for the open West, where opportunity hunts the man.
“No, Thaine,” he answered gently at last. “All I ask is that you try to foresee what is coming in hardship and responsibility. Young men go to war for adventure mostly. The army life may make a hero of you, not by brevet nor always by official record, but a hero nevertheless in bravery where courage is needed, and in a sense of duty done. Or it can make a low-grade scoundrel of you almost before you know it, if you do not put yourself on guard duty over yourself twenty-four hours out of every twenty-four. War means real hardship. It is in everything the opposite of peace. And this war foreshadows big events. It may lead you to Cuba or to the Orient. Our Asiatic squadron is ordered from Hong Kong. Dr. Carey tells me it is going to meet the Spanish navy in the Philippines. I thought I fixed the West when I came here as a scout and later a settler, and drove the frontier back with my rifle and my hoe. Is it possible your frontier is further westward still? Even across the Pacific Ocean, where another kind of wilderness lies?”
Into Asher’s clear gray eyes, that for all the years had held the vision of the wide, pathless prairies redeemed to fruitfulness, there was a vision now of the big things with which the twentieth century must cope. The work of a generation younger than his own.
“Don’t forget two things, Thaine, when you are fairly started in this campaign. First, that wars do not last forever. They jar the frontier line back by leaps, but298after war is over the good old prairie soil is waiting still for you—acres and acres yet unredeemed. And secondly, while you are a soldier don’t waste energy with memories. Fight when you wear a uniform, and dream and remember when the guns are cold. You have my blessing, Thaine, only remember the blessing of Moses to Asher of old, ‘As your day so will your strength be.’ But you must have your mother’s approval too.”
Thaine looked lovingly at his mother, and the picture of her fine face lighted by eyes full of mother love staid with him through all the months that followed. And all the old family pride of the Thaines of Virginia, all the old sense of control and daring was in her tone as she answered:
“You have come to a man’s estate. You must choose for yourself. But big as the world is, it is too little for mothers to be lost in. You cannot find a frontier so far that a mother’s love has not outrun you to it. Go out and win.”
“You are a Trojan, mother. I hope I’ll always be worthy of your love, wherever I am,” her son murmured.
Two hours later, when Dr. Carey stopped for Thaine, Virginia Aydelot came down to his buggy. Her face was very white and her eyes were shining with heroic resolve to be brave to the last.
“Horace, you may be glad you have no children,” she said, as they waited for Thaine and his father to come out.
“My life has had many opportunities for service that must make up for the lack of other blessings. It may have further opportunity soon. May I ask a favor of you?”
Virginia was not to blame that her heart was too full to299catch the undertone of sorrow in Horace Carey’s words as she replied graciously:
“Anything that I can grant.”
“Life is rather uncertain—even with a good doctor in the community—”Dr. Carey’s smile was always winning. “I have hoarded less than I should have done if there had been a Carey to follow me. There will be nobody but Bo Peep to miss me, especially after awhile. I want you to give him a home if he ever needs one. He has some earnings to keep him from want. But you and I are the only Virginians in the valley. Promise me!”
“Of course I will, always, Horace. Be sure of that.”
“Thank you, Virginia. I am planning to start to California in a few days. I may be gone for several months. I’ll tell you good-by now, for I may not be down this way again before I go.”
Virginia remembered afterward the doctor’s strong handclasp and the steady gaze of his dark eyes and the pathos of his voice as he bade her good-by. But she did not note these then, for at that moment Thaine came down the walk with his father, and in the sorrow of parting with her son she had no mind for other things.
Dreary rains filled up the first days of May. At Camp Leedy, where the Kansas volunteers mobilized on the old Fair Ground on the outskirts of Topeka, Thaine Aydelot sat under the shelter of his tent watching the water pouring down the canvas walls of other tents and overflowing the deep ruts that cut the grassy sod with long muddy gashes. Camp Leedy was made up mostly of muddy gashes crossed by streams of semi-liquid mud supposed to be roads. Thaine sat on a pile of sodden straw. His clothing was300muddy, his feet were wet, and the chill of the cold rain made him shiver.
“Noble warfare, this!” he said to himself. “Asher Aydelot knew his bearing when he told me that war was no ways like peace. I wonder what’s going on right now down at the Sunflower Ranch. The rain ought to fill that old spillway draw from the lake down in the woods. It’s nearly time for the water lilies to bloom, too.”
The memory of the May night two years before with Leigh Shirley, all pink and white and sweet and modest, came surging across his mind as a heavy dash of rain deluged the tent walls about him.
“Look here, Private Thaine Aydelot, Twentieth Kansas Volunteers, if you are going to be a soldier stop that memory business right here, except to remember what Private Asher Aydelot, of the Third Ohio Infantry, told you about guard duty twenty-six hours out of twenty-four. Heigh ho!”
Thaine ended with a sigh, then he shut his teeth grimly and stared at the unceasing downpour with unseeing eyes.
A noisy demonstration in the camp roused him, and in a minute more young Todd Stewart lay stretched at full length in the mud before his tent.
“Welcome to our city, whose beauties have overcome others also,” Thaine said, as he helped Todd to rise from the mud.
“Well, you look good to me, whether I do to you or not,” Todd declared, as he scraped at the muddy plaster on his clothing.
“Enter!” Thaine exclaimed dramatically, holding back the tent flaps. “I hope you are not wounded.”301
Todd limped inside and sat down on the wet straw.
“No, my company just got to camp. I was so crazy to see anybody from the short grass country that I made a slide your way too swiftly. I don’t mind these clothes, for I’ll be getting my soldier’s togs in a minute anyhow, but I did twist that ankle in my zeal. Where’s your uniform?” Todd asked, staring at Thaine’s clothes.
“With yours, still. Make a minute of it when you get it, won’t you?” Thaine replied. “Our common Uncle wants soldiers. He has no time to give to their clothes. A ragged shirt or naked breast will stop a Spanish bullet as well as a khaki suit.”
“Do you mean to say you haven’t your soldier uniform yet?” Todd broke in.
“A few of us have, but most of us haven’t. They cost something,” Thaine said with a shiver, for the May afternoon was chilly.
“Then I’ll not stay here and risk my precious life for a government so darned little and stingy.”
Todd sprang up with the words, but fell down again, clasping his ankle.
“Oh, yes, you will. You’ve enlisted already, and you have a bad ankle already. Let me see it.”
Thaine examined the sprained limb carefully. He had something of his father’s ability for such things combined with his mother’s gentle touch.
“Let me bind it up a little while you tell me about Grass River. Then hie thee to a hospital,” he said.
“There’s nothing new, except that Dr. Carey has gone West for a vacation and John Jacobs is raising cain over at Wykerton because a hired hand, just a waif of an302orphan boy, got drunk in Hans Wyker’s joint and fell into Big Wolf and was drowned. Funny thing about it was that Darley Champers came out against Wyker for the first time. It may go hard with the old Dutchman yet. Jim Shirley isn’t very well, but he never complains, you know. Jo Bennington was wild to have me enlist. I suppose some pretty University girl was backing you all the time,” Todd said enthusiastically.
“The only pretty girl I care for didn’t want me to go to the war at all,” Thaine replied, staring gloomily out at the rain.
“Well, why do you go, then?” Todd inquired.
“Oh, she doesn’t specially care for me here, either,” Thaine replied. “Girls don’t control this game for me. But we have some princes of men here all right.”
“As for instance?” Todd queried.
“My captain, Adna Clarke, and his lieutenants, Krause and Alford. They were first to enlist in our company down in the old rink at Lawrence. Captain Clarke is the kind of a man who makes you feel like straightening right up to duty when you see him coming, and he is so genial in his discipline it is not like discipline. Lieutenant Krause fits in with him—hand and glove. But, Todd,” Thaine went on enthusiastically, “if you meet a man on this campground with the face of a gentleman, the manners of a soldier, a smile like sunshine after a dull day in February, and a, well a sort of air about him that makes you feel he’s your friend and that doing a kind act is the only thing a fellow should ever think of doing—that’s Lieutenant Alford. There are some fine University boys here and we have all packed up our old Kansas University yell, ‘Rock303Chalk! Jay Hawk! K U!’ to use on the Spanish. We’ll make them learn to run whenever they hear that yell. The whole regiment is a credit to Kansas, if we haven’t the clothes right now. You are rather a disreputable looking old mudball yourself. Let’s try to get to the hospital tent.”
Thaine lifted Todd Stewart to his feet, and as they started up the slushy way to the hospital tent, he said:
“Yonder is Lieutenant Alford now.”
A young man with a face as genial as his manner was dignified responded pleasantly to the private’s salute, and the rainfall seemed less dreary and all the camp more cheerful for this lieutenant’s presence. No wonder he seemed a prince to the enthusiastic young soldier whose admiration deepened into an abiding love he was never to lose out of his life in all the years to come. In the months that followed Thaine came to know Captain Clarke and his two lieutenants, Krause and Alford, as soldier knows soldier. Nor did ever Trojan nor Roman military hero have truer homage from the common private than the boy from the Grass River Valley paid to these young men commanding his company.
The hardships of soldier life began for Thaine Aydelot and his regiment with the day of enlistment. The privations at Camp Leedy were many. The volunteers had come in meagerly clothed because they expected to be fully supplied by the government they were to serve. The camp equipments were insufficient. The food was poor, and day after day the rain poured mercilessly down on the muddy campground, where the volunteers slept on wet straw piled on the wet earth. Sore throats, colds, and pneumonia304resulted, and many a homesick boy who learned to wade the rice swamps and to face the Mauser’s bullets fearlessly had his first hard lesson of endurance taught to him before he left Camp Leedy on the old Topeka Fair Ground.
Wonderful history-making filled up the May days. While the fleets and land forces were moving against Cuba, the deep sea cable brought the brief story from Commodore Dewey in the harbor of Manila, “Eleven Spanish warships destroyed and no Americans killed.”
And suddenly the center of interest shifted from the Cuban Island near at hand to the Philippines on the other side of the world. The front door of America that for four centuries had opened on the Atlantic ocean opened once and forever on Pacific waters. A new frontier receding ever before the footprint of the Anglo-American flung itself about the far-off island of the Orient with its old alluring call:
Something lost behind the Ranges!
Over Yonder! Go you there!
And the Twentieth Kansas, under Colonel Fred Funston, broke camp and hurried to San Francisco to be ready to answer that call.
Thaine Aydelot had never been outside of Kansas before. Small wonder that the mountains, the desert, the vinelands, and orchard-lands, and rose-lands of California, the half-orientalism of San Francisco and the Pacific Ocean with its world-old mystery of untamed immensity should fill each day with a newer interest; or that the conditions of soldier life at Camp Merritt beside the Golden Gate, to which the eager-hearted, untrained young student from the Kansas305prairie brought all his youthful enthusiasm and patriotism and love of adventure, should wound his spirit and test his power of self-control. Small wonder, too, that the Twentieth Kansas Regiment, poorly equipped, undrilled, and non-uniformed still, should make only a sorry showing among the splendid regiments mobilized there; or that to the big, rich City of San Francisco the ragged fellows from the prairies, who were dubbed the “Kansas Scarecrows,” should become the byword and laughing stock among things military.
One neglect followed another for the Kansas Twentieth. The poorest camping spot was their portion. The chill of the nights, the heat of the days oppressed them. The filth of their unsanitary grounds bred discomfort and disease.
But no military favors were shown them, and the same old stupid jests and jibes of the ignorant citizen of the other states were repeated on the Pacific seaboard. When the thirtieth of May called forth the military forces in one grand parade the Twentieth Kansas was not invited to take part.
For Thaine Aydelot, to whom Decoration Day was a sacred Sabbath always, this greatest of all indignities cut deep where a man’s soul feels keenest. And when transport after transport sailed out of the San Francisco harbor, loaded with regiments for the Philippines, and still the Twentieth Kansas was left in idle waiting on the dreary sand lots of Camp Merritt and the Presidio reservation, the silent campaign that really makes a soldier was waged daily in Thaine and his comrades.
“Don’t complain, boys,” Captain Clarke admonished his306company. “We’ll be ready when we are called, and that’s what really counts.”
Other commanders of the regiment gave the same encouragement. So the daily drilling went on. The sons of the indomitable men and women who had conquered the border ruffian, the hostile Plains Indian, and the unfriendly prairie sod, these sons kept their faith in themselves, their pride in the old Kansas State that bore them, and their everlasting good humor and energy and ability to learn. Such men are the salt of the earth.
Todd Stewart made a brave struggle, but his slide on the muddy ground at Camp Leedy was his military undoing, and his discharge followed.
“I’m going to start back to old Grass River tomorrow,” he said to Thaine Aydelot, who had called to see him with face aglow. “I’ve made the best fight I could, but the doctor says the infantry needs two legs, and neither one wooden. But best of all, Thaine, Jo has written that she wants me to come home. It’s not so bad if there’s a welcome like that waiting. She is slowly overcoming her dislike for country life. But I can’t help envying you.”
“Oh, you’ll stand on both feet all right when you get them both on the short grass of the prairie again, and, as you say, the welcome makes up for a good many losses.”
Something impenetrable came into his eyes for the moment only and then the fire of enthusiasm burned again in them, for Thaine’s nerves were a-tingle with the ambition and anticipation of the young soldier waiting immediate orders, and he changed the subject eagerly.
“I came to tell you something, Todd. We are to sail307the seas on the next transport to Manila, sure. And we’ll see service yet, all right.”
Thaine threw his cap in air and danced about the bed in his enthusiasm.
“Glory be! Won’t Fred Funston do things when he hits the Orient? Best colonel that ever had the U. S. military engines to buck against.”
Todd rejoiced, even in his own disappointment.
“But see here, Thaine, me child, I also have a bit of news that may interest you plumb through. My surgeon isn’t equal to the Philippines either, nor the Ephesians, nor Colossians, and he’s going back to some fort in the mountains. Who do you s’pose will take his place? Now, who?”
“How should I know? Seeing I’ve got to get this regiment off, I have to leave the hospital corps to you. Who is it?” Thaine asked.
“Dr. Horace Carey, M.D.!” Todd replied.
“You don’t mean it!” Thaine gasped.
“Yes, he does, Thaine.” It was Horace Carey who spoke, as he entered the hospital quarter, and, as everywhere else, the same engaging smile and magnetic charm of personality filled the place.
Thaine turned and gathered him in close embrace.
“Oh, Dr. Carey, are you really going?” He whistled, and shouted, and executed jigs in his joy. “Why do you go? Can you leave Kansas? You and me both? Oh, hurry home, Todd, and show Governor Leedy how to run things without us.” And much more to like effect.
“I’ve a notion I’m the right man to go,” Horace Carey answered. “I had experience in the late Civil War, which308seems trifling to you fellows at the Presidio. I rode the Plains for some years more when rattlesnakes and Indian arrows—poisoned at that—and cholera and mountain fever called for a surgeon’s aid. I have diplomas and things from the best schools in the East. I have also some good military friends in authority to back me in getting a surgeon’s place in the army—and, lastly, I haven’t a soul to miss me, nor home to leave dreary, if I get between you and the enemy; nobody but Boanerges Peeperville to care personally, and Mrs. Aydelot, as the only other aristocrat in the Grass River Valley, has promised to give him a home. He has always adored Virginia, Thaine, since he could remember anything.”
Thaine Aydelot was only twenty-one, with little need hitherto for experience in reading human nature. Moreover, he was alert in every tingling nerve with the anticipation of an ocean voyage and of strange new sights and daring deeds half a world away. Yet something in Dr. Carey’s strong face seemed to imply a deeper purpose than his words suggested. A faint sense of the nobility of the man gripped him and grew upon him, and never in the years that followed was separate from the memory of the doctor he had loved from babyhood.
When the Ohio woodlands were gorgeous with the frost-fired splendor of October word came to Miss Jane Aydelot, of the old Aydelot farmhouse beside the National pike road, that one Thaine Aydelot had sailed from San Francisco with the Twentieth Kansas Regiment to see service in the Philippine Islands. On board the same transport was Dr. Horace Carey, of the military medical staff. That winter309Jane Aydelot’s hair turned white, but the pink bloom of her cheeks and the light of her clear gray eyes made her a sweet-faced woman still, whose loveliness grew with the years.
The kiss of the same October breezes was on the Kansas prairie with the hazy horizon and the infinite beauty of wide, level landscapes, overhung by the infinite beauty of blue, tender skies. Boanerges Peeperville, established as cook in the Sunflower Inn, was at home in his cosy little quarter beside the grape arbor of the rear dooryard.
“Tell me, Bo Peep, why Dr. Carey should enter the army again and go to the Philippines?” Virginia Aydelot asked on the day the news reached the Sunflower Ranch.
Bo Peep did not answer at once. Virginia was busy arranging some big yellow chrysanthemums in a tall cut-glass vase that Dr. Carey had left to be sent down to her when Bo Peep should come to the Aydelots to make his home.
“See, Bo Peep, aren’t they pretty? Set them in the middle of the table there, carefully. The first bouquet we ever had on our table was a few little sunflowers in an old peach can wrapped round with a newspaper. You didn’t answer my question. Why did Horace go so far away?”
The servant took the vase carefully and placed it as commanded. Then he turned to Virginia with a face full of intense feeling.
“Miss Virgie, I done carry messages for him all my days.” The pathos of the soft voice was touching. “I wasn’t to give this las’ one to you less’n he neveh come back. An Mis’ Virgie, Doctoh Carey won’t neveh come310back no mo’. But I kaint tell you yet jus’ why he done taken hisself to the Fillippians, not yet.”
“Why do you think he will never come back? You think Thaine will come home again, don’t you?” Virginia queried.
“Oh, yas’m! yas’m! Misteh Thaine, he’ll come back all right. But hit’s done fo’casted in my bones that Doctoh Horace won’t neveh come. An’ when he don’t, I’ll tell you why he leff’n Grass Riveh, Kansas, for the Fillippians.”