The Price of the Prairie: A Story of Kansas

"Oh, that is easy for you to say, who have everything to make you happy."

"I? Oh, Dave! I have not even a grave." The sudden sense of loss, driven back by the thought of another's sorrow, swept over me again. It was his turn now to forget himself.

"What is it, Phil? Have you and Marjie quarrelled? You never were meant for that, either of you. It can't be."

"No, Dave. I don't know what is wrong. I only wish – no, I don't. It is hard to be a man with the heart of a boy still, a foolish boy with foolish ideals of love and constancy. I can't talk to-night, Dave, only I envy you the sure possession, the eternal faith that will never be lost."

He pressed my hand in his left hand. His right arm had had only a limited usefulness since the night he tried to stop Jean Pahusca down by the mad floods of the Neosho. I have never seen him since we parted on the prairie that August evening. The next day he went to Red Range to stay for a short time. By the end of a week I had left Springvale, and we are to each other only boyhood memories now.

Out on the open prairie, where there was room to think and be alone, I went to fight my battle. There was only a sweep of silver sky above me and a sweep of moonlit plain about me. Dim to the southwest crept the dark shadow of the wooded Fingal's Creek Valley, while against the horizon the big cottonwood tree was only a gray blur. The mind can act swiftly. By the time the moon had swung over the midnight line I had mapped out my course. And while I seemed to have died, and another being had my personality, with only memory the same in both, I rose up armed in spirit to do a man's work in the world. But it cost me a price. I have been on a battle field with a thousand against fifty, and I was one of the fifty. Such a strife as I pray Heaven may never be in our land again. I have looked Death in the face day after day creeping slowly, surely toward me while I must march forward to meet it. Did the struggle this night out on the prairie strengthen my soul to bear it all, I wonder.

The next morning a package addressed in Marjie's round girlish hand was put before me. Forgetful of resolve, I sent back by its bearer an imploring appeal for a chance to meet her and clear up the terrible misunderstanding. The note came back unopened. I gave it with the bundle to Aunt Candace.

"Keep this for me, auntie, dear," I said, and my voice trembled. She took it from my hand.

"All right, Phil, I'll keep it. You are not at the end of things, dearie. You are only at the beginning. I'll keep this. It is only keeping, remember." She pointed to a stain on the unopened note, the round little blot only a tear can make. "It isn't yours, I know."

It was the first touch of comfort I had felt. However slender the thread, Hope will find it strong to cling to. Rachel's visit ended that day. Self-centred always, she treated me as one who had been foolish, but whom she considered her admirer still. It was not in her nature to be rejected. She shaped things to fit her vanity, and forgot what could not be controlled. I refused to allow myself to be alone with her again. Nobody was ever so tied to a woman's presence as I kept myself by Aunt Candace so long as I remained in the house.

My father, I knew, was grieved and indignant. With all my fair promises and pretended loyalty I seemed to be an idle trifler. How could my relation to Lettie Conlow be explained away in the light of this visit from a handsome cultured young lady, who had had an assurance of welcome or she would not have come. He loved Marjie as the daughter of his dearest friend. He had longed to call her, "daughter," and I had foolishly thrown away a precious prize.

Serious, too, was my reckless neglect of business. I had disregarded his request to manage a grave matter. Instead of going alone to the cabin, I had gone off with a pretty girl and reported that I had found nothing.

"Did you go near the cabin?" He drove the question square at me, and I had sullenly answered, "No, sir." Clearly I needed more discipline than the easy life in Springvale was giving me. I went down to the office in the afternoon, hoping for something, I hardly knew what. He was alone, and I asked for a few words with him. Somehow I seemed more of a man to myself than I had ever felt before in his presence.

"Father," I began. "When the sea did its worst for you – fifteen years ago – you came to the frontier here, and somehow you found peace. You have done your part in the making of the lawless Territory into a law-abiding State, this portion of it at least. The frontier moves westward rapidly now."

"Well?" he queried.

"I have lost – not by the sea – but, well, I've lost. I want to go to the frontier too. I must get away from here. The Plains – somewhere – may help me."

"But why leave here?" he asked. After all, the father-heart was yearning to keep his son.

"Why did you leave Massachusetts?" I could not say Rockport. I hated the sound of the name.

"Where will you go, my boy?" He spoke with deepest sorrow, and love mingled in his tones.

"Out to the Saline Country. They need strong men out there. I must have been made to defend the weak." It was not a boast, but the frank expression of my young manhood's ideal. "Your friend Mr. Morton urged me to come. May I go to him? It may be I can find my place out in that treeless open land; that there will come to me, as it came to you, the help that comes from helping others."

Oh, I had fought my battle well. I was come into a man's estate now and had put away childish things.

My father sitting before me took both my hands in his.

"My son, you are all I have. You cannot long deceive me. I have trusted you always. I love you even unto the depths of disgrace. Tell me truly, have you done wrong? I will soon know it. Tell me now."

"Father," I held his hands and looked steadily into his eyes. "I have no act to conceal from you, nor any other living soul. I must leave here because I cannot stay and see – Father, Marjie is lost to me. I do not know why."

"Well, find out." He spoke cheerily.

"It is no use. She has changed, and you know her father's firmness. She is his mental image."

"There is no stain somewhere, no folly of idle flirtation, no weakness? I hear much of you and Lettie."

"Father, I have done nothing to make me ashamed. Last night when I fought my battle to the finish, for the first time in my life I knew my mother was with me. Somehow it was her will guiding me. I know my place. I cannot stay here. I will go where the unprotected need a strength like mine."

The stage had stopped at the courthouse door, and Rachel Melrose ran up the steps and entered the outer office. My father went out to meet her.

"Are you leaving us?" he asked kindly.

"Yes, I had only a day or two that I could spend here. But where is Philip?"

John Baronet had closed his door behind him. I thanked him fervently in my heart for his protection. How could I meet this woman now? And yet she had seemed only selfishly mischievous, and I must not be a coward, so I came out of the inner room at once. A change swept over her face when I appeared. The haughty careless spirit gave place to gentleness, and, as always, she was very pretty. Nothing of the look or manner was lost on John Baronet, and his pity for her only strengthened his opinion of my insincerity.

"Good-bye, Philip. We shall meet again soon, I hope. Good-bye, Judge Baronet." Her voice was soft and full of sadness. She smiled upon us both and turned to go.

My father led her down the courthouse steps and helped her into the stage. When he came back I did not look up. There was nothing for me to say. Quietly, as though nothing had occurred, he took up his work, his face as impenetrable as Jean Pahusca's.

My resemblance to my mother is strong. As I bent over his desk to gather up some papers for copying, my heavy dark hair almost brushed his cheek. I did not know then how his love for me was struggling with his sense of duty.

"I have trusted him too much, and given him too free a rein. He doesn't know yet how to value a woman's feelings. He must learn his lesson now. But he shall not go away without my blessing."

So he mused.

"Philip," his voice was as kind as it was firm, "we shall see what the days will bring. Your mother's spirit may be guiding you, and your father's love is always with you. Whatever snarls and tangles have gotten into your threads, time and patience will straighten and unravel. Whatever wrong you may have done, willingly or unwillingly, you must make right. There is no other way."

"Father," I replied in a voice as firm as his own. "Father, I have done no wrong."

Once more he looked steadily into my eyes and through them down into my very soul. "Phil, I believe you. These things will soon pass away."

In the early twilight I went for the last time to "Rockport." There are sadder things than funeral rites. The tragedies of life do not always ring down the curtain leaving the stage strewn with the forms of the slain. Oftener they find the living actor following his lines and doing his part of the play as if all life were a comedy. The man of sixty years may smile at the intensity of feeling in the boy of twenty-one, but that makes it no easier for the boy. I watched the sun go down that night, and then I waited through the dark hour till the moon, now past the full, should once more illumine the Neosho Valley. Although I have always been a lover of nature, that sunset and the purple twilight following, the darkness of the early evening hour and the glorious moonrise are tinged with a sorrow I have never quite lost even in the happier years since then. I sat alone on the point of rock. At last the impulse to go down below and search for a letter from Marjie overcame me, although I laughed bitterly at the folly of such a notion. In the crevice where her letter had been placed for me the night before, I found nothing. What a different story I might have to tell had I gone down at sunset instead of waiting through that hour of darkness before the moon crept above the eastern horizon line! And yet I believe that in the final shaping-up the best thing for each one comes to all of us. Else the universe is without a plan and Love unwavering and eternal is only a vagary of the dreamer.

Early the next morning I left Springvale, and set my face to the westward, as John Baronet had done a decade and a half before, to begin life anew where the wilderness laps the frontier line. My father held my hand long when I said good-bye, and love and courage and trust were all in that hand-clasp.

"You'll win out, my boy. Keep your face to the light. The world has no place for the trifler, the coward, or the liar. It is open to homestead claims for all the rest. You will not fail." And with his kiss on my forehead he let me go.

Anything is news in a little town, and especially interesting in the dull days of late Summer. The word that I had gone away started from Conlow's shop and swept through the town like a prairie fire through a grassy draw.

No one man is essential to any community. Springvale didn't need me so much as I needed it. But when I left it there were many more than I deserved who not only had a good word for me; they went further, and demanded that good reason for my going must be shown, or somebody would be made to suffer. Foremost among these were Cam Gentry, Dr. Hemingway, and Cris Mead, president of the Springvale Bank, the father of Bill and Dave. Of course, the boys, the blessed old gang, who had played together and worked together and been glad and sorry with each other down the years, the boys were loyal to the last limit.

But we had our share of gossips who had a tale they could unfold – a dreadful tale! Beginning with my forging my father's name to get money to spend on Rachel Melrose and other Topeka girls, and to pay debts I had contracted at Harvard, on and on the tale ran, till, by the time the Fingal's Creek neighborhood got hold of the "real facts," it developed that I had all but murdered a man who stood in the way of a rich fee my father was to get out of a land suit somewhere; and lastly came an ominous shaking of the head and a keeping back of the "worst truth," about my gay escapades with girls of shady reputation whom I had deceived, and cruelly wronged, trusting to my standing as a rich man's son to pull me through all right.

Marjie was the last one in Springvale to be told of my sudden leave-taking. The day had been intolerably long for her, and the evening brought an irresistible temptation to go up to our old playground. Contrary to his daily habit my father had passed the Whately house on his way home, and Marjie had seen him climb the hill. I was as like him in form as Jean Pahusca was like Father Le Claire. Six feet and two inches he stood, and so perfectly proportioned that he never looked corpulent. I matched him in height and weight, but I had not his fine bearing, for I had seen no military service then. I do not marvel that Springvale was proud of him, for his character matched the graces Nature had given him.

As Marjie watched him going the way I had so often taken, her resolve to forget what we had been to each other suddenly fell to pieces. Her feelings could not change at once. Mental habits are harder to break up than physical appetites. For fourteen years my loved one had known me, first as her stanch defender in our plays, then as her boy sweetheart and lastly as her lover and betrothed husband. Could twenty-four hours of distrust and misunderstanding displace these fourteen years of happy thinking? And so after sunset Marjie went up the slope, hardly knowing why she should do so or what she would say to me if she should meet me there. It was a poor beginning for the new life she had carefully mapped out, but impulse was stronger than resolve in her just then. Just at the steep bend in the street she came face to face with Lettie Conlow. The latter wore a grin of triumph as the two met.

"Good-evening, Marjie. I s'pose you've heard the news?"

"What news?" asked Marjie. "I haven't heard anything new to-day."

"Oh, yes, you have, too. You know all about it; but I'd not care if I was you."

Marjie was on her guard in a moment.

"I don't care for what I don't know, Lettie," she replied.

"Nor what you do, neither. I wouldn't if I was you. He ain't worth it; and it gives better folks a chance for what they want, anyhow."

Lettie's low brows and cunning black eyes were unendurable to the girl she was tormenting.

"Well, I don't know what you are talking about," and Marjie would have passed on, but Lettie intercepted her.

"You know that rich Melrose girl's gone back to Topeka?"

"Oh, yes," Marjie spoke indifferently; "she went last evening, I was told."

"Well, this morning Phil Baronet went after her, left Springvale for good and all. O'mie says so, and he knows all Phil knows. Marjie, she's rich; and Phil won't marry nobody but a rich girl. You know you ain't got what you had when your pa was alive."

Yes, Marjie knew that.

"Well he's gone anyhow, and I don't care."

"Why should you care?" Marjie could not help the retort. She was stung to the quick in every nerve. Lettie's face blazed with anger.

"Or you?" she stormed. "He was with me last. I can prove it, and a lot more things you'd never want to hear. But you'll never be his girl again."

Marjie turned toward the cliff just as O'mie appeared through the bushes and stepped behind Lettie.

"Oh, good-evening, lovely ladies; delighted to meet you," he hailed them.

Marjie smiled at him, but Lettie gave a sudden start.

"Oh, O'mie, what are you forever tagging me for?" She spoke angrily and without another word to Marjie she hurried down the hill.

"I tag!" O'mie grinned. "I'd as soon tag Satan, only I've just got to do it." But his face changed when he turned to Marjie. "Little girl, I overheard the lady. Lovely spirit that! I just can't help dancin' attendance on it. But, Marjie, I've come up here, knowin' Phil had gone and wasn't in my way, 'cause I wanted to show you somethin'. Yes, he's gone. Left early this mornin'. Never mind that, right now."

He led the way through the bushes and they sat down together. I cannot say what Marjie thought as she looked out on the landscape I had watched in loneliness the night before. It was O'mie, and not his companion, who told me long afterwards of this evening.

"I thought you were away on a ten days' vacation, O'mie. Dever said you were." She could not bear the silence.

"I'm on a tin days' vacation, but I'm not away, Marjie, darlin'," O'mie replied.

"Oh, O'mie, don't joke. I can't stand it to-night." Her face was white and her eyes were full of pain.

"Indade, I'm not jokin'. I came up here to show you somethin' and to tell you somethin'."

He took an old note book from his pocket and opened it to where a few brown blossoms lay flatly pressed between the leaves.

"Thim's not pretty now, Marjie, but the day I got 'em they was dainty an' pink as the dainty pink-cheeked girl whose brown curls they was wreathed about. These are the flowers Phil Baronet put on your hair out in the West Draw by the big cottonwood one April evenin' durin' the war; the flowers Jean Pahusca kissed an' throwed away. But I saved 'em because I love you, Marjie."

She shivered and bent her head.

"Oh, not like thim two ornery tramps who had these blossoms 'fore I got 'em, but like I'd love a sister, if I had one; like Father Le Claire loves me. D'ye see?"

"You are a dear, good brother, O'mie," Marjie murmured, without lifting her head.

"Oh, yis, I'm all av that an' more. Marjie, I'm goin' to kape these flowers till – well, now, Marjie, shall I tell you whin?"

"Yes, O'mie," Marjie said faintly.

"Well, till I see the pretty white veil lifted fur friends to kiss the bride an' I catch the scent av orange blossoms in thim soft little waves." He put his hand gently on her bowed head. "I'll get to do it, too," he went on, "not right away, but not fur off, nather; an' it won't be a little man, ner a rid-headed Irishman, ner a sharp-nosed school-teacher; but – Heaven bless an' kape him to-night! – it'll be a big, broad-shouldered, handsome rascal, whose heart has niver changed an' niver can change toward you, little sister, 'cause he's his father's own son – lovin', constant, white an' clane through an' through. Be patient. It's goin' to be all right for you two." He closed the book and put it back in its place. "But I mustn't stay here. I've got to tag Lettie some more. Her an' some others. That's what my tin days' vacation's fur, mostly." And O'mie leaped through the bushes and was gone.

The twilight was deepening when Marjie at last roused herself.

"I'll go down and see if he did get my letter," she murmured, taking her way down the rough stair. There was no letter in the crevice where she had placed it securely two nights before. Lifting her face upward she clasped her hands in sorrow.

"He took it away, but he did not come to me. He knows I love him." Then remembering herself, "I would not let him speak. But he said he hated 'Rockport.' Oh, what can it all mean? How could he be so good to me and then deceive me so? Shall I believe Lettie, or O'mie?"

Kneeling there in the deep shadows of the cliff-side with the Neosho gurgling darkly below her, and the long shafts of pink radiance from the hidden sunset illumining the sky above her, Marjie prayed for strength to bear her burden, for courage to meet whatever must come to her, and for the assurance of divine Love although now her lover, as well as her father, was lost to her. The simple pleading cry of a grief-stricken heart it was. Heaven heard that prayer, and Marjie went down the hill with womanly grace and courage and faith to face whatever must befall her in the new life opening before her.

In the days that followed my little girl was more than ever the idol of Springvale. Her sweet, sunny nature now had a new beauty. Her sorrow she hid away so completely there were few who guessed what her thoughts were. Lettie Conlow was not deceived, for jealousy has sharp eyes. O'mie understood, for O'mie had carried a sad, hungry heart underneath his happy-go-lucky carelessness all the years of his life. Aunt Candace was a woman who had overcome a grief of her own, and had been cheery and bright down the years. She knew the mark of conquest in the face. And lastly, my father, through his innate power to read human nature, watched Marjie as if she were his own child. Quietly, too, so quietly that nobody noticed it, he became a guardian over her. Where she went and what she did he knew as well as Jean Pahusca, watching in the lilac clump, long ago. For fourteen years he had come and gone to our house on Cliff Street up and down the gentler slope two blocks to the west of Whately's. Nobody knew, until it had become habitual, when he changed his daily walk homeward up the steeper climb that led him by Marjie's house farther down the street. Nobody realized, until it was too common for comment, how much a part of all the social life of Springvale my father had become. He had come to Kansas a widower, but gossip long ago gave up trying to do anything with him. And now, as always, he was a welcome factor everywhere, a genial, courteous gentleman, whose dignity of character matched his stern uprightness and courage in civic matters. Among all the things for which I bless his memory, not the least of them was this strong, unostentatious guardianship of a girl when her need for protection was greatest, as that Winter that followed proved.

I knew nothing of all this then. I only knew my loved one had turned against me. Of course I knew that Rachel was the cause, but I could not understand why Marjie would listen to no explanation, why she should turn completely from me when I had told her everything in the letter I wrote the night of the party at Anderson's. And now I was many miles from Springvale, and the very thought of the past was like a knife-thrust. All my future now looked to the Westward. I longed for action, for the opportunity to do something, and they came swiftly, the opportunity and the action.

CHAPTER XVI

BEGINNING AGAIN

It matters not what fruit the hand may gather,If God approves, and says, "This is the best."It matters not how far the feet may wander,If He says, "Go, and leave to Me the rest."– ALBERT MACY.

I stood in the August twilight by the railway station in the little frontier town of Salina, where the Union Pacific train had abandoned me to my fate. Turning toward the unmapped, limitless Northwest, I suddenly realized that I was at the edge of the earth now. Behind me were civilization and safety. Beyond me was only a waste of gray nothingness. Yet this was the world I had come hither to conquer. Here were the spaces wherein I should find peace. I set my face with grim determination to work now, out of the thing before me, a purpose that controlled me.

Morton's claim was a far day's journey up the Saline Valley. It would be nearly a week before I could find a man to drive me thither; so I secured careful directions, and the next morning I left the town on foot and alone. I did not mind the labor of it. I was as vigorous as a young giant, fear of personal peril I had never known, and the love of adventure was singing its siren's song to me. I was clad in the strong, coarse garments, suited to the Plains. I was armed with two heavy revolvers and a small pistol. Hidden inside of my belt as a last defence was the short, sharp knife bearing Jean Le Claire's name in script lettering.

I shall never forget the moment when a low bluff beyond a bend in the Saline River shut off the distant town from my view and I stood utterly alone in a wide, silent world, left just as God had made it. Humility and uplift mingle in the soul in such a time and place. One question ran back and forth across my mind: What conquering power can ever bring the warmth of glad welcome to the still, hostile, impenetrable beauty of these boundless plains?

"The air is full of spirits out here," I said to myself. "There is no living thing in sight, and yet the land seems inhabited, just as that old haunted cabin down on the Neosho seemed last June."

And then with the thought of that June day Memory began to play her tricks on me and I cried out, "Oh, perdition take that stone cabin and the whole Neosho Valley if that will make me forget it all!"

I strode forward along the silent, sunshiny way, with a thousand things on my mind's surface and only one thought in its inner deeps. The sun swung up the sky, and the thin August air even in its heat was light and invigorating. The river banks were low and soft where the stream cuts through the alluvial soil a channel many feet below the level of the Plains. The day was long, but full of interest to me, who took its sight as a child takes a new picture-book, albeit a certain sense of peril lurked in the shadowing corners of my thought.