Winning the Wilderness

The dining room was crowded with men when Virginia entered. Whoever is hunting for evidence of good breeding and unselfishness, must not expect too much in any eating-house, be it dining car on the Empire Limited or grub shack on the western frontier, if only men are accustomed to feed there. The best places were filled with noisy talkers and eaters, who stared at her indifferently, and it was not until Gretchen Wyker, tow-haired, pimpled, and short-necked like her father, chose to do so, that she finally pointed out a chair at a shabby side table and waved her empty tin waiter toward it. Virginia was passing the long table of staring men to reach this seat, when a man rose from the small table at the other side of the room and crossed hastily to her.

“Excuse me, madam,” he said politely. “Will you come over to our table? We are strangers to you, but you will get better service here than you might get alone. My name is Jacobs. I saw you in the store this morning, and I know nearly every man in your settlement.”

It was a small service, truly, but to Virginia it was a grateful one in that embarrassing moment.

“You can take Dr. Carey’s place. He’s away today, locating a claim on the upper fork of Grass River somewhere. He hasn’t been back a month, but he’s busy as ever. Tell me about your neighborhood,” Jacobs said.

Virginia told the story of the community that differed little from the story of the whole frontier line of Kansas settlements in the early seventies.

“Do you have hope of help through Mr. Champers?” Jacobs asked.

“I don’t know what to hope for from Mr. Champers. He seems kind-hearted,” Virginia replied.

“I hope you will find him a real friend. He is pretty busy with a man from the East today,” Jacobs answered, with a face so neutral in its expression that Virginia wondered what his thought might be.

As she rose to leave the table, Mr. Jacobs said:

“I shall be interested in knowing how you succeed this afternoon. I hope you may not be disappointed. I happen to know that there are funds and goods both on hand. It’s a matter of getting them distributed without prejudice.”

“You are very kind, Mr. Jacobs,” Virginia replied. “It is a desperate case. I feel as if I should be ready to leave the West if I do not get relief for our neighborhood today.”

Jacobs looked at her keenly. “Can you go?” he asked. “I wonder you have waited until now.”

“I’ve never wanted to go before. I wouldn’t now. I could stand it for our household.” The dark eyes flashed with the old Thaine will to do as she pleased. “But it is my sympathy for other people, for our sick, for discouraged men.”

Jacobs smiled kindly and bowed as she left the room.

When she returned to Champers’ office Mr. Thomas Smith was already there, his small frame and narrow, close-set eyes and secretive manner seeming out of place in the breezy atmosphere of the plain, outspoken West of the settlement days. In the conversation that followed it seemed to Virginia that he controlled all of the real estate dealer’s words.

“I am sorry to say that there ain’t anything left in the way of supplies, Mrs. Aydelot, except what’s reserved for worthy parties. I’ve looked over things carefully.” Darley Champers broke the silence at once.

“Who draws the line between the worthy and the unworthy, Mr. Champers?” Virginia asked. “I am told the relief supply is not exhausted.”

“Oh, the distributin’s in my hands in a way, but that don’t change matters,” Champers said.

“I read the rulings in the postoffice,” Virginia began.

“Yes, I had ’em put there. It saves a lot of misunderstandin’,” the guardian of supplies declared. “But it don’t change anything here.”

Virginia knew that her case was lost and she rose to leave the room. She had instinctively distrusted Darley Champers from their first meeting. She had disliked him as an ill-bred, blustering sort of man, but she had not thought him vindictive until now. Now she saw in him a stubborn, unforgiving man, small enough to work out of petty spite to the complete downfall of any who dared oppose his plans.

“Sit down, Mrs. Aydelot. As I said this mornin’, it’s too bad you can’t go back East now,” Champers said seriously.

“We can.” Virginia could not keep back the words.

Champers and Smith exchanged glances.

“No, mom, you can’t, Mrs. Aydelot. Let me show you why.”

He opened the drawer of his rickety desk and out of a mass of papers he fished up a copy of the Cincinnati Enquirer, six weeks old. “Look at this,” and he thrust it into Virginia’s hand.

The head-lines were large, but the story was brief. The failure of the Cloverdale bank, the disappearance of the trusted cashier, the loss of deposits – a story too common to need detail. Virginia Aydelot never knew until that moment how much that reserve fund had really meant to her. She had need of the inherited pride of the Thaines now.

“The papers are not always accurate,” she said quietly.

“No, mom. But Mr. Smith here has interests in Cloverdale. He’s just come from there, and he says it’s even worse than this states it.”

Virginia looked toward Mr. Smith, who nodded assent.

“The failure is complete. Fortunately, I lost but little,” he said.

“Why hasn’t Mr. Aydelot been notified?” she demanded.

“It does seem queer he wasn’t,” Thomas Smith assented.

Something in his face made Virginia distrust him more than she distrusted Darley Champers.

“Now, Mrs. Aydelot, seein’ your last bridge is burned, I’m humane enough to help you. You said this mornin’ you wanted to get away. Mr. Smith and I control some funds together, and he’s willing to take Shirley’s place and I’ll give you a reasonable figger, not quite so good as I could ’a done previous to this calamity – but I’ll take the Aydelot place off your hands.” Champers smiled triumphantly.

“The Aydelot place is not for sale. Good afternoon.” And Virginia left the office without more words.

When she was gone Champers turned to Smith with a growl.

“It’s danged hard to turn agin a woman like her. What made you so bitter?”

Smith half grinned and half snarled in reply:

“Oh, her neighbor, Shirley, you know.”

Hopeless and crushed, Virginia sat down on the bench before the Wyker House to wait for Juno to be brought to her from the stables. The afternoon sun was beginning to creep under the roof shading the doorway. Before her the dusty street ran into the dusty trail leading out to the colorless west. It was the saddest moment she had known in the conflict with the wilderness.

“Thy shoes shall be iron and brass,” ran the blessing of Asher through her mind. “It must be true today as in the desert long ago. And Asher lives by the memory of his mother’s blessing.” The drooping shoulders lifted. The dark eyes brightened.

“I won’t give up. I’m glad the money’s gone,” she declared to herself. “We did depend on it so long as we knew we had it.”

“What luck, Mrs. Aydelot?” It was John Jacobs who spoke as he sat down beside her.

“All bad luck, but we are not discouraged,” she replied bravely, and Jacobs read the whole story in the words.

A silence fell. Virginia sat looking at the vacant street, while the young man studied her face. Then Juno was brought to the door and Virginia rose to mount her.

“Mrs. Aydelot,” John Jacob’s sharp eyes seemed to pierce to her very soul as he said slowly, “I believe you are not discouraged. You believe in this country, you, and your neighbors. I believe in it, and I believe in you. Stewart and I had to dissolve partnership when Carey’s Crossing dissolved. He took a claim. It was all he could do. I went back to Cincinnati, but only for a time. I’m ready to start again. I will organize a company of town builders, not brewery builders. You must not look for favors in a whisky-ridden place like this. There’ll be no saloon to rule our town.”

Virginia listened interestedly but not understandingly.

“What of this?” Jacobs continued. “I have some means. I’m waiting for more. I’ll invest them in Grass River. Go back and tell your homesteaders that I’ll make a small five-year loan to every man in the settlement according to his extreme needs. I’ll take each man’s note with five per cent interest and the privilege of renewing for two years if crops fail at the end of the term. I am selfish, I’ll admit,” he declared, as Virginia looked at him incredulously, “and I want dollar for dollar – always – sometimes more. My people are popularly known as Shylocks. But you note that my rate of usury is small, the time long, and that I want these settlers to stay. I am not trying to get rid of them in order to speculate on their land in coming days of prosperity – the days when you will be landlords over broad acres and I a merchant prince. I say again, I believe in the West and in you farmer people who must turn the West from a wilderness to a land of plenty. I’m willing to risk something on your venture.”

“Oh, Mr. Jacobs,” was all Virginia could say, and, womanlike, the tears filled her eyes and ran down her cheeks.

“Tell the men to send a committee up here with their needs listed,” Jacobs said hastily, “or better, I’ll go out there myself the day after tomorrow. I want to see what kind of a claim Carey has preempted. Good-by, now, good-by.”

He hurried Virginia to her horse and watched her ride away.

Down at the ford of Wolf Creek the willow brush fringed the main trail thinly for a little distance and half hid the creek trail, winding up a long canyon-like hollow, until a low place in the bank and a steep climb brought it up to the open prairie. It was the same trail that Dr. Carey had spoken of as belonging to an ugly little creek running into Big Wolf, the trail he had wanted to avoid on the day he had heard Virginia singing when she was lost on the prairie one cold day.

Virginia paused in this semblance of shade to let Juno drink. She pushed back her sunbonnet and sat waiting. Her brown face grew radiant as she thought of the good news she was bearing to the waiting home-makers of the Grass River Valley. A song came to her lips, and as she sang a soft little measure she remembered how somewhere down a tributary to this very creek she had sung for help in pleading tones one cold hopeless day three years before. So intent was she on the triumph of the hour she did not even look up the willow-shadowed creek trail.

Dr. Horace Carey, coming in from a distant claim, had dropped into this trail for the bits of shade here and there and was letting his pony take its way leisurely along the side of the creek bed. There were only a few shallow pools now where the fall rains would soon put a running stream, and as the doctor’s way lay along the moist places the pony’s feet fell noiselessly on the soft ground. As he rounded a bend in the stream he caught sight of Virginia, her face outlined against the background of willow sprays, making a picture worth a journey to see, it was such a hopeful, happy face at that moment. Dr. Carey involuntarily checked his pony at the sight. His own countenance was too pale for a Kansas plainsman, and he sat so still that the low strain of Virginia’s song reached his ears.

Presently Juno lifted her head and Virginia rode away out on the Sunflower Trail, bordered now only by dead pest-ridden stalks. Suddenly lifting her eyes she saw far across a stretch of burned prairie a landscape of exquisite beauty. In a foreground lay a little lake surrounded by grassy banks and behind it, on a slight elevation, stood a mansion house of the old Colonial style with white pillared portico, and green vines and forest trees casting cool shade. Beyond it, wrapped in mist, rose a mountain height with a road winding picturesquely in and out along its side. Virginia caught her breath as a great sob rose in her throat. This was all so like the old Thaine mansion house of her childhood years.

“It’s only the mirage,” she said aloud. “But it was so like – what?” She held Juno back as she looked afar at the receding painting of the plains. “It’s like the house we’ll have some day on that slope beyond the Sunflower Inn. The mountains are misty. They are only the mountains of memory. But the home and the woods and the water – all may be real.”

Then she thought of Asher and of the dull prairie everywhere.

“I wonder if he would want to go back if he could see this as I see it,” she questioned. “But I know he has seen it daily. I can tell by that look in his gray eyes.”

It was long after moonrise when Asher Aydelot, watching by the corral, heard the sound of hoof-beats and saw the faint outline of a horse and rider swinging in from the northward as once before he had watched the same horse and rider swinging over the same trail before the cool north wind that beat back the September prairie fire.

“I have supper all ready. See what grew just for you!” Asher said as he and his wife entered the house.

A bunch of forlorn little sunflowers in a brown pitcher graced the table. They could scarcely be called flowers, but to Virginia, who had hardly seen a blossom through the days of drouth, the joy they brought was keener than the joy that the roses and orchids gave in the days of a later prosperity.

“I found them in the draw where the wild plums grow,” Asher said. “How they ever escaped the hoppers is a miracle.”

“We will christen our claim ’The Sunflower Ranch’ tonight, and these are our decorations for the ceremony. It is all we have now. But it is ours,” Virginia declared.

And then she told the story of the bank failure at Cloverdale.

“The last bridge is burned surely,” Asher commented as he looked across the table at Virginia. “This is the only property we have except youth and health and hope – and – each other.”

“And the old Aydelot heritage to stand for principle, and your mother’s belief in the West and in you, and the Thaine stubbornness about giving up what they want to keep,” Virginia declared.

“As our days so shall our strength be,” Asher added, as he saw his wife’s face bright with hope and determination, and remembered the sweet face of his mother as it had looked that night on the veranda of the old farmhouse by the National pike road.

For a long time down by the willows thinly shadowing Wolf Creek a white-faced man sat looking out toward the west, where a horse and rider had vanished into the mellow tones of distance.

CHAPTER VIII

Anchored Hearthstones

Dear Mother of Christ, who motherhood blessed,All life in thy Son is complete.The length of a day, the century’s taleOf years do His purpose repeat.As wide as the world a sympathy comesTo him who has kissed his own son,A tenderness deep as the depths of the sea,To motherhood mourning is won.No life is for naught. It was heaven’s own wayThat the baby who came should stay only a day.

Living by faith, which is the substance of things hoped for, is good for the spirit but reducing to the flesh. Yet it was much by faith that the frontier settlers lived through the winter after the grasshopper raid. Jim Shirley often declared in that time between crops that he could make three meals a day on Pryor Gaines’ smile. And Todd Stewart asserted that when the meat was all gone from their larder his family lived one whole week on John Jacobs’ belief in the future of their settlement. For the hardship of that winter was heavy. All the more heavy because the settlers were not stupid pauper-bred folk but young men and women of intelligence and culture, whose early lives had known luxuries as well as comforts. But the saving sense of humor, the saving power of belief in themselves, and the saving grace of brotherly love carried them through.

The winter was mercifully mild and the short grass of the prairies was nourishing to the stock that must otherwise have perished. Late in February a rainfall began that lasted for days and Grass River, rising to its opportunity, drowned all the fords, so that the neighbors on widely separated claims were cut off from each other. No telephones relieved the loneliness of the country dwellers in those days, and each household had to rely on its own resources for all its needs. March came raging in like a lion. All the rain turned to snow and the wind to a polar blast as the one furious blizzard of that season fell upon the plains and for many hours threshed the snow-covered land.

On the night before the coming of the blizzard the light did not go out in the Aydelot cabin. And while the wind and rain without raved at door and window, a faint little cry within told that a new life had come to the world, a baby girl born in the midst of the storm. Morning brought no check to the furious elements. And Asher, who had fought in the front line at Antietam, had forced his way through a storm of Indian arrows out of a death-trap in the foothills of the Rockies, had ministered to men on the plains dying of the Asiatic plague, and had bound up the wounds of men who returned to the battle again, found a new form of heroism that morning in his own little cabin – the heroism of motherhood.

“You must go for help, Asher,” Virginia said, smiling bravely. “Leave the baby beside me here. We’ll wait till you come back. Little Sweetheart, you are welcome, if you did come with the storm, a little before you were expected.” The young mother looked fondly at the tiny face beside her.

“I can’t leave you alone, Virgie,” Asher insisted.

“But you must.” Virginia’s voice was full of courage. “You can go as far as Pryor Gaines’ and send him on for you. Little daughter and I will be all right till you come back.”

So Asher left her.

Pryor Gaines was waterbound across Grass River. Of the three women living east of the stream one was sick abed, one was kept at home with a sick husband, and the third had gone with her husband to Wykerton for supplies and was stormstaid somewhere along the Sunflower Trail.

“I must go for Jim. Any neighborhood is blessed that has a few good-hearted unmarried folks in it,” Asher thought as he braced himself against the driving rain and hurried away.

When he reached home again the fire was low, the house was very quiet, and Virginia’s face was white against her pillow.

“Our little daughter is asleep,” she said, and turning away she seemed not to hear her husband’s voice assuring her that Jim would bring the doctor as soon as possible.

The blizzard was just beginning in the early evening when Jim Shirley fairly blew down the trail from the north. He slipped into the kitchen and passed quietly to the next room. Asher was bending over his wife, who lay in a delirium.

Jim Shirley had one of those sympathetic natures that read the joys and sorrows of their friends without words. One look at Asher told him what had been.

“The doctor was away up Wolf Creek, but I left word with his colored man for him to come at once, and he’ll do it,” Jim assured Asher as he stood for a moment beside the bed. “I didn’t wait because you need me.”

Asher lifted his head and looked at Jim. As man to man they knew as never before the strength of their lifetime friendship.

“I need you. She needs the doctor. The baby – ”

“Doesn’t need any of us,” Jim said softly. “I’ll do what I can.”

It is no strange, unreal story of the wilderness day, this fluttering in and out of a little life, where no rosewood grew for coffins nor florists made broken columns of white lilies and immortelles.

But no mother’s hands could have been more gentle than the gentle hands of Jim Shirley as he prepared the little form for burial.

Meantime the wind was at its wildest, and the plains blizzard swirled in blinding bitterness along the prairie. The hours of the night dragged by slowly to the two men hoping for the doctor’s coming, yet fearing that hope was impossible in the face of such a night.

“Carey has the keenest sense of direction I ever knew in a human being,” Jim assured Asher. “I know he will not fail us.”

Yet the morning came and the doctor came not. The day differed from the night only in the visible fierceness of the storm. The wind swept howling in long angry shrieks from the northwest. The snow seemed one dizzy, maddening whirlpool of white flakes hanging forever above the earth.

Inside the cabin Virginia’s delirium was turning to a frenzy. And Asher and Jim forgot that somewhere in the world that day there was warmth and sunlight, health and happiness, flowers, and the song of birds, and babies cooing on their mothers’ knees. And the hours of the day dragged on to evening.

Meanwhile, Dr. Carey had come into Wykerton belated by the rains.

“The wind is changing. There’ll be a snowstorm before morning, Bo Peep,” he said wearily as the young colored man assisted him into warm, dry clothes. “It’s glorious to sit by a fire on a night like this. I didn’t know how tired I was till now.”

“Yes, suh, I’se glad you all is home for the night, suh. I sho’ is. I got mighty little use for this yuh country. I’se sorry now I eveh done taken my leave of ol’ Virginny.” Bo Peep’s white teeth glistened as he laughed.

“Any calls while I was gone?” Dr. Carey asked.

Bo Peep pretended not to hear as he busied himself over his employer’s wraps, until Carey repeated the question.

“No, suh! no, suh! none that kaint wait till mawhnin’, suh,” Bo Peep assured him, adding to himself, “Tiahd as he is, he’s not gwine way out to Grass Riveh this blessed night, not if I loses my job of bein’ custodian of this huh ’stablishment. Not long’s my name’s Bone-ah-gees Peepehville, no, suh!”

Dr. Carey settled down for the evening with some inexplicable misgiving he could not overcome.

“I didn’t sleep well last night, Bo Peep,” he said when he rose late the next morning. “I reckon we doctors get so used to being called out on especially bad nights we can’t rest decently in our beds.”

“I didn’t sleep well, nutheh,” Bo Peep replied. “I kep thinkin’ bout that man come heah foh you yestedy. I jes wa’n’t gwine to le’ yuh go out again las’ night.”

“What did he want?” the doctor asked, secretly appreciative of Bo Peep’s goodness of heart as he saw the street full of whirling snow.

“He done said hit wah a maturity case.”

Bo Peep tried to speak carelessly. In truth, his conscience had not left him in peace a moment.

“What do you mean? Who was it?” Horace Carey demanded.

“Don’t be mad, Doctah, please don’t. Hit wah cuz you all wah done woah out las’ night. Hit wah Misteh Shulley from Grass Riveh, suh. He said hit wah Misteh Asheh Aydelot’s wife – ”

“For the love of God!” Horace Carey cried hoarsely, springing up. “Do you know who Mrs. Aydelot is, Bo Peep?”

“No, suh; neveh see huh.”

“She was Virginia Thaine of the old Thaine family back at home.”

Bo Peep did not sit down. He fell in a heap at Dr. Carey’s feet, moaning grievously.

“Fo’ Gawd, I neveh thought o’ harm. I jus’ thought o’ you all, deed I did. Oh! Oh!”

“Help to get me off then,” Carey commanded, and Bo Peep flew to his tasks.

When the doctor was ready to start he found two horses waiting outside in the storm and Bo Peep, wrapped to the eyes, beside them.

“Why two?” he asked kindly, for Bo Peep’s face was so full of sorrow he could not help pitying the boy.

“Please, kaint I go with you all? I can cook betteh’n Miss Virginia eveh could, an’ I can be lots of help an’ you all’ll need help.”

“But it’s a stinger of a storm, Bo Peep,” the doctor insisted, anxious to be off.

“Neveh mind! Neveh mind! Lemme go. I won’t complain of no stom.” And the doctor let him go.

It was already dark at the Sunflower Ranch when the two, after hours of battling with wind and snow and bitter cold, reached the cabin door. Bo Peep, instead of giving up early or hanging a dead weight on Dr. Carey’s hands, as he had feared the boy might do, had been the more hopeful of the two in all the journey. The hardship was Bo Peep’s penance, and right merrily, after the nature of a merry-hearted race, he took his punishment.

Jim Shirley, putting wood on the kitchen fire, bent low as he heard the piteous moanings from the sick room.

“Oh, Lord, if you can work miracles work one now,” he pleaded below his breath. “Bring help out of this storm or give us sense to do the best for her. We need her so, dear Lord. We need her so.”

He lifted his eyes to see Horace Carey between himself and the bedroom door, slipping out of his snowy coat. And beside him stood Bo Peep, helping him to get ready for the sick room.

“I know Miss Virginia back in the Souf, suh. I done come to take keer of this kitchen depahtment. I know jus’ what she lak mos’ suh,” Bo Peep said to Jim, who had not moved nor spoken. “I’se Misteh Bone-ah-gees Peepehville, an’ I done live with Doctah Carey’s family all mah life, suh, ’cept a short time I spent in the Jacobs House at Carey’s Crossing. I’se his custodian now, suh, and I know a few things about the cookin’ depahtment, suh.”