Winning the Wilderness Part 12

"You don't seem very joyous, however," the doctor responded.

"Joy don't belong to me. We parted company some years ago. But life is mine."

"And duty?"

"Yes, and duty. Say, Doctor, if you'd ever cared all there was in you to care for one woman, and then had to give her up, you'd know how I feel.

And if, then, a sort of service opened up before you, you'd know how I welcome this."

Jim's face, white from his illness, was wonderfully handsome now, and he looked at his friend with that eager longing for sympathy men of his mould need deeply. Horace Carey stood up beside the bed and, looking down with a face where intense feeling and self-control were manifest, said in a low voice:

"I have cared. I have had to give up, and I know what service means."

CHAPTER VI

WHEN THE GRa.s.sHOPPER WAS A BURDEN

Although the figtree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines, the labor of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls:

Yet I will rejoice in the Lord.

--HABAKKUK.

While Jim Shirley was getting back to health, he and his physician had many long talks regarding the West and its future; its products and its people. There was only one topic in which Horace Carey was but intermittently interested, namely, Jim's neighbors--the Aydelots. At least, it seemed so to Jim, who had loved Asher from boyhood, and had taken Virginia on sight and paid homage to her for all the years that followed. Jim accepted the doctor's manner at first as a mere personal trait, but, having nothing to do except to lie and think, he grew curiously annoyed over it.

"I wish you'd tell me what ails you?" he blurted out one evening, as the two sat together in the twilight.

"About what?" the doctor inquired. "If I knew, I might even risk my own medicine to get over it."

"Don't joke, Horace Carey, not with a frail invalid. I've tried all day to talk to you about my neighbors and you turn the subject away as if it was of no consequence, and now, tonight, you settle down and say, 'Tell me about the Aydelots.' Why do you want to hear in the dark what you won't listen to in the daylight?"

"Oh, you are a sick man, Jim, or you wouldn't be so silly," the doctor replied, "but to please you, I'll tell you the truth. I'm homesick."

"Yes?"

"And this Mrs. Aydelot was a Virginia woman."

"Yes?"

"Well, I'm a true son of Virginia, and I thought it might make me happy to hear about somebody from--"

"You are a magnificent liar," Jim broke in.

"Evidently it's better to have you talk about your neighbors than your medical advisor tonight," Carey retorted.

"Oh, I won't say a word more," Jim declared.

"More Ananias magnificence! Do you suppose the Aydelots will be down before we go away?" the doctor asked.

"We?"

"Yes, I am going to take you with me, or give you a quieting powder when I leave here. On your own declaration you'd do anything to get back to strength and work. Now, the only way to get well, with or without a physician, is to get well. And you'll never do that by using up a little more strength every day than you store up the night before. Men haven't sense enough to be invalids. Nothing else is such a menace to human life as the will of the man who owns that life. You'll obey my will for a month or two."

"You are a--doctor, Carey. No, the Aydelots won't be down before we go away, because Virginia has been sick ever since that awful trip to Carey's Crossing," Jim said sadly.

"Why haven't you told me?" Carey's voice was hardly audible.

"Because Asher just told me today, and because you took no interest in them."

"Sickness is a doctor's interest, always," Carey replied in a stern voice.

And then the two sat in silence while the night shadows darkened the little cabin.

As soon as Shirley was able to ride, he went up to Carey's Crossing for a two months' stay, and the Aydelots were left far away from the edge of civilization. A heavy snowfall buried all the trails and the world, the happy, busy world, forgot these two holding their claim on the grim wilderness frontier.

In after years they often talked of the old pioneer days, but of this one winter they spoke but rarely.

"We lived alone with each other and G.o.d," Virginia said once. "He walked beside us on the prairie and made our little sod house His sanctuary.

Those were consecrated days to Asher and me, like the stormy days of our first love in the old war times, and the first hours of our baby's life.

We were young and full of hope and belief in the future, and we loved each other. But we had need to have shoes of iron and bra.s.s, as Moses promised Asher of old. It was a hard, hard way, but it was His way. I am glad we walked through it all. It made the soil of Kansas sacred to us two forevermore."

One March day spring came up the Gra.s.s River Valley with a glory all its own, and sky and headland and low level prairie were baptized with a new life. A month later a half-dozen prairie schooners moved out on the old sunflower-bordered trail. Then following down the Gra.s.s River trail, the schooner folk saw that the land, which Darley Champers had denounced, was very good. And for Asher and Virginia Aydelot, the days of lonely solitude were ended.

But the prairie had no gifts to bestow. It yielded slowly to its possessors only after they had paid out time and energy and hope and undying faith in its possibilities. The little sum of money per acre turned over to the Government represented the very least of the cost.

There were no forests to lay waste here, nor marshes to be drained.

Instead, forests must be grown and waters conserved. What Francis Aydelot with the Clover Valley community had struggled to overcome on the Ohio frontier, his son, Asher, with other settlers now strove to develop in Kansas. But these were young men, many of them graduates, either in the North or the South, from a four years' course in the University of the Civil War. No hardship of the plains could be worse than the things they had already endured. These men who held the plow handles were State builders and they knew it. Into the State must be builded schools and churches, roads and bridges, growing timber and perpetual water reservoirs; while fields of grain and orchard fruitage, and the product of flock and herd must be multiplied as the sinews of life and larger opportunity. For all these things the Kansas plains offered to Asher Aydelot and his little company of neighbors only land below, crossed by a gra.s.s-choked river, and sky overhead, crossed but rarely by blessed rain-dropping clouds. And yet the less the wilderness voluntarily gave up, the more these farmer folk were determined to win from it. Truly, they had need not only for large endurance in the present, but for large vision of a future victory, and they had both.

The weight of pioneer hardship, however, fell heaviest on the women of whom Virginia Aydelot was a type. Into the crucible out of which a state is moulded, she cast her youth and strength and beauty; her love of luxury, her need for common comforts, her joy in the cultured appointments of society. She had a genius for music, trained in the best schools of the East. And sometimes in the lonely days, she marked her only table with a bit of charcoal to the likeness of a keyboard. Then she set her music against her clean dishpan and dumbly fingered the melodies she had loved, hoping her hands might not lose all their cunning in these years of home-making on the plains.

The spring of the memorable year of 1874 opened auspiciously. The peach trees on the Aydelot and Shirley claims bloomed for the first time; more sod had been turned for wheat and corn; gardens and truck patches were planted; cattle were grazing beyond the sand dunes across the river, while the young cottonwood and catalpa groves, less than three feet high it is true, began to make great splotches of darker green on the prairie, promising cool forest shade in coming years. Mail went west on the main trail three times a week. The world was coming nearer to the Gra.s.s River settlement which, in spite of his doleful view once, Darley Champers was helping to fill up to the profit of the real estate business.

Carey's Crossing, having given up all hope of becoming a county seat, had faded from the face of the earth. The new county seat of Wolf County was confidently expected to be pitched at Wykerton, up in the Big Wolf Creek settlement, where one Hans Wyker, former saloon-keeper of Carey's Crossing, was building up a brewery for the downfall of the community. Dr.

Carey was taking an extended medical course in the East, whither Bo Peep had followed him. Darley Champers was hovering like a hawk between Wykerton and the Gra.s.s River settlement. Todd Stewart had taken a claim, while John Jacobs, temporarily in the East, was busy planting the seeds for a new town which no Wyker brewery should despoil.

All lovely was this springtime of 1874. Midsummer had another story to tell. A story of a wrathful sun in a rainless sky above a parched land, swept for days together by the searing south winds. In all the prairie there was no spot of vivid green, no oasis in the desert of tawny gra.s.ses and stunted brown cornstalks, and bare, hot stubble wherefrom even the poor crop of straw had been chaffless and mean.

On a Sabbath morning in late July, the little Gra.s.s River schoolhouse was crowded, for Sabbath school was the event of the week. It did not take a mult.i.tude to crowd the sod-built temple of learning. Even with the infant cla.s.s out of doors in the shade, the cla.s.s inside filled the s.p.a.ce. The minister school-teacher, Pryor Gaines, called it the "old folks' cla.s.s,"

although there was not a person over thirty-five years of age in the whole settlement.

Asher Aydelot was the superintendent, and Virginia took care of the infant cla.s.s. Jim Shirley led the singing, and Pryor Gaines taught the "old folks." He was the same minister school-teacher who had sat at the table with Dr. Carey and Todd Stewart and John Jacobs on the day that Thomas Smith ate his first meal at the Jacobs House. With the pa.s.sing of Carey's Crossing, he had taken a homestead claim on Gra.s.s River.

This morning the lesson was short, and the children, finding the heat of the shade outside unbearable, were sitting on the earth floor beside their parents. n.o.body seemed ready to go home.

"Times are getting worse every day," one man observed. "No rain since the tenth of May, and the prettiest stand of wheat I ever saw, burned to a half-yield or less before cutting time. I'd counted on wheat for my living this year."