Winning the Wilderness Part 15

THE LAST BRIDGE BURNED

...Scores of better men had died.

I could reach the township living, but--He knew what terrors tore me-- But I didn't! But I didn't! I went down the other side.

--The Explorer.

Pryor Gaines never preached a better sermon than the one that followed the singing of that old Portuguese hymn; and there were no doleful faces in that little company when the service closed. The men stopped long enough to discuss the best crops to put in for the fall, and how and where they might get seeds for the same; to consider ways for destroying the eggs left by the gra.s.shoppers in the honey-combed ground, and to trade help in the wheat-breaking to begin the next day. The women lingered to plan a picnic dinner for the coming Sat.u.r.day. Jim Shirley hummed an old love tune as he helped Pryor Gaines to close the windows and door for the week. Only little Todd Stewart, with sober face, scratched thoughtfully at the hard earth with his hard little toes.

"Can't there be no more little children where there's gra.s.shoppers and Darley Champerses?" he asked his mother.

"Yes, yes, Todd. You won't be lonesome long," his mother a.s.sured him.

"Some time when you are a man you can say, 'I was the only little boy the gra.s.shoppers and Darley Champers didn't get.' You stout little Trojan!"

And then Todd, too, caught the spirit of the day and went singing blithely away. Across the bare hollow of Gra.s.s River, and beyond the sand dunes into the brown wastes that had been gra.s.sy prairies, his young voice came trailing back still singing, as he rode behind his father, following the long hot trail toward their home. And the other settlers went their ways, each with courage renewed, for the new week's work.

Yet, they were lonesomely few in number, and the prairies were vast; they were poverty-stricken, with little means by which to sustain life through the coming season; on every hand the desolate plains lay robbed of every green growth, and to this land they were nailed hand and foot as to a cross of crucifixion. But they were young. They believed in the West and in themselves. Their faces were set toward the future. They had voted themselves into holding on, and, except for the Aydelots, no one family had more resource than another. The Aydelots could leave the West if they chose. But they did not choose. So together they laughed at hardship; they made the most of their meager possessions; they helped each other as one family--and they trusted to Providence for the future. And Providence, albeit she shows a seamy side to poverty, still loves the man who laughs at hard luck. The seasons following were not unkind. The late summer rains, the long autumn, and the mild winter were blessings. But withal, there were days on days of real hunger. Stock died for lack of encouragement to live without food. And the grim while of waiting for seed time and signs of prosperity was lived through with that old Anglo-Saxon tenacity that has led the English speaking peoples to fight and colonize to the ends of the earth.

"Virginia," Asher said one noontime, as the two sat at their spare meal, "the folks are coming up tonight to hold a council. I saw Bennington this morning and he had heard from the men over Todd Stewart's way. Dust the piano, polish up the chandelier, and decorate with--smiles," he added, as he saw the shadow on his wife's face.

"I'll have the maid put the reception room in order," Virginia replied, with an attempt at merriment.

Then through the long afternoon she fought to a finish with the yearning for the things she missed daily. At supper time, however, she was the same cheery woman who had laughed at loss and lack so often that she wondered sometimes if abundance might not really make her sad.

In the evening the men sat on the ground about the door of the Sunflower Inn. Their wives had not come with them. One woman was sick at home; little Todd Stewart was at the beginning of a fever, and the other women were taking turns at nursing. Virginia's turn had been the night before.

She was weary now and she sat in the doorway listening to the men, and remembering how on just such a moonlit September night she and Asher had sat together under the Sign of the Sunflower and planned a future of wealth and comfort.

"The case is desperate," Cyrus Bennington was saying. "Sickness and starvation and the horses failing every day and the need for all the plowing and getting winter fuel. Something must be done."

Others agreed, citing additional needs no less pressing.

"There are supplies and money coming from the East right now," Jim Shirley declared. "A hunting party crossed south two days ago. I was down on lower Plum Creek searching for firewood, and I met them. They said we might get help from Wykerton if we went up right away."

"Well, you are Mr. Swift, Jim," one of the men exclaimed. "If you knew it two days ago, why in thunder didn't you report. We'd have made a wooden horse gallop to Wykerton before night."

"How'd I round up the neighborhood? I didn't get home till nearly noon today. And, besides, they said Darley Champers has the distributing of the supplies and money, and he's putting it where it will do the most good, not giving to everybody alike, he says."

A sudden blankness fell upon each face, as each recalled the last words of Champers when he left them on the Sabbath day in August.

"Well, you said a wooden horse could have galloped up to Wykerton." Jim Shirley tried to speak cheerfully. "A horse of iron might, too, but who's got a critter in Gra.s.s River Valley right now that could make a trip like that? Mine couldn't. It took me two days and a half to haul up a load of stuff, mostly sunflower stalks, that I gathered down south."

"Aydelot's black mare could do it if anything could," Pryor Gaines declared, trying to speak cheerfully, yet he was the least able to meet the hardships of that season.

"Yes, maybe," Shirley commented. "She's a thoroughbred, and they finally win, you know. But knowing what you do, who of you wants to face Darley Champers?"

Again a hopeless despair filled the hearts of the little company. Todd Stewart clinched his hands together. The husband of the sick woman set his jaws like iron. Pryor Gaines turned his face away and offered no further word. Asher Aydelot sat looking out across the prairie, touched to silvery beauty by the pitying moonlight, and Jim Shirley bowed his head and said nothing.

"I will go to Wykerton," Virginia Aydelot's soft voice broke the silence.

"I'll take Juno and go tomorrow morning. If Darley Champers refuses me, he would do the same to you."

"Oh, Mrs. Aydelot, will you go? Can you try it? Do you think you could do it?" The questions came from the eager settlers.

"We'll try it, Juno and I," Virginia replied.

"Thoroughbreds, both of 'em," Jim Shirley murmured under his breath, and Pryor Gaines' face expressed the things he could not say.

"I believe that is the best thing to do," Asher Aydelot declared.

Then the settlers said good night, and sought their homes.

As Virginia Aydelot rode away in the early morning, the cool breeze came surging to her out of the west. The plains were more barren than she had ever seen them before, but the sky above them had lost nothing of its beauty. No color had faded from the eastern horizon line, no magnificence had slipped away from the sunset.

"'The heavens declare the glory of G.o.d,'" Virginia said to herself. "Has He forgotten the earth which is His also?"

She turned at the little swell to the northward to wave good-by to Asher, standing with arms folded beside a corral post, looking after her.

"Is he thinking of Cloverdale and the big cool farmhouse and the well-kept farm, and the many people coming and going along that old National pike road? He gave it all up for me--all his inheritance for me and this."

She looked back once more at the long slope of colorless land and the solitary figure watching her in the midst of it all.

"I'll tell him tonight I'm ready to go back East. We can go to Ohio, and Asher can live where his boyhood days were spent. My Virginia can never be as it was in my childhood, but Asher can have some of the pleasures of his eastern home." She pushed back the sunbonnet from her face, and let the west breeze sweep across it.

"I used to wear a veil and was somewhat acquainted with cold cream, and my hands were really white and soft. They are hard and brown now. When I get home I'll put it straight to Asher about going back to civilization, even if there are only a few dollars waiting to take us there, and nothing waiting for us to do."

With a sigh, half of antic.i.p.ation and half of regret, she rode away toward the little town of Wykerton in the Big Wolf Creek settlement.

There were few differences between the new county seat and Carey's Crossing, except that there were a few more houses, and over by the creek bank the brewery, by which Hans Wyker proposed to save the West. There was, however, one difference between the vanished Carey's Crossing and this place, the difference between the community whose business leaders have ideals of citizenship, and the community wherein commerce is advanced by the degradation of its citizens. Wykerton had no Dr. Carey nor John Jacobs to control it. The loafers stared boldly at Virginia Aydelot as she rode up before the livery stable and slipped from her saddle. Not because a woman in a calico dress and sunbonnet, a tanned, brown-handed woman, was a novelty there, but because the license of the place was one of impudence and disrespect.

The saloon was on one side of the livery stable and the postoffice was on the other side. Darley Champers' office stood next to the postoffice, a dingy little shack with much show of maps and real estate information.

Behind the office was a large barren yard where one little lilac bush languished above the hard earth. The Wyker hotel and store were across the street.

Virginia had been intrusted with small sums for sundry purchases for the settlement, especially for the staple medicines and household needs--camphor and turpentine, quinine and certain cough syrups for the winter; castor oil, some old and tried ointment, and brand of painkiller; thread and needles and pins--especially pins--and b.u.t.tons for everybody's clothes. One settler had ridden back at midnight to ask for the purchase of a pair of shoes for his wife. It was a precious commission that Virginia Aydelot bore that day, although to the shopper in a Kansas city today, the sum of money would have seemed pitifully small.

In the postoffice, printed rulings and directions regarding the supplies were posted on the wall, and Virginia read them carefully. Then with many misgivings and a prayer for success, she crossed the street to Darley Champers' place of business.

In spite of her plain dress, Virginia Aydelot was every inch a lady, and Darley Champers, dull as he was in certain lines, felt the difference her presence made in the atmosphere of his office when she entered there.

"I understood, Mr. Champers, that you have charge here of the supplies sent into the state for the relief of those who suffered from the gra.s.shoppers," she said, when she was seated in the dingy little room.

"Yes, mom!" Champers replied.

"I am Mrs. Asher Aydelot, and I represent the Gra.s.s River settlement. I have come to ask for a share of this relief fund, and as I must start back as soon as possible after dinner, perhaps we can make all arrangements now."

She never knew how near her gentle manner and pleasant voice came to winning the day at once. Champers' first impulse was to grant her anything she asked for; his second was to refuse everything; his third, his ruling principle always, was to negotiate to his own advantage. He dropped his eyes and began to play for time.

"I don't know as I can help you at all, madam," he said, half sympathetically. "The supplies and money is about gone, except what's promised, and, well--you ought to have come sooner. I'd a been glad to help you, but I thought you Gra.s.s River folks had about everything you needed for the winter."

"Oh, Mr. Champers," Virginia cried, "you know that n.o.body could foretell the coming of the plague. We were as well off as hundreds of other settlers this dry summer before the gra.s.shoppers came."

"Yes, yes, madam, but the supplies is gone, about."