Winning the Wilderness Part 17

"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 bra.s.s," 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 Gra.s.s 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 Gra.s.s 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 gra.s.sy 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

ANCh.o.r.eD HEARTHSTONES

Dear Mother of Christ, who motherhood blessed, All life in thy Son is complete.

The length of a day, the century's tale Of years do His purpose repeat.

As wide as the world a sympathy comes To 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 way That 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 gra.s.shopper 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 a.s.serted 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 gra.s.s of the prairies was nourishing to the stock that must otherwise have perished. Late in February a rainfall began that lasted for days and Gra.s.s 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."