Winning the Wilderness Part 21

"And leave your papa and mamma?"

"They left their papas and mammas, too," Thaine philosophized.

The men laughed, although each felt a curious deep pain at the boy's words.

Thaine settled back, satisfied to be silent as he watched the wonderful prairie landscape about him.

"I am going down to Shirley's," Carey began, as if to change the subject.

"Strange fellow, Jim; I never knew another like him."

"I was just thinking of Shirley," Asher responded. "He is a royal neighbor and true friend, better to everybody else than he is to himself. His own crops suffer sometimes while he helps other folks lay theirs by. And yet his premises always look like he was expecting company. One cannot help wondering what purpose stays him in his work."

"There is the tragedy of it," Horace Carey declared. "I never knew a more affectionate man, yet he has lived a bachelor all these years."

"How long have you known him, Carey?" Asher asked.

"Since the night at Kelley's Ferry, back in the Civil War. Our regiment, the Fifty-fourth Virginia, was taken. We were worn out with fighting and marching, and we were nearly starved besides. The Third Ohio boys had been in the same fix once and our boys--"

"Yes, I was a Third Ohio boy. I know what you fellows did. You saved our lives," Asher broke in.

"Well, you paid us back at Kelley's Ferry. I first knew Jim Shirley that night, although he remembered me from the time we had your regiment at our mercy. He brought me bacon and hard tack and coffee. We have been friends ever since. How long have you known him?"

"I am going to war when I get big, before I ever go to the purple notches.

I know I am."

Thaine had been listening intently and now he broke in with face aglow and eyes full of eagerness.

"G.o.d forbid!" Carey said. "The lure of the drum beat might be hard for older men to resist even now."

"Your hand will fit a plow handle better than a gun-stock, Thaine," his father a.s.sured him, looking down at the boy's square, sun-browned hand with a dimple in each knuckle.

Thaine shut his lips tightly and said no more. But his father, who knew the heart of a boy, wondered what thoughts might lie back of that silence.

"I have known Jim all my life," Asher Aydelot took up the conversation where Thaine had interrupted it. "That is why I have wondered at the tenacity of his holding on out here. A man of his temperament is p.r.o.ne to let go quickly. Besides, Jim is far from being a strong man physically."

"When he was down with pneumonia in the early seventies he was ready to give up. Didn't want to get well and was bound not to do it," Dr. Carey said, "but somehow a letter I had brought him seemed to change him with one reading. 'I will do anything to get back to strength and work,' he declared, and he has worked ever since like a man who knew his business, even if his business judgment is sometimes faulty."

They rode awhile in silence, drinking in the delicious air of early autumn. Presently Dr. Carey said:

"Aydelot, I am taking a letter down to Jim this morning. It is in the same handwriting as the one I took when he had the pneumonia so severely. I learned a little something of Jim's affairs through friends when I was East studying some years ago."

He paused for a moment. Then, as if to change the subject, he continued:

"By the way, there was a bank failure at Cloverdale once that interested you. Did you ever investigate it?"

"There was nothing to investigate," Asher replied.

It did not occur to him to connect the query with Carey's knowledge of Shirley's affairs or with his studying in the East.

"You have relatives there?" Carey asked.

"Yes, a Jane Aydelot. Married, single, widowed, I can't tell. My father left his estate to her. I was in love with the West then, and madly in love with my wife. My father wasn't impressed with either one. But, you see, I was rash about little things like money matters. I had so much faith in myself and I couldn't give up a girl like Virginia Thaine.

Understand, I have no quarrel with Jane Aydelot. Her property is absolutely her own, not mine to crave and look forward to getting some day."

"I understand," Horace Carey said, looking out toward the purple notches now more clearly outlined against the sky. "How this country has changed since that cold day when Mrs. Aydelot came almost to the old Crossing after me. The sand dunes narrow and the river deepens a little every year.

The towns come and go on the prairies, but the homesteaders build better.

It is the farmer who really makes a new country habitable."

"That's what my mother said when I talked of coming West. But the real test will come with the second generation. If it is loyal we will have won. Here is the old Gra.s.s River trail that Jim and I followed many lonely days. The valley is slowly coming out of the wilderness," Asher replied, remembering his wife's words long before when she said: "The real story of the plains is the story of the second generation. The real romance out here will be Thaine Aydelot's romance."

They had reached the old trail that led to the Gra.s.s River settlement now. It was still a new country where few trees, save some lone cottonwoods, were as tall as a cabin, and nothing broke the view. But groves had rooted, low windbreaks cut the country at frequent intervals; many acres of sod had been turned by the plow, and many more were being shut in by fences where the open cattle range was preempted by freeholds.

One bit of woodland, however, was beginning to dignify the valley. The Aydelot grove spread over a hundred acres before the one-time sod Sunflower Inn. The new home was on the swell now as Virginia had seen the Colonial mansion of the mirage on the day she went seeking aid for the gra.s.shopper-beset neighborhood. But this was just a little cottage waiting, like the grove, for years of time in which to grow a mansion shaded with tall trees, with the lake and the woodland before it, and the open prairie beyond.

Down at Jim Shirley's ranch the changes were many, for Jim had an artist's eye. And the energy other settlers spent on the needs of wives and children Jim spent on making his little dwelling attractive. He had brought clover seed from Ohio, and had carefully sowed a fire guard around his sod shack. Year by year the clover business increased; fire guard grew to clover-lot, and clover-lot to little meadow. Then the little meadow expanded along Gra.s.s River to a small cattle range. Over the door of his four-roomed cottage he put the name "Cloverdale," as he had put it over his sod cabin years before. And the Cloverdale Ranch, like the Sunflower Ranch farther up the river, became a landmark on the trail.

Pryor Gaines, still the teacher-preacher of the Gra.s.s River settlement, had come to the Cloverdale Ranch on an errand, and he and Jim Shirley were chatting beside the well curb when Dr. Carey drove up.

"h.e.l.lo, Carey. How did you scent chicken pie so far? And a plum pudding all brown and ready?" Shirley called hospitably.

"It's my business to find what produces sickness as well as to provide cures," Carey responded as he stepped from his buggy to tie his horses.

"Take him in the house, Pryor, while I stable his crowbaits," Jim said, patting one of the doctor's well groomed horses the while.

"I hope you will stay, too," Horace Carey said to Pryor Gaines. "I have some important news for Shirley, and you and he are fast friends."

"The bachelor twins of Gra.s.s River," Pryor Gaines declared. "Jim hasn't any lungs and I haven't any heart, so we manage to keep a half a household apiece, and added together make one fairly reputable citizen. I'll stay if Jim wishes me to, of course."

"The two most useful men in the community," Carey declared. "Jim has been father and mother, big brother, and hired girl for half the settlement, while you, you marry and train up and bury. No neighborhood is complete without a couple of well-meaning old bachelors."

"How about a bachelor M. D.?" Pryor Gaines asked. "I've not been able to get in my work on you yet."

"Purely a necessary evil, the M. D. business," Carey insisted. "Here's Jim now. We wait the chicken and plum pudding, Host Shirley."

Jim's skill as a cook had not decreased since the day when he prepared Asher Aydelot's wedding supper, and the three men who sat together at that day's meal took large enjoyment in this quiet hour together.

"I have a letter for you, Shirley," the doctor said at last. "It was sent to me some months ago with the request that I give it to you when I had word to do so. I have had word. Here it is."

"I think I'll be going now." Pryor Gaines rose with the words.

"Don't go," Jim insisted. "I want you here."

So Gaines sat down. Shirley, who was quick in intuitive power, knew instinctively what awaited him. He opened the letter and read it while the two friends busied themselves with a consideration of Jim's bookcase, reading-table, and toolchest combined, all made out of one goods box with sundry tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs.

Jim said nothing when he had finished, grateful that no painful silence on the part of the other two men forced him to words until he was ready to speak.

"Listen to me," he said at length. "I need your help now. When I came West life didn't seem worth living at first, but I had it on my hands and couldn't throw it away. I tried to take an interest in Asher Aydelot's home. But it is a second-rate kind of pleasure to sit by your own lonely fireside and enjoy the thought of the comfort another man has in his home with the wife of his choice."

A shadow fell on Dr. Carey's face as he sat looking through the open window at the stretch of green clover down the valley.