Winning the Wilderness Part 22

"I was about ready to call time on myself one winter here when Carey brought me a letter. It was from Alice Leigh, my brother Tank's wife. Tank and I were related--by marriage. We had the same father, but not the same mother. My mother died the day I was born. n.o.body else is so helpless as a man with a one-day-old baby. My father was fairly forced into a second marriage by my step-mother, Betsy Tank. She was the housekeeper at the tavern after my mother's death. Her G.o.d was property and Tank is just like her. She married the old Shirley House. It looked big to her. Oh, well! I needn't repeat a common family history. I never had a mother, nor a wife, nor a sister, nor a brother. Even my father was early prejudiced in Tank's interest against mine, always. The one happy memory of my boyhood years was the loving interest of Asher Aydelot's mother, who made the old Aydelot farmhouse on the National road a welcome spot to me. For the Lord made me with a foolish longing for a home and all of these things--father, mother, sister, and brother."

"So you have been father and mother, brother and sister to this whole settlement," Pryor Gaines said.

"Which may be vastly satisfying to these relatives, but does not always fill the lack in one's own life," Horace Carey added, as a man who might know whereof he spoke.

"I won't bore you with details," Jim began again. "The letter I had from Alice Leigh, Tank's wife, a dozen or more years ago, asked me if I would take the guardianship of her children if they should need a guardian. I knew they would need one, if she were--taken from earth, as she had reason to fear then that she might be soon. I began to live with a new motive--a sense that I was needed, a purpose to be ready to help her children--the one service I could give to her. There's a long, cruel story back of her marriage to Tank--a story of deception, coercion, love of money, and all the elements of common cussedness--too common to make a good story. And, as generally happens, when Tank married the girl who didn't want him he treated her as he's always treated everybody else."

Jim clinched his fists hard and shut his teeth with a grip as he sat silent for a moment. Then drawing a deep breath, as if he were lifting a weight from his life, he said calmly:

"Mrs. Shirley died some time ago. Only one child survived her--a little girl six years old. The letter says--"The letter fluttered in Jim's trembling hands. "It says, 'My little Leigh is just six. She has been taught to love her uncle Jim.... Through the help of a friend here'--she doesn't give the name--'I have made you her guardian. I want her to go to your home. Her father will not take any responsibility, nor try to keep her. I know you will not fail me.'"

Jim folded the letter abruptly. "It is a dead woman's last wish. How can I make a home for a little girl? What shall I do?"

He looked at the two men for answer. The doctor lifted his hand to Pryor Gaines, but the preacher waited awhile before replying. Then he said thoughtfully:

"It is easy for us two to vote a duty on you, Shirley. I answer only because you ask, not because I would advise. From my angle of vision, this looks like your call to service. Your lonely fireside is waiting for a little child's presence--the child already taught to love you. I would say send for her at once."

"But how can I send?" Jim questioned. "How can I do a parent's part by her? I can help a neighbor in need. I can't bring up his children. I'm not fit for that kind of work. I've hung on here for more than a dozen years to be ready to help when the time came, and now the thing seems impossible."

"'As thy day, so shall thy strength be.' If you have prepared yourself to do anything, you can do it," Pryor Gaines a.s.sured him.

"Well, how can I send?" Jim asked again. "There's n.o.body there to bring her, and n.o.body here to go after her. It's an awfully long way from here to Ohio. A little six-year-old girl can't come alone. I couldn't go back myself. I may be a coward, but the Almighty made me as I am. I can't go back to Cloverdale and see only a grave--I can stay here and remember, and maybe do a kind of a man's part, but I can't go back." He bowed his head and sat very still.

"You are right, Shirley," Pryor Gaines spoke softly still. "Unless you were close to the life in its last days, don't hang any graves like dead weights of ineffectual sorrow about your neck. Look back to the best memories. Look up to the eternal joy no grave can withhold."

There was a sympathetic chord in Pryor Gaines' voice that spoke home to the heart, and so long as he lived in the Gra.s.s River valley, he gave the last service for everyone who left it for the larger life beyond it.

"I will go for you, Shirley," Horace Carey said. "You forget who brought you this letter. That it was sent to me for you, and that the time to give it to you was left until I was notified. This friend of your brother's wife is a friend of mine. Let me go."

"Horace Carey, since the night your Virginia regiment fed us poor starving fellows in the old war times, you've been true blue."

"Well, I wore the gray that night, and I'd probably do it again. I can't tell. It was worth wearing, if only for men to find out how much bigger manhood and brotherhood are than any issue of war to be satisfied only by shedding of innocent blood," Horace Carey replied, glad to lift the burden of thought from Shirley's mind.

"Could a sectional war ever have begun out here on these broad prairies, where men need each other so?" Pryor Gaines asked, following the doctor's lead.

"Something remarkably like it did make a stir out here once. Like it, only worse," Horace Carey answered with a smile. "But the little girl, what's her name? Leigh? We'll have her here for you. Your service is only beginning, but think of the comfort of such a service. I envy you, Jim."

"A little child shall lead them," Pryor Gaines added reverently.

Then they fell to talking of the coming of little Leigh Shirley. The hours of the day slipped by. The breeze came pouring over the prairie from the far southwest where the purple notches stood sentinel. The warm afternoon sunlight streamed in at the door. The while these childless men planned together for the welfare of one motherless, and worse than fatherless, little girl away in the Clover Creek Valley in Ohio, waiting for a home and guardianship and love under far Kansas skies.

CHAPTER X

THE COMING OF LOVE

I love the world with all its brave endeavor, I love its winds and floods, its suns and sands, But, oh, I love most deeply and forever The clinging touch of timid little hands.

The Ohio woods were gorgeous with the October coloring. The oak in regal purple stood outlined against the beech in cloth-of-gold, while green-flecked hickory and elm, and iridescent silver and scarlet ash, and flaming maple added to the kaleidoscope of splendor.

The old National pike road leading down to Cloverdale was still flanked by little rail-fenced fields that were bordered by deep woodlands. The old Aydelot farmhouse was as neat and white, with gardens and flower beds as well kept, as if only a day had pa.s.sed since the master and mistress thereof had gone out to their last earthly home in the Cloverdale graveyard.

Fifteen years had seen the frontier pushed westward with magic swiftness.

The Gra.s.s River Valley, once a wide reach of emptiness and solitude, where only one homestead stood a lone bulwark against the forces of the wilderness, now, after a decade and a half, beheld its prairie dotted with freeholds, where the foundations of homes were laid.

Fifteen years marked little appreciable change in the heritage given up by Asher Aydelot out of his love for a girl and his dream of a larger opportunity in the new West. For fifteen springtimes the old-fashioned sweet pinks had blossomed on the two mounds where his last service had been given to his native estate. Hardly a tree had been cut in the Aydelot woods. The marshes in the lower ground had not been drained. The only change in the landscape was the high grade of the railroad that cut a triangle from the northwest corner of the farm in its haste to reach Cloverdale and be done with it. The census of 1880, however, showed an increase in ten years of seventy-five citizens in Clover County, and the community felt satisfied with itself.

The afternoon train on the Cloverdale branch was late getting into town, but the station parasites were rewarded for their patience by the sight of a stranger following the usual two or three pa.s.sengers who alighted.

Strangers were not so common in Cloverdale that anyone's face would be forgotten under ten years of time.

"That's that same feller that come here ten year or mebby twelve year ago.

I'd know him in Guinea," one of the oldest station parasites declared.

"That's him, sure as shootin'," his comrade-in-laziness agreed. "A doctor, don't you ricolleck? Name's Corrie, no, Craney, no, that's not it neither--A-ah!" trying hard to think a little.

"Carey. Don't you remember?" the first speaker broke in, "Doc Carey. They say he doctored Miss Jane in Philadelphia, an' got in good with her, more'n a dozen years ago."

"Well," drawled the second watcher of affairs, "if he thinks he can get anything out'n o' her by hangin' round Cloverdale, he's barkin' up the wrong saplin'. Miss Jane, she's close, an' too set in her ways now. She must be nigh forty."

"That's right. But, I'll bet he's goin' there now. Let's see."

The two moved to the end of the station, from which strategic point both the main street, the National pike road, of course, and the new street running "cat-i-cornered" from the station to the creek bridge could be commanded.

"Darned fool! is what he is! hikin' straight as a plumbline fur the crick.

If he was worth it, I'd foller him."

"Oh, the ornery pup will be back all right. Lazy fellers waitin' to marry rich old maids ain't worth follerin'. Darn 'em! Slick skeezicks, tryin' to git rich jes' doin' nothin'."

So the two citizens agreed while they consigned a perfect stranger to a mild purgatory. His brisk wholesomeness offended them, and the narrowness of their own daily lives bred prejudice as the marshes breed mosquitoes.

Dr. Carey walked away with springing step. He was glad to be at his journey's end; glad to be off the slow little train, and glad to see again the October woods of the Alleghany foothills. To the eastern-bred man, nothing in the grandeur of the prairie landscape can quite meet the craving for the autumn beauty of the eastern forests. The slanting rays of the late afternoon sun fell athwart the radiant foliage of the woods as Dr. Carey's way led him between the two lines of flaming glory. When he had cleared the creek valley, his pace slackened. Something of the old boyhood joy of living, something of the sorrowful-sweet memory, the tender grace of a day that is dead, but will never be forgotten, came with the pensive autumn mood of Nature to make the day sweet to the pensive mind.

Jane Aydelot sat on the veranda of the Aydelot home, looking eagerly toward Cloverdale, when she discovered Dr. Carey coming leisurely up the road. She was nearly forty years old, as the railroad station loafers had declared, but there was nothing about her to indicate the "old maid, set in her ways." She might have pa.s.sed for Asher's sister, for she had a certain erect bearing and strong resemblance of feature. All single women were called old maids at twenty-five in those days. Else this fair-faced woman, with clear gray eyes and pink cheeks, and scarce a hint of white in her abundant brown hair, would not have been considered in the then ridiculed cla.s.s. There was a mixture of resoluteness and of timidity in the expression of her face betokening a character at once determined of will but shrinking in action. And withal, she was daintily neat and well kept, like her neat and well-kept farm and home.

As Dr. Carey pa.s.sed up the flower-bordered walk, she arose to greet him.

If there was a look of glad expectancy in her eyes, the doctor did not notice it, for the whole setting of the scene was peacefully lovely, and the fresh-cheeked, white-handed woman was a joy to see. Some quick remembrance of the brown-handed claimholders' wives crossed his mind at that instant, and like a cruel stab to his memory came unbidden the picture of Virginia Thaine in her dainty girlishness in the old mansion house of the years now dead. Was he to blame that the contrast between Asher Aydelot's wife, now of Kansas, and Jane Aydelot of Ohio should throw the favor toward the latter, that he should forget for the moment what the women of the frontier must sacrifice in the winning of the wilderness?

"I am glad to see you again, Doctor," Jane Aydelot said in cordial greeting.

"This is a very great pleasure to me, I a.s.sure you, Miss Aydelot," Horace Carey replied, grasping her hand.

Inside the house everything was as well appointed as the outside suggested. As the doctor was making himself more presentable after his long journey, he realized that the pretty, old-fashioned bedroom had evidently been a boy's room once, Asher Aydelot's room. And with a woman's loving sentiment, neither Asher's mother nor the present owner had changed it at all. The petals of a pink rose of the wallpaper by the old-styled dresser were written over in a boyish hand and the doctor read the names of "Jim and Alice," and "Asher and Nell."

"Old sweethearts of 'the Kerry Dancing' days," he thought to himself.