Winning the Wilderness Part 25

Settlers were filling up the valley rapidly, but they all wanted ranches, and ranches do not make close neighbors. Land-l.u.s.t sometimes overshadows the divine rights of children. And the lower part of the settlement was not yet equal to the support of a school of its own.

The two families still kept the custom of spending their Sabbaths together. And one Sabbath Thaine showed Leigh the books and slate and sponge and pencils he was to take to school the next week. Leigh, who had been pleased with all of them, turned to her guardian, saying gravely:

"Uncle Jim, can I go to school wif Thaine?"

"You must meet that question every day now, Jim," Asher said. "Why not answer it and be rid of it?"

"How can I answer it?" Jim queried.

"Virgie, help us with this educational problem of the State," Asher turned to his wife. "Women are especially resourceful in these things, Jim. I hope Kansas will fully recognize the fact some day."

"Who is Kansas?" Virginia asked with a smile.

"Oh, all of us men who depend so much on some woman's brain every day of our lives," Jim a.s.sured her. "Tell me, what to do for my little girl. Mrs.

Bennington and some of the other neighbors say I should send her East for her sake--"

"And for both of your sakes, Jim, I say, no," Virginia broke in. "The way must open for all of our children here. It always has for everything else, you know."

"Thaine can walk the two miles. He's made of iron, anyhow. But Leigh can't make the five miles 'up stream,'" Asher declared.

"Jim," Virginia Aydelot said gravely, "Pryor Gaines will be our teacher for many years, we hope, but he is hardly equal to tilling his ground now.

John Jacobs holds the mortgage on his claim still that he put there after the gra.s.shopper loan, which he could not pay. Life is an uphill pull for him, and he bears his burdens so cheerfully. I believe Mr. Jacobs would take the claim and pay him the equity. We all know how unlike a Shylock John Jacobs really is, even if he is getting rich fast. Now, Jim, why not take Pryor into your home and let him drive up to the school with Leigh and the other little folks down your way. We can pay him better wages and he will have a real home, not a lonely cabin by himself, and you will be fortunate in having such a man in your household."

"Just the thing, Virginia," Jim declared. "Why haven't we done it before?

He always says I'm his heart and he's my lungs. We might stack up to a one-man power. Old bachelors should be segregated, anyhow, out here. The West needs more families. And think what Pryor Gaines' cultivated mind will mean to a little artist soul like Leigh Shirley's. Glorious!"

"Well, Virgie, if you will also segregate John Jacobs and Dr. Carey, we'll settle the bachelors once for all. A quartette of royal good fellows, too, State-makers who really make. They ought to be in the legislature, but Carey and Pryor are democrats and Jim and Jacobs are republican. They balance too well for the interests of any party. Anyhow, if Pryor agrees, the school problem is fixed," Asher a.s.serted.

Pryor Gaines did agree, to the welfare of many children, who remember him still with that deep-seated affection of student for teacher unlike any other form of human devotion. But especially did this cultured man put into Leigh Shirley's life a refining artistic power that stood her well in the years to come.

CHAPTER XI

LIGHTS AND SHADOWS

They saw not the shadow that walked beside, They heard not the feet with silence shod.

--Whittier.

With successive seasons of good crops, combining with the time of the crest between two eras of financial depression, and with Eastern capital easy to reach, a mania of speculation known as "the boom" burst forth; a mania that swept men's minds as prairie fires sweep along the wide lengths of the plains, changing both the face of the land and the fortunes of the land owners, and marking an epoch in the story of the West. New counties were organized out of the still unoccupied frontier. Thousands of citizens poured into these counties. Scores of towns were chartered and hundreds of miles of railroad were constructed. Colleges and universities sprouted up from the virgin soil of the prairie. Loans on real estate were easy to secure. Land, especially in town lots, took on an enormously inflated valuation and the rapid investment in real estate and the rapid transference from buyer to seller was bewildering, while voting bonds for extensive and extravagant improvements in cities-to-be was not the least phase of this brief mania of the fortune-making, fortune-breaking "boom."

When Hans Wyker had seen his own town wane as Careyville waxed, he consigned the newer community, and all that it was, to all the purgatories ever organized and some yet to be created.

Wykerton was at a standstill now. The big brewery had become a flouring mill, but it was idle most of the time. The windows served as targets for the sons of the men who consumed its brewing product in other days, and the whole structure had a disconsolate, dismantled appearance.

There was neither a schoolhouse nor a church inside the corporation limits. The land along Big Wolf was not like the rich prairies west of it, and freeholds entered first with hopes in Wykerton's prosperity had proved disappointing, if not disastrous, to their owners.

The rough ground, mortgaged now, and by the decline of the town, decreased in value, began to fall into the hands of John Jacobs, who made no effort at settlement, but turned it to grazing purposes. His holdings joined the property foreclosed by Wyker when his town failed, but inhabited still by tenants too poor to leave it. The boundary line between Wyker and Jacobs was the same ugly little creek that Doctor Carey had turned his course to avoid on that winter day when he had seen Virginia Aydelot's distress signal and heard her singing a plaintive plea for help.

It was an ugly little stream, with much mire and some quicksand to be avoided; with deep earth-canyons and sliding avalanches of dirt on steep slopes, and now and then a stone outcrop jagged and difficult, not to say dangerous, to footways, and impossible to stock. It was called Little Wolf because it was narrower than the willow-fringed stream into which it emptied. But Big Wolf Creek could rarely boast of half the volume of water that the sluggish little tributary held. Big Wolf was shallow, with more shale and sand along its bed. Little Wolf was narrow and deceivingly deep in places.

One Spring day, John Jacobs and Asher Aydelot rode out to Jacobs' ranches together.

"You are improving your stock every year, Stewart tells me," Asher was saying. "I may try sheep myself next year."

"I am hoping to have only thoroughbreds some day. That's a good horse you ride," Jacobs replied.

"Yes, he has a strain of Kentucky blue-blood. My wife owned a thoroughbred when we came West. We keep the descent still. We've never been without a black horse in the stable since that time. Do we turn here?"

They were following the lower trail by the willows, when Jacobs turned abruptly to a rough roadway leading up a shadowy hollow.

"Yes. It's an ugly climb, but much shorter to the sheep range and the cattle are near."

"How much land have you here, Jacobs?" Asher asked.

"From Little Wolf to the corporation line of Wykerton. Five hundred acres, more or less; all fenced, too," Jacobs added. "This creek divides Wyker's ground from mine. All the rest is measured by links and chains. We agreed to metes and bounds for this because it averages the same, anyhow, and I'd like a stream between Wyker and myself in addition to a barbed wire fence.

It gives more s.p.a.ce, at least."

They had followed the rough way only a short distance when Asher, who was nearest the creek, halted. The bank was steep and several feet above the water.

"Does anybody else keep sheep around here?" he inquired.

"Not here," John Jacobs answered.

"Look over there. Isn't that a sheep?"

Asher pointed to a carca.s.s lying half out of the water on a pile of drift where the stream was narrow, but too deep for fording.

"Maybe some dog killed it and the carca.s.s got into the creek. My sheep can't get to the water because my pasture is fenced. That's on Wyker's side, anyhow. I won't risk fording to get over there. It's as dead right now as it will ever be," Jacobs a.s.serted.

Their trail grew narrower and more secluded, winding up a steep hill between high banks. Half way up, where the road made a sharp turn, a break in the side next to the creek opened a rough way down to the water. As they neared this, a woman coming down the hill caught sight of the two hors.e.m.e.n around the bend, and made a swift movement toward this opening in the bank, as if to clamber down from their sight. She was not quick enough, however, and when she found she had been seen, she waited by the roadside until the men had pa.s.sed on.

Asher, who was next to her, looked keenly at her as he bade her good morning, but John Jacobs merely lifted his hat without giving her more than a glance.

The woman stared at both, but made no response to their greetings. She was plainly dressed, with a black scarf tied over her tow-colored hair. She had a short club in one hand and a big battered tin can in the other, which she seemed anxious to conceal. When the men had pa.s.sed, she looked after them with an ugly expression of malice in her little pale gray eyes.

"That's a bad face," Asher said, when they were out of her hearing. "I wonder why she tried to hide that old salt can."

"How do you know it was a salt can?" Jacobs asked.

"Because it is exactly like a salt can I saw at Pryor Gaines' old cabin, and because some salt fell out as she tipped it over," Asher replied.

"You have an eye for details," Jacobs returned. "That was Gretchen Gimpke, Hans Wyker's girl. She married his bartender, and is raising a family of little bartenders back in the hilly country there, while Gimpke helps Hans run a perfectly respectable tavern in town."

"Well, I may misjudge her, but if I had any interest near here, I should want her to keep on her own side of the creek," Asher declared.

And somehow both remembered the dead sheep down in the deep pool at the foot of the hill.