Winning the Wilderness Part 31

Rosie Gimpke, the tow-headed image of her mother, Gretchen Wyker, stared at Leigh, who smiled back at her. Rosie was stupid and ignorant, but she knew the difference between Jo Bennington's frown and Leigh Shirley's smile. A saving thing, the smile of good will, and worth its cost in any market.

"Shall I help you too, or shall Rosie and I look after the refreshments?"

Virginia asked as she greeted Leigh.

"No, run along and get dressed. Rosie knows just how to fix things in the kitchen, and I never need anybody else if Leigh can help me," Thaine declared. "How is this, Leigh?"

Leigh gave a quick glance and answered: "Too heavy everywhere? Can we fix it right?" "You bet we can. I'm not going to have a thing wrong tonight,"

Thaine answered her. "But Jo fixed it, and you know Jo."

Leigh made no reply, but went about the rearrangement with swift artistic skill; while Jo, who had changed her mind about being in a hurry, slipped down stairs to the dining room again. At the doorway she discovered the undoing of her work. For a minute or two she watched the pair, then pa.s.sed unnoticed up stairs again. Leigh Shirley was the only girl who ever dared to oppose Jo, and she did it so quietly and completely that Jo could only ignore her. She could not retaliate.

"Jo Bennington, you are the prettiest girl in Kansas, and I claim the first dance and the last, and some in-betweens, right now," Thaine declared when she appeared again.

Jo was tall and graceful and imperious in her manner. The oldest and handsomest child in a large family, she had had her own way at home and with her a.s.sociates all her life. Her world was made to give way to her from the beginning, until nothing seemed possible or popular without her sanction. Tonight her heavy black hair was coiled in braids about her head, her black eyes were full of youthful glow and her cheeks were like June roses. She wore a pink lawn dress vastly becoming to her style, and a string of old-fashioned pearl beads was wound through her dark braids.

"You'd better make amends for spoiling all my pretty work as you and Leigh have done," she said in reply to Thaine's frank compliment. "I'll make it a few more dances, for you do dance better than any of the other boys--"

"Except Todd Stewart, Junior," the owner of the name, who had just come in, declared. "There is to be a birthday party and an old settlers'

meeting, and maybe a French duel or two before midnight. I remember when I was the only kid in the Gra.s.s River Valley. There were others at first, but I always thought the gra.s.shoppers or Darley Champers ate 'em. And Jo is the first white girl baby born in captivity here. We'll lead the opening of this ball or shoot up the ranch. You can have Jo for the last dance, Thaine, my son, but me first."

"Oh, that's fine," Jo declared as Thaine was about to protest. "Serves you right for spoiling my decorations. But, Thaine, I claim you for the in-betweens and the last. Let's take one more look at the refreshments--that Gimpke girl may have them all in a mess by this time."

There was a rush for the kitchen, where Leigh Shirley was already showing Rosie how to keep the table of dishes in order.

Meanwhile, Asher Aydelot had gone out to the seat Thaine had put up under the honeysuckle trellis.

"It is early for the crowd, Virgie. Come here and watch Boanerges Peeperville tuning up," Asher Aydelot said as Virginia stood on the veranda a little later.

She came out to the seat under a bower of sweet white honeysuckle and sat down beside her husband.

"The same Bo Peep of the old Virginia days, only he was a half-grown boy then," she said, watching the Negro bending above his violin. "How faithfully he has served Dr. Carey all these years. He's past forty now.

Asher, we are all getting along."

"With a boy nineteen tonight, how can it be otherwise?" Asher replied.

"But when the Careyville crowd gets here I'm going to ask you for a dance, anyhow, Miss Thaine."

Virginia stood in the moonlight and looked out over the prairie slumbering in a silver-broidered robe of evening mist.

"How fast the years have gone. Do you remember the night in the old Thaine home in Virginia when you were our guest--too sick to dance?" she asked.

Asher caught her arm and drew her to the seat beside him.

"I remember the jessamine vines and the arbor at the end of the rose garden."

"We are not old until we forget our own romance days," Virginia said. "You were my hero that night. You are my hero still."

"Even with a son as old now as I was that night? The real romance of the prairie, you've said it often, Virgie, is Thaine Aydelot's romance.

There's little chance for the rest of us."

The coming of the guests just then called the host and hostess to the parlor, and the evening's festivities began.

In the building of the Aydelot home there was a memory of the old farmhouse beside the National pike road in Ohio and the old Thaine mansion house of the South. The picture the mirage had revealed to Virginia Aydelot on the afternoon when she rode the long lonely miles from Wykerton with John Jacob's message of hope in her keeping--that wonderful mirage picture had grown toward a reality with the slowly winning years.

Tonight, with the lighted rooms and the music of the violin, and the sound of laughter and the rhythm of dancing feet, and outside the May moonlight on the veranda with its vine-draped columns, and the big elm trees throwing long shadows down the lawn, with the odor of plowed fields and blossoming grain and shrub mingled with the perfume floating from the creamy catalpa blooms in the shadowy grove, all made a picture not unworthy to hang beside the painting of an Ohio landscape or an old Virginia mansion.

"Here's where the forty-niners get the best of it," Jim Shirley declared, as the older men gathered about the veranda steps. "We're dead certain of ourselves now. We're not like those youngsters in there with their battles before 'em."

"There hasn't been such a gathering as this in ten years. Not since the night Darley Champers herded us into the schoolhouse and blew a boom down our throats through a goosequill," Cyrus Bennington declared.

"See that black thing away across the prairie east of Aydelot's grove.

Wait till the moon gets out from that cloud. Now!" Todd Stewart directed the eyes of all to a tall black object distinct in the moonlight.

"That's the Cloverdale Farmers' Company's elevator. Looks like a lighthouse stretching up in that sea of wheat."

"There are plenty of derelicts in that sea as well as some human derelicts left afloat," Jim said, with a laugh. "Let's take the census."

"Begin with Darley Champers," Asher suggested.

"Not present. Who got his excuse?" Jim inquired.

"He sent it by me," Horace Carey spoke up. "Business still keeping him busy. He's a humane man."

"Up to a point he is," John Jacobs broke in. "Let's be fair. He is a large-sized boomer and a small-sized rascal. A few deals won't bear the light of day, but mainly they are inside the law. I've let him handle all but my grazing land around Wykerton. He's done well by me. But he's been at his line a quarter of a century and he'll end where he began--in a real estate office over in Wykerton, trying to get something for nothing and calling it business."

"Horace Carey?" Jim Shirley called next.

"Here," Carey replied.

"With a big H," Todd Stewart declared. "Same doctor of the old school. Why don't you get married or take a trip to India, Doctor? Not that we aren't satisfied all over with you as you are, though, and wouldn't hear to your doing either one. You belong to all of us now."

"I may have a call to a bigger practice some day, a service that will make you proud of your former honorable townsman. At present I'm satisfied,"

Carey said, with a smile.

Four years later the men remembered this reply and the attractive face of the speaker, the sound of his voice, and the whole magnetic presence of the man.

"John Jacobs?" Shirley called next.

"The merchant prince of Careyville," Asher Aydelot declared. "The money-loaning Shylock. Didn't let the boom so much as turn one hair black or white. Land owner and stock raiser of the Wolf Creek Valley and hater of saloons seven days in the week. Whatever it may mean in New York and Cincinnati and Chicago, being a Jew means being a gentleman in this corner of Kansas," Asher was running on, till John Jacobs threw a chair cushion at his head and Jim called out:

"Cyrus Bennington."

"Busted by the boom. Lived at the public crib ever since. Held every little county office possible to get, asking now for your votes this fall for County Treasurer. Will end his days seeking an election and go at last to be with the elected," Cyrus Bennington frankly described himself.

"Not so bad yet as Todd Stewart," Todd declared. "He lost everything in the boom except his old Scotch Presbyterian faith. Now head clerk in J.

Jacobs' dry goods and general merchandise store. Had the good sense, though, this old Todd did, to send his son back to the land and make a farmer out of him, and the second generation of Stewarts in this valley promises to make it yet. Why don't you revert to the soil, too, Bennington?"

"Todd is doing well with his leases," Asher Aydelot declared. "He'll be a landowner yet."

"My family, especially the girls, object to living on a farm," Cyrus Bennington said gravely. "They have notions of city life I can't overcome.

Jo especially dislikes the country and Jo runs things round the Bennington place."