Winning the Wilderness Part 9

"Has some influence here?" the stranger a.s.serted rather than questioned.

"A lot. Has the whole town under hoodoo. It's named for him. He has all the doctoring he can do and won't half charge, so's no other doctor'll come here. That's no way to build up a town. He'd get up at one o'clock in the morning to doctor a widder's cow. Now, sure he would, when he knows even a dead cow'd make business for the butcher to render up into grease and the cattle dealer to sell another cow."

"Not your style of a man then?" the stranger observed.

"Oh, pshaw, no, but, as I say, he's got the whole country hoodoo'd. Notice how everybody give him right of way to get his mail first? Why him? And hear him order the best horse? I'll bet a tree claim in hades right now that he's off somewhere to doctor some son of a gun out of cussed good will."

"Who is this James Shirley whose mail he seems to look after?"

There was a half-tone lowering of the voice as Smith p.r.o.nounced the name, which was not lost on Champers, whose business was to catch men at all corners.

"Jim Shirley lives out in one of the rich valleys west. Him and a fellow named Aydelot have some big notions of things out there. I don't know the doc's claim to control his mail, but n.o.body here would deny Carey any danged thing he wanted." Champers twisted his face in disgust.

"You are in the real estate business here?" Thomas Smith asked after a pause, as if the subject fell into entirely new lines.

"Yes," Champers answered absently with eyes alert on the opposite wall.

"I'd like to see you later, Mr.--"

"Champers--Darley Champers," and the dealer in land shoved a soiled card across the table. "Come in any time. This cold snap will soon be over and I can show you no end of land worth a gold mine any time you are ready.

But make it soon. Land's goin' faster here'n you Delaware fellers think, and"--in a lower voice--"Doc Carey's drivin' over it all the time, and that Jew of a Jacobs ain't in business here on account of no lung trouble, and his hatred of saloons is somethin' pisen."

They finished their meal in silence, for they had come to an understanding. The afternoon was too short and cold for real estate business to be brisk, and n.o.body in Carey's Crossing noted that the front window of Darley Champer's little office was covered with a newspaper blind all the rest of that day, nor did anybody pay attention to the whereabouts of the stranger--Mr. Thomas Smith, of Wilmington, Delaware--during this same time. n.o.body, except John Jacobs, of the Jacobs House, who gained his knowledge mostly by instinct; never, at least, by rude inquiry. He had been up on the roof helping Bo Peep to fasten the sign over the door which the wind had torn loose. From this place he could see above the newspaper screen of the window across the street that Champers and Smith were in a tremendously earnest consultation. He would have thought nothing of it had not Champers chanced to sight him on the roof and immediately readjusted the newspaper blind to prevent observation.

"I'll offer to sell Darley a window shade cheap tomorrow and see how he bites," and the little Jewish merchant smiled shrewdly at the thought.

Out on the trail that day the snow lay deeper to the westward, hiding the wagon ruts. The dead sunflower stalks made only a faint black edging along the white monotony of the way and sometimes on bleak swells there were no markings at all. Some distance from Carey's Crossing a much heavier snowfall, covering a wide swath, under which the trails were entirely lost, had wandered in zigzag lines down from the northwest.

In the early afternoon Dr. Horace Carey had started west on the surest horse in the Stewart-Jacobs livery stable, taking his old-fashioned saddle-bags with him through force of habit, and by mid-afternoon was floundering in the edge of this deeper snowfall.

Nature must have meant Horace Carey for the plains. He was of medium height, compactly built, without an ounce of unnecessary weight. The well-rounded form took away all hint of spareness, while it did not destroy the promise of endurance. His heavy, dark hair and dark gray eyes, his straight nose and firm mouth under a dark mustache, and his well-set chin made up an attractive but not handsome face. The magnetism of his personality was not in manly beauty. It was an inborn gift and would have characterized him in any condition in life. There was about him a genial dignity that made men look up to him and a willingness to serve that made selfishness seem mean. He could not have been thirty, although he had been on the plains for five years. The West was people by young men. It's need for daring spirits found less response in men of maturer life. But the West had most need for humane men. The bully, the dare-devil, the brutal, and the selfish were refuse before the force that swept the frontier onward; but they were never elements in real state building. Before such men as Carey they lost power.

The doctor rode away toward the west, bowing his head before the strong wind that he knew too well to fear, yet wondering as he rode if he had done wisely to dare the deepening snow of the buried trail.

"I might have waited a day, anyhow," he thought. "It's a devil of a ride over to Jim Shirley's, and we got only the tag ends of that storm down at the Crossing from the looks of this. However, I may as well keep at it now."

He surged on for a few miles without any signs of an open trail appearing.

Then he dropped to a slow canter.

"I'd better get this worry straightened and my mind untangled if I am to have any comfort on this ride," he said aloud, as was his wont to do when out in the open alone. "Everything happens to a man who gives too much leeway to that indefinite inside guide saying, 'Do this! Let that alone!'

And yet that guide hasn't failed me when I've listened to it."

He let the pony have the rein as he looked ahead with unseeing eyes.

"What made me take this day? First, everybody is well enough to be left for two or three days, good time for a vacation, and Stewart can take care of emergencies always. Second, I promised Jim I'd see that his letters got to him straightway. Third, yes, third, something said, 'Go now!' But here's the other side. Why go on the heels of a snowstorm? Why not keep Jim's letter a day or two? It's in my hands. And why mistrust a man who calls himself innocent 'Thomas Smith?' That's it. He's too innocent.

There's no place on these wide Kansas prairies for that man Thomas Smith.

He'd better get back to his home and his real name at once."

The doctor smiled at the thought, then he frowned at the cold wind and the shifting snows above the trail.

"You are a fool--a stack of fools, Dr. Horace Carey, to beat out of town miles on miles on a fool's errand over a lost trail, trusting your instinct that never lost you a direction yet, and all because of an inward call to an unrevealed duty. Some other day will do as well. And here's where I may as well cut off these notions of being led by inside signals.

What should make me sight danger in a man I never saw before, and who will probably go out on the stage tomorrow morning? Oh, well, the Lord made us as we are. He knows why."

He wheeled the pony about and began to trot toward Carey's Crossing.

Suddenly he halted.

"Let me see. I'm not twenty miles along, though I've come at a good rate.

I believe I'll cut across northwest and hit some of the settlers up on Big Wolf Creek for the night. Lucky I've no wife to worry about me."

A wave of sadness swept over the man's face--just a sweep of sorrow that left no mark. He turned abruptly from the trail and struck in a definite direction across the snow-covered prairie. Presently his path veered to the north, then to northwest.

"I know an ugly little creek running into Big Wolf that's the d.i.c.kens to cross. I'll run clear round it, even if it takes longer. After all, I'm doing just what I said I wouldn't do. I don't know why I didn't go on, nor why I am tacking off up here. Something tells me to do it, and I'll do it."

But however changeable of mind he seemed to himself, Dr. Carey was a man who formed his judgments so quickly and acted upon them so promptly that he seemed most stable to other men. He rode forward now to a land wave that dropped on one side to a creek, a quarter of a mile away, where black shrubbery marked the water line. A long swell of wind swung down the valley, whirling the snow in eddies before it. As the doctor's eye followed them, he suddenly noted a red scarf lift above the tallest clumps of bushes and flutter out to its full length, then drop again as the wind swell pa.s.sed.

"There's n.o.body in fifteen miles of here. I reckon that scarf blew there and caught some time this fall when somebody was going out on the trail.

Mighty human looking thing, though. It seemed waving a signal to me. But I must hurry on."

He hastened at a gallop up the ridge away from the creek, his mind still on that red scarf flung about by the winter wind.

"It was a strange thing," he thought, "but every human token is startling out here. What's that now?"

The doctor had a plainsman's ear as well as a plainsman's eye. As he listened, through the wail of the wind borne along the distance, he caught the words of a song, low and pleading like a plaintive cry for help:

Though, like the wanderer, The sun gone down, Darkness be over me, My rest a stone-- Yet in my dreams I'd be Nearer, my G.o.d, to thee, Nearer to thee.

It was a woman's voice and Carey faced about to listen. He knew it came from the bushes below the red scarf. So he changed his course and hurried around a bend in the stream to the other side of the brush where Virginia Aydelot stood beside Juno.

"I'm afraid there isn't even a stone to rest on here, Madam. Can I be of any service to you?" he said, lifting his hand toward his cap in semi-military salute.

Virginia stood looking at the stranger with a half-comprehending gaze. She had been less than an hour beside the bushes, but it had seemed to her like many hours. And the terrifying certainty of a night alone on the prairie made the sudden presence of a human being unreal to her.

"I beg your pardon; I am Dr. Carey, of Carey's Crossing, and I was striking across the prairie to the Big Wolf settlement when I saw your scarf and heard your singing. I took them both to be distress signals and came over to see if you needed me."

One had only to listen to Dr. Carey's voice to understand why Darley Champers should accuse him of laying a charm on the whole settlement.

Virginia recovered herself quickly, saying with a wan smile:

"You came just in time, Doctor. I am lost and need help. I was going to you, anyhow."

Each one's face was so m.u.f.fled against the wind that the eyes and lips and a bit of the cheeks alone were visible.

"Not a bad-looking woman for all the Kansas tan," the doctor thought. "She has a voice like a true Virginian and fine eyes and teeth. But any woman who bundles up for a horseback ride across the plains on a day like this isn't out for a beauty show contest. I've seen eyes like that before, though, and as to her voice--"

"I am Mrs. Asher Aydelot from the Gra.s.s River Valley," Virginia went on.

"There are only three settlers out there now, Mr. Shirley and my husband and myself. Mr. Shirley is very sick with pneumonia, and Mr. Aydelot could not leave him, so I started to Carey's Crossing to see if you could come to him. I missed the trail somewhere. I was trying to help, but I failed, you see."