Winning the Wilderness

“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.

“God 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 assured 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 prone 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 Grass 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 Grass 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 grasshopper-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 Grass 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 Grass 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.

“Hello, 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 Grass 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 trimmings.

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.

“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. Nobody 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 god 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 assured him.

“Well, how can I send?” Jim asked again. “There’s nobody there to bring her, and nobody 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 Grass 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 foreverThe 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 passed 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 Grass 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 passengers 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 passed 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 class. 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 passed 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 assure 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.

From the open window he looked out upon the magnificence of the autumn forests and saw the white pike road leading down to Clover Creek and the church spires and courthouse tower above the trees.

“The heir to all this comfort and beauty gave it up because he didn’t want to be a tavern-keeper here, and because he did want a girl – Virginia!” Horace Carey said the name softly. “I know what her jessamine-draped window looked out upon. I hardly realized when I was here before what Asher’s early home had been. Yet those two for love of each other are building their lives into the life of their chosen State. It is the tiller of the soil who must make the West. But how many times in the lonely days in that little sod cabin must they have remembered their childhood homes! How many times when the hot fall winds swept across the dead brown prairie have their memories turned to the beauty of the October days here in the East! Oh, well, the heroes weren’t all killed at Lexington and Bunker Hill, nor at Bull Run and Gettysburg. Some of them got away, and with heroic wives went out to conquer the plains from the harsh rule of Nature there.”

When the doctor went downstairs again, a little girl met him, saying, “Miss Jane says you may sit in the parlor, or out on the meranda, till supper is ready.”

“How pleasant! Won’t you come and sit with me?” Doctor Carey replied.

“I must put the – the lap-robes on the tables to everybody’s plate, and the knives and forks and poons. Nen I’ll come,” she answered.

Carey sat on the veranda enjoying the minutes and waiting for the little girl.

“What is your name?” he asked when she appeared, and climbed into Miss Jane’s vacant chair.

“Leigh Shirley. What’s yours?”

“Horace Carey.”

The doctor could not keep from smiling as he looked at her. She was so little and pretty, with yellow hair, big blue eyes, china-doll cheeks, and with all the repose of manner that only childhood and innocence can bestow.

“I think I like you, Horace,” Leigh said frankly, after carefully looking Carey over.