Winning the Wilderness

“Because I’m not now from Wilmington, Delaware, any more than I ever was. I’m from Cloverdale, Ohio. You know, Wyker, how I lost money in your brewery, investing in machinery and starting the thing, only to go to smash on us.”

He turned on Hans fiercely.

“And you know how I lost by you in this town and the land around it. It was my money took up all this ground to help build up Wykerton and you, as my agent, sold every acre of it to Jacobs.”

This as fiercely as Darley Champers.

Both men nodded and Darley broke in:

“I was honest. I thought Jacobs was gettin’ it to boom Wykerton with, or I’d never sold. And him bein’ right here was a danged sight easier’n havin’ some man in Wilmington, Delaware, to write to. That’s why I let him in on three sides, appealin’ to his pride.”

But Thomas Smith stopped him abruptly.

“Hold on! You need money to push your schemes now. And I’m the one who does the financing for you.”

Both men agreed.

“Then it’s death to either of you if you ever tell a word of this. You understand that? I’m not to be known here because I’m a dead man. I’m the cashier that was mixed up in the Cloverdale bank affair. And, as I say, if Jane Aydelot had let things alone Tank Shirley and I could have pulled out honorably, but, womanlike, because she had a lot of bank stock and was the biggest loser of anybody, in her own mind, she pushed things where a man would not have noticed or kept still, and she kept pushing year after year. Damn a woman, anyhow! All I could do at last was to commit suicide. Tank planned it. It saved me and helped Tank. You see, Miss Jane had a line around his neck, too. She was the only one who really saw me go down and she spread the report that I’d committed suicide on account of the bank failure. So, gentlemen, I’m really drowned in Clover Creek right above where the railroad grade that cuts the Aydelot farm reaches the water.”

Darley Champers wondered why Thomas Smith was so particular in his description.

“I’ve known Jim Shirley all my life. He was as bad a boy as ever left Cloverdale, Ohio, under a cloud. Got into trouble over some girl, I believe, finally. But you can see why I’m out of this game when it comes to the open. And maybe you could understand, if you knew the brothers as well as I do, why Tank keeps me after him. And I’ll get him yet.”

The vengeance of the last words was venomous.

“Well, now we understand each other we’ll not be tramping on anybody’s corns,” Darley Champers urged, anxious to get away from the subject.

With all of his shortcomings he was a man of different mould from the other men. Eagerness to represent and invest large capital and to make by far the best of a bargain by any means just inside the law were his besetments. But he had not the unremitting hatred that enslaved Thomas Smith and Hans Wyker.

Champers’ store of energy seemed exhaustless. Following this council he fell upon the Grass River Valley and threshed it to his profit.

One mid-June evening the Grass River schoolhouse was lighted early, while up from the prairie ranches came the work-worn farmers.

This year the crop outlook was bad, yet somehow an expectant spirit lifted sagging shoulders and looked out through hopeful eyes.

While the men exchanged neighborly greetings, a group of children, the second generation in the valley, romped about in the twilight outside.

“Here comes Thaine,” they shouted as Asher Aydelot and his boy came down the trail.

“Come on, Thaine,” Leigh Shirley said, reaching for his hand. “We are going to play drop the handkerchief.”

“Thaine’s going to stand by me,” pretty Jo Bennington declared, pushing Leigh boisterously aside.

Josephine, the week-old baby Mrs. Aydelot had gone to see one day nine years ago, had grown into a big, black-eyed, rosy-cheeked girl who lorded it over every other child in the neighborhood. And every other child submitted except Leigh Shirley, who had a quiet habit of going straight ahead about her affairs in a way that vexed the pretty Jo not a little. From the first coming of Leigh among the children Jo had resented her independence. But, young as they all were, she objected most to Thaine Aydelot’s claiming Leigh as his playmate. Thaine was Jo’s idol from earliest memory.

“What’s the row here?” Todd Stewart, Junior, broke in. “You mustn’t fuss or you’ll all have to go in and listen to Darley Champers and I’ll play out here by myself.”

Todd was a young-hearted, half-grown boy now, able to work all day in the hayfield or to romp like a child with younger children in the evening. He was half a dozen years older than Thaine and Jo, a difference that would tend to disappear by the end of a decade.

“We’ll be good, Toddie, if you’ll let us stay and you’ll play with us,” the children entreated, and the game began, with Thaine between Leigh and Jo.

When Asher Aydelot joined the group inside Darley Champers rapped on the desk and called the men to order.

“Gentlemen, let’s have a businesslike proceeding,” he said. “Who shall preside at the meeting?”

“I move Jim Shirley be made chairman. He’s the best looking man here,” Todd Stewart said, half seriously.

The motion carried and Jim, looking big and handsome and kindly as always, took the chair.

“I’ll ask Mr. Champers to state the purpose of the meeting,” he said.

“Gentlemen,” Champers began with tremendous dignity, “I represent the firm of the Champers Town Company, just chartered, with half a million dollars’ capital. Gentlemen, you have the finest valley in Kansas.”

The same was said of every other valley in Kansas in the fat years of the boom. But to do Darley justice, he had never made a finer effort in his life of many efforts than he was bent on making tonight.

“And this site is the garden spot of it all,” he continued. “The elevation, the water power at the deep bend of Grass River (where at that moment only a trace of water marked the river’s grassy right of way), the fine farming land – everything ready for a sudden leap into prosperity. And, gentlemen, the A. and T. (Arctic and Tropic) North and South Railroad will begin grading down this very stream inside of thirty days. A town here this year will be a city next year, a danged sight bigger city than Careyville will ever be. Why, that town’s got its growth and is beginning to decay right now. The A. and T. will miss it comin’ south, by ten mile.”

He paused and looked at the men before him. They were farmers, drooped to rest after the long summer day’s work, yet they listened with intense eagerness. Only Asher Aydelot sat in easy dignity, looking straight at Darley Champers with steady interest. The four years’ training in the University of the Civil War had not been overcome by his hold on the plow handles. And no farmer will grow hopelessly stooped in shoulders and sad of countenance who lifts his face often from the clods beneath his feet to the stars above his head.

“You all know crops was poor last year and only moderately promisin’ this year,” Champers continued. “But this is temporary and you are stayers, as I can testify. The Champers Town Company is ready to locate a townsite and start a town right here at the deep bend of Grass River. We propose to plat the prairie into town lots with a public square for the courthouse and sites for the railroad station and grain elevators, a big hotel, an opera house, and factories and foundries that’s bound to come.”

The speaker paused a moment. Then the inspiration of the evening came to him.

“When you first came here, Aydelot, there wasn’t nothing but imagination to make this a farming community. And it looked lots more impossible then than this looks to me now. What’s to prevent a metropolis risin’ right here where a decade and a half ago there wasn’t nothing but bare prairie?”

The appeal was forceful, and the very men who had stood like heroes against hardships and had fought poverty with a grim, unyielding will-power, the same men fell now before Darley Champers’ smooth advances.

“Our company’s chartered with no end of stock for sale now that in six months will be out of sight above par and can’t be bought for no price. It’s your time to invest now. You can easy mortgage your farms to raise the money, seein’ you can knock the mortgage off so quick and have abundance left over, if you use your heads ’stead of your tired legs to make money out of your land.”

Cyrus Bennington and Todd Stewart and Jim Shirley, with others, were sitting upright with alert faces now. Booms were making men rich all over Kansas. Why should prosperity not come to this valley as well? It was not impossible, surely. Only the unpleasant memory of Champers’ holding back the supplies in the days when the grasshopper was a burden would intrude on the minds of the company tonight. Champers was shrewd to remember also, and he played his game daringly as well as cautiously.

“Maybe some of you fellows haven’t felt right toward me sometimes,” he said. “I hate to tell it now, but justice is justice. The truth is, it was a friend of yours who advised me not to let any supplies come your way, time of the grasshopper raid. I listened to him then and didn’t know no better’n to be run by him till I see his scheme to kill Wykerton an’ build a town for hisself. He’ll deny it now, declare he never done it, and he’ll not do a thing for your town down here. See if he does. But it’s Gawd’s truth, he held me back so’s he could run you his way. It’s your turn to listen to me now and believe me, too.”

And well they listened, especially the men who still owed John Jacobs for the loan of 1874.

“You can have a boom right here that’ll make you all rich men inside of a year. Why not turn capitalists yourselves for a while, you hard-working farmers. Money is easy and credit long, now. Take your chance at it and make five hundred per cent on your investments. I’m ready to take subscriptions for stock in this new town right now. Why not stop this snail’s pace of earnin’ and go to livin’ like gentlemen – like some Careyville men I know who own hundreds of acres they never earned and they won’t improve so’s to help others?”

“You’re right there,” a farmer sitting beside Asher Aydelot called out. “We all know how Careyville got her start. It’s kept some of us poor doing it. I’ll invest in Town Company stock right now.”

Asher Aydelot turned toward the speaker in surprise.

“Jacobs helped you out as well as the rest of us in the drouth and grasshopper time of seventy-four,” he said. “What’s your grievance against him now?”

“Yes, and hung onto me like a leech of a Jew ever since,” the man muttered.

“Because you never paid either interest or principal. And Jacobs has carried you along and waited your time,” Asher asserted frankly.

But the farmer plunged into the discussion again, not realizing that his grudge against Careyville was the outgrowth of his own shortcomings.

“Take this site right here in the middle of your neighborhood where you’ve already got your church and your schoolhouse, and your graveyard,” Champers declared. “Aydelot here gave part of it and Pryor Gaines the rest. Gaines don’t farm it any more himself, it’s most too big a job for a man of brains like him. And that quarter across the river that used to be all sand, you own that now, Aydelot, don’t you? What did you think of doin’ with it now?”

“I think I’ll set it in alfalfa this fall,” Asher replied.

“Yes, yes, now these two make the very site we want. You are lucky, for you are ready right now to start things. How much stock do you want, Aydelot, and how will you sell?”

As Asher listened he seemed to see the whole scheme of the town builder bare itself before him, and he wondered at the credulity of his neighbors.

“Gentlemen,” he said, standing before them, “it is a hard thing to put yourself against neighborhood sentiment and not seem to be selfish. But as I was the first man in this valley and have known every man who settled here since, I ought to be well enough known to you to need no certificate of good moral character here. I offer no criticism on the proposition before you. You are as capable of judging as I am. The end may show you more capable, but I decline to buy stock, or to donate, or sell any land for a townsite at the deep bend of Grass River. A man’s freehold is his own.”

Asher’s influence had led in Grass River affairs for years. But Darley Champers had the crowd in the hollow of his paw tonight.

“How about Gaines?” he demanded. “You join him on the south. You ought to know some of his notions.”

“Gaines has no land to consider,” Asher said frankly. “He sold it more than a year ago.”

“You mean the Jew foreclosed on the preacher, don’t you?” someone said sarcastically.

“You’ll have to ask the preacher,” Asher replied good-naturedly. “I didn’t understand it so at the time. But as for myself, I’m no boomer. I stand for the prosperity that builds from day to day, and stays built. The values here are in the soil, not in the shining bubbles that glitter and burst on top of it. You’ll have to count me out of your scheme. I’m a farmer still. So I’ll wish you all good luck and good night.”

“Good night, I must go with papa,” Thaine Aydelot said, springing up from his play outside.

“No, you’ve got to stay here. Hold him, Leigh,” Jo Bennington commanded, clutching at Thaine’s arm.

Leigh sat calmly disobedient.

“He’s his papa’s boy, I guess, and he ought to go,” she asserted.

“You meany, meany,” Jo whispered, “I don’t like you.”

But Leigh paid little heed to her opinion.

As Asher passed out of the room there was an ugly look in Darley Champers’ eyes.

“No more ambition than a cat. One of them quiet, good-natured fellers that are as stubborn as the devil once they take a stand. Just a danged clod-hopper farmer, but he don’t leave no enemies behind him. That’s enough to make any man hate him. He’s balked twice when I tried to drive. I’ll not be fooled by him always.”

So Champers thought as he watched Asher Aydelot walk out of the room. And in the silence that followed his going the company heard him through the open window whistling some old patriotic air as he strode away in the June moonlight with little Thaine trotting beside him.

“Shirley, where is Pryor tonight?” Cyrus Bennington broke the silence with the query. “I couldn’t get him to come; said he had no land for sale nor money to invest,” Jim replied.

“Then Jacobs got him at last. Fine friend to you fellers, that man Jacobs. Easy to see what he wants. He ain’t boomin’ no place but Careyville,” Champers snarled. “But the deep bend ain’t the only bend in Grass River. Or do you want to shove prosperity away when it comes right to your door?”

Nobody wants to do that. Least of all did the Kansas settlers of the boom days turn away from the promise of a fortune.

So the boom came to the Grass River Valley as other disasters had come before it. Where a decade and a half ago Asher and Virginia Aydelot had lived alone with each other and God, in the heart of the wide solitary wilderness, the town of Cloverdale was staked out now over the prairie.

Stock in the new venture sold rapidly, and nobody ever knew how much clear profit came to Champers & Co. from this venture. A big slice of the Cloverdale ranch went into the staking of the new city, and prosperity seemed wedded to Jim Shirley. He ceased farming and became a speculator with dreams of millions in his brain. Other settlers followed his example until the fever had infected every man in the community except Asher Aydelot, who would not give up to it, and Pryor Gaines, who had nothing to give up.

Everything fell out as advertised. The railroad grade swelled up like a great welt across the land, seemingly in a day. Suburban additions radiated for miles in every direction. Bonds were voted for light and water and public buildings and improvements. Speculators rushed to invest and unload their investments at a profit. The Grass River Farmers’ Company built the Grass River Creamery. And because it looked big and good they built the Grass River Sugar Factory and the Grass River Elevator. But while they were building their money into stone and machinery they forgot to herd cattle to supply the creamery and to grow cane for the sugar product and to sow and reap grain to be elevated.

Also, the Cloverdale Farmers’ Company, made up mostly of the members of the Grass River Farmers’ Company, built the Cloverdale Hotel, and the Cloverdale State Bank, and the Cloverdale Office Block. And the sad part of it all was that mortgaged and doubly mortgaged farms and not the price of crops had furnished the capital for the boom building.

It is an old story now, and none too interesting – the story of a boom town, founded on prairie breezes and built out of fortune seekers’ dreams.

Meanwhile, Asher Aydelot, watching the sudden easy prosperity of his neighbors, fought down the temptation to join them and resolutely strove with the soil for its best yield. The drouth and hot winds had not forgotten all their old tricks, and even the interest on his mortgage could not be met promptly sometimes. Yet with the same old Aydelot tenacity with which his father had held Cloverdale in Ohio away from the old farm beside the National pike road, the son of this father held the boundary of the Sunflower Ranch intact, nor yielded up one acre to be platted into a suburban addition to the new Cloverdale in the Grass River Valley in Kansas. And all the while the Aydelot windbreaks strengthened; the Aydelot grove struck deeper root; the long corn furrows and the acres on acres of broken wheat stubble of the Sunflower Ranch wooed the heavier rainfall, narrowing the sand dunes and deepening the water courses.

For two brief years Cloverdale, in the Grass River Valley in Kansas, had a name, even in the Eastern money markets. Speculation became madness; and riotous commercialism had its little hour of strut and rave.

Then the bubble burst, and all that the boom had promised fell to nothingness. Many farms were mortgaged, poor crops worked tribulation, taxes began to eat up acres of weed-grown vacant town lots, Eastern money was withdrawn to other markets, speculators departed, the strange enthusiasm burned itself out, and the Wilderness came again to the Grass River Valley. Not the old Wilderness of loneliness, and drouth, and grasshoppers, and prairie fires that had dared the pioneer to conquest; but the Prairie, waiting again the kingly hand on the plow handle, gave no quarter to him whom the gilded boom had lured to shipwreck.

PART TWO

THE SON

Give me the land where miles of wheatRipple beneath the wind’s light feet,Where the green armies of the cornSway in the first sweet breath of morn;Give me the large and liberal landOf the open heart and the generous hand;Under the wide-spaced Kansas skyLet me live and let me die.– Harry A. Kemp.

CHAPTER XIII

The Rollcall

Nothing is too lateUntil the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.– Longfellow.

The twilight had fallen on the prairie. Grass River, running bank full from the heavy May rains, lay like a band of molten silver glistening in the after-sunset light. The draw, once choked with wild plum bushes in the first days of the struggle in the wilderness, was the outlet now to the little lake that nestled in the heart of the Aydelot grove. The odors of early summer came faintly on the soft twilight breeze. Somewhere among the cottonwoods a bird called a tender good-night to its mate. Upon the low swell the lights were beginning to twinkle from the windows of the Aydelot home, and the sounds of voices and of hurrying footsteps told of something unusual going on within. Asher Aydelot, driving down the old Grass River trail, saw from far away the windows of his home beginning to glow like beacons in the twilight. Beyond it was the glimmer of the waters of the river and before it spread the mile-long grove, dim and shadowy in the mist-folds rising up from the prairie.

“A man can win a kingdom in the West, I told my mother one spring evening long ago,” he murmured as his eyes took in the view. “It’s surely more like a kingdom now than it was when we came down this trail a quarter of a century ago. Twenty-five good years of life, but it’s worth the effort, and we are just now at the opening of our best years. A man’s real usefulness begins at fifty. This is more like a kingdom, too, than it was ten years ago when those old hulks of wrecks that strew the prairie down the river were banks, and hotels, and opera houses, and factories of boomed-up Cloverdale. We are doing something for the land. I hope our boy will make up his mind to want to keep it when his time comes.”

He lifted his head bravely, as if to throw off all doubt, and tightening the reins on his horses he swung away down the trail toward the home lights shining in the gathering gloom.

As he neared the house Thaine Aydelot leaped from the side porch and hurried toward him. Climbing into the moving wagon, he put one hand affectionately on his father’s shoulder.

“Don’t you know whose birthday this is?” he inquired with serious countenance, “and you’ve not spoken to me all day.”

“I know my boy is nineteen today and expects to have a birthday party here tonight, and that I left him asleep when I started to town this forenoon about nine o’clock.”

“Nine cats! You left at six sharp to go with John Jacobs over to Wolf Creek after what you never got, judging from this empty wagon. And I had half of the feeding done when you left the house here. I saw you when I was out by the old stone corral looking after the pigs, but they squealed so loud you could not hear me telling you good-by.”

“All pigs squeal alike to me,” Asher began, but Thaine choked him to silence.

“Hurry up and get togged out for the party,” he urged. “The Benningtons will be over early. Jo’s been here all day. I’ll take care of the horses. Hike!”

“Be sure to rub them down. They had to pull hard today,” Asher called back as he went up the walk toward the house.

“Oh, fiddle! Always take care of a horse like it was a prize poodle. Farms like he was decorating chinaware. Good enough dad, but too particular. Me for the State University and the professional or military life. This ranch is all right for Asher Aydelot, but it’s pretty blamed slow for T. A. And Jo Bennington doesn’t like a farm either,” he added with a smile.

In the superiority of his youth Thaine fumed at his father’s commands, but failed not to obey them. He was just nineteen, as tall as his father, and brawny with the strength of the outdoors life of the prairie ranch. Strength of character was not expressed in his face so much as the promise of strength with the right conditions for its development in future days. His features were his mother’s set in masculine lines, with the same abundant dark hair, the same lustrous dark eyes, the same straight nose and well-formed chin. The same imperious will of all the Thaines to do as he chose was his heritage, too, and he walked the prairies like a king.

“The real story of the plains is the story of the second generation; the real romance here will be Thaine Aydelot’s romance, for he was born here.”

So Virginia Aydelot had declared on the day she had gone to visit the Bennington baby, Josephine, and coming home had met Asher with little Thaine beside Mercy Pennington’s grave. Sorrow for the dead had become a tender memory that day, and joy in the living made life full of hope.

In Virginia’s mind a pretty romance was begun in which Thaine and Josephine were central figures. For mothers will evermore weave romances for their children so long as the memory of their own romance lives.

The time of the second generation came swiftly, even before the wilderness of the father’s day had been driven entirely from the prairie. Some compensation for the loss of eastern advantages belonged to the simple life of the plains children. If they lacked the culture of city society they were also without its frivolity and temptations. What the prairies denied them in luxuries they matched with a resourcefulness to meet their needs. Something of the breadth of the landscape and of the free sweeping winds of heaven gave them breadth and power to look the world squarely in the face, and to measure it at its true value, when their hour for action came.

The Grass River children could ride like Plains Indians. They could cut a steer out of a herd and prevent or escape a stampede. They had no fear of distance, nor storm, nor prairie fire, nor blizzard. Because their opportunities were few, they squandered them the less. Matched against the city-bred young folks their talents differed in kind, not in number, nor in character-value.