Winning the Wilderness

“Yes, and father and mother are going home so early,” Jo said.

“Well, your whole wardrobe is over here; why not stay all night? You can help Rosie and mother and me tomorrow. There are plenty of Benningtons left at your home without you, and mother will want you,” Thaine urged.

“Do you want me to?” Jo asked softly.

“Tremendously. We’ll eat all the ice cream that’s left when the crowd goes and have the empty mansion all to ourselves,” Thaine declared.

“We are to dance the last dance together too,” Jo reminded him.

“Let’s run in now. The crowd doesn’t miss me, but I’m host, you know, and they’re gasping for you. They’ll be scouring the premises if we wait longer.”

As Thaine lifted Jo to her feet there was a glitter of tears in her bright eyes. And because the place was shadowy and sweet with honeysuckle perfume, and the moonlight entrancing, and Jo was very willing, and tears are ever appealing, he put his arm around her and drew her close to him, and kissed her on each cheek.

Jo’s face was triumphant as they met Leigh Shirley at the dining room door.

“What’s the next case on docket, Leigh?” Thaine asked, dropping Jo’s arm.

Jealousy has sharp eyes, but even jealousy could hardly have found fault with the friendly and indifferent look on Thaine’s face.

“Why, it’s my first with you, Leigh. Who’s your partner, Jo?” Thaine continued.

Two or three young men claimed the honor, and the music began.

“Mrs. Aydelot, Thaine has asked me to stay all night,” Jo said, as the figures were forming.

“It will please us all,” Virginia said graciously, and Jo tripped away.

When the strains of music for the last dance began Jo looked for Thaine, but he was nowhere to be found. She waited impatiently and the angry glitter in her eyes was not unbecoming her imperious air.

Bo Peep did not wait long, for he was getting tired. Half a dozen young men rushed toward Jo as she stood alone. But Todd Stewart let no opportunity escape him. And the dance began. A minute later Thaine came in with Leigh Shirley. Smiling a challenge at Todd, he caught Leigh’s hand and swung into the crowd on the floor.

The older guests were already gone. The music trailed off into a weird, rippling rhythm, with young hearts beating time to its melody and young feet keeping step to its measure. Then the tired, happy company broke into groups. Good-bys and good wishes were given again and again, and the party was over.

The couples took their way up or down the old Grass River trail or out across the prairie by-roads, with the moon sailing serenely down the west. Everybody voted it the finest party ever given on Grass River. And nobody at all, except his mother and Jo Bennington, noticed that Thaine had not left Leigh Shirley’s side from his first dance with her late in the evening until the time of the good-bys.

As the guests were leaving Thaine turned to Jo, saying:

“I’m sorry about that last dance, but I’ll forgive Todd this last time. Rosie cut her hand on a glass tumbler she dropped and I was helping Leigh to tie it up when old Bo Peep started the music. Here’s the girl I’m to take home. Got your draperies on already. The carriage waits and the black steed paws for us by the chicken yard gate. Good-night, gentle beings.” And taking Leigh’s arm, he led her away.

“Gimpke is as awkward as a cow,” Jo Bennington declared, “and too stupid to know what’s said to her.”

But Rosie Gimpke, standing in the shadows of the darkened dining room, was not too stupid to understand what was said about her. And into her stolid brain came dreams that night of a fair face with soft golden brown hair and kindly eyes of deep, tender blue. Stupid as she was, the woman’s instinct in her told her in her dreams that the handsome young son of her employer might not always look his thoughts nor dance earliest and oftenest with the girl he liked best. But Rosie was dull and slept heavily and these things came to her sluggish brain only in fleeting dreams.

Thaine and Leigh did not hurry on their homeward way. And Jo Bennington, wide awake in the guest room of the Aydelot house, noted that the moon was far toward the west when Thaine let himself in at the side door and slipped up stairs unheard by all the household except herself.

“Let’s go down by the lake,” Thaine suggested as he and Leigh came to the edge of the grove. “It’s full to the bridge, and the lilies are wide open now. Are you too sleepy to look at them? You used to draw them with chalk all along the blackboard in the old schoolhouse up there.”

“I’m never too sleepy to look at water lilies in the moonlight,” Leigh replied, “nor too tired to paint them, either. Lilies are a part of my creed. ‘Consider the lilies, how they grow.’”

“With their long rubbery stems, up out of mud mostly,” Thaine said carelessly. “I pretty nearly grew fast along with them down there, till I learned how to gather them a better way.”

The woodland shadows were thrust through with shafts of white moonbeams, giving a weird setting to the silent midnight hour. The odor of woods’ blossoms came with the moist, fresh breath of the May night. There was a little song of waters gurgling down the spillway that was once only a dry draw choked with wild plum bushes. The road wound picturesquely through the grove to a bridged driveway that separated the lakelet into two parts. A spread of silvery light lay on this driveway and Thaine checked his horse in the midst of it while the two looked at the waters.

“It’s all just silver or sable. There’s no middle tone,” Leigh said, looking at the sparkling moonbeams reflected on the face of the lake and the darkness of the shadowed surface beyond them.

“Isn’t there pink, or creamy, or something softer in those lilies right by the bank? I’m no artist, but that’s how it looks to a clod-hopper,” Thaine declared.

“You are an artist, or you wouldn’t catch that, where most anybody would see only steely white and dead black. It is the only color in this black and white woodsy place,” Leigh insisted, looking up at Thaine’s face in the shadow and down at her own white dress.

“There’s a bit of color in your cheeks,” Thaine said, as he studied the girl’s fair countenance, all pink and white in the moonlight.

“Oh, not the pretty blooming roses like Jo Bennington has,” Leigh said, smiling frankly and folding her hands contentedly in her lap.

Thaine recalled the seat under the honeysuckle, and Jo Bennington’s pleading eyes, and bewitching beauty, and the touch of her hand on his arm, and her willingness to be kissed. He was flattered by it all, for Jo was the belle of the valley, and Thaine thought himself in love with her. He knew that the other boys, especially Todd Stewart, Jr., envied him. And yet in this quiet hour in the silent grove, with the waters shimmering below them, the gentle dignity of the sweet-faced girl beside him, with her purity and simplicity wrapping her about, as the morning mists wrapped the far purple notches on the southwest horizon, gave to her presence there an influence he could not understand.

Thaine had never kissed any girl except Jo, had never cared enough for any other girl to think about it. But tonight there suddenly swept through his mind the thought of the joy that was waiting for some man to whom Leigh would give that privilege, and without any self-analysis (boys at nineteen analyze little) he began to hate the man who should come sometime to claim the privilege.

“Leigh, don’t you ever feel jealous of Jo?” He didn’t know why he asked the question.

Leigh gave a little laugh.

“Ought I?” she inquired, looking up. “She hasn’t anything I want.”

The deep violet eyes under the long lashes were beautiful without the flashing and sparkle of Jo Bennington’s coquettish gaze.

“That was an idiotic thing to ask,” Thaine admitted. “Why should you, sure enough?”

“I wish I had some of those lilies.” Leigh changed the subject abruptly.

“Hold the horse, then, and I’ll get them. I keep a hooked knife on a long stick hidden down here on purpose to cut them for me mummy, on occasion.”

Thaine jumped out of the buggy and ran down to the end of the driveway where the creamy lilies lay on the dark waters near the bank.

“Be careful of your dress,” he said, as he came back and handed a bunch of blossoms with their trailing wet stems up to Leigh. “Do you remember your Prince Quippi off in China, and your love letters, with old Grass River for postal service? Will you send me a letter down the old Kaw River when I go to the Kansas University this fall?”

“A sunflower letter like I used to send to Quippi?” Leigh asked.

“Any kind of a letter. I’ll miss you more than anything here, except my beloved chores about the farm,” Thaine responded.

“Jo will write all the letters you’ll have time to answer,” Leigh asserted.

“Oh, she says she’s going to Lawrence too, if her pa-paw is elected County Treasurer. We’ll be in the University together. You’ll just have to write to me, Leighlie.”

“Not unless you go to China. I’ll send you a letter there like I used to send to Prince Quippi.” There was a sudden pathos in her tone.

“Will you? Oh, Leigh, will you?” Thaine asked, gaily, looking down into her face, white and dainty in the soft light. “Quippi never answered one of them, but I would if I was over there, and I may go yet. There’s no telling.”

Leigh looked up with her eyes full of pain.

“Why, I didn’t mean to tease you,” Thaine declared.

“Thaine, Pryor Gaines is to start to China tomorrow. He’s been planning it for weeks and weeks. He’s going to be a missionary and he’ll never come back again – and – and there is so much for me to do when he is gone. He has been such a kind helper all these years. His refined taste has meant so much to me in the study of painting, and I need him now.”

Thaine gave a low whistle of surprise. Leigh’s eyes were full of tears, but Thaine would not have dared to take her in his arms, as he had taken Jo Bennington.

“Little neighbor, we’ve been playmates nearly all our lives. Can’t I help you in some way?” he asked gently.

“Yes, you can,” Leigh replied in a low voice. “There are some things I must do for Uncle Jim and when you are doing for people you can’t tell them nor depend on their advice. When Pryor is gone, may I ask you sometimes what to do? I won’t bother you often.”

Asher Aydelot had declared that Alice Leigh was the prettiest girl in Ohio in her day.

The pink-tinted creamy lilies looking up from the still surface of the lakelet were not so fair as the pink-tinted face of Alice Leigh’s daughter, framed in the soft brown shadows of her hair with a hint of gold in the ripples at the white temples. And behind the face, looking out through long-lashed violet eyes, was loving sacrifice and utter self-forgetfulness.

Thaine was nineteen and wise to give advice. A sudden thrill caught his pulse, mid-beat.

“Is that all? Can’t I do something?” he asked eagerly.

“That’s a great deal. And nobody can do for anybody. We have to do for ourselves.”

“You are not doing anything for Uncle Jim, then, I am to understand,” Thaine said.

But Leigh ignored his thrust, saying:

“When Pryor leaves, he doesn’t want to say good-by to anybody, not even to Uncle Jim. He says China is only a little way off, just behind the purple notches over there. I’m going to take him to the train tomorrow and then I’m going on to Wykerton on business. After that, I may need lots of advice.”

“Wykerton’s a joint-ridden place, but John Jacobs has put a good class of farmers around it. He’s such an old saloon hater, Hans Wyker’d like to kill him. But say, why not tell me now what you are about, so I can be looking up references and former judicial decisions handed down in similar cases?” Thaine asked lightly.

“Because it’s too long a story, and I must get Pryor to the eight o’clock limited,” Leigh said.

The crowing of chickens in a far away farmyard came faintly at that moment, and Thaine with a strange new sense of the importance of living, sent the black horses cantering down the trail to the old Cloverdale Ranch house.

Jo Bennington slept late. She had been up late. She had danced often and she had waited for Thaine’s homecoming. Yet, when she came downstairs in a white morning dress all sprinkled with little pink sprays, there was hardly a hint of weariness in her young face or in her quick footsteps.

“I’m glad you stayed, Jo,” Mrs. Aydelot greeted her. “This is ’the morning after the night before,’ and, as usual, the desertions equal the wounded and imprisoned. Asher and the men had to go across the river early to look after the fences and washouts on the lower quarter. And Rosie Gimpke decided to go home this morning as soon as breakfast was done. So it is left for us to get the house over the party. Not so easy as getting ready for it, especially without help.”

“Where’s Thaine?” Jo asked carelessly, though her face was a tattler.

“He took some colts over to John Jacobs’ ranch. He had Rosie ride one and he rode another and led two. They were a sight. I hoped you might see them go by your window. Thaine had his hat stuck on like a Dutchman’s and he puffed himself out and made up a regular Wyker face as he jogged along. And Rosie plumped herself down on that capering colt as though she shifted all responsibility for accidents upon it. The more it pranced about, the firmer she sat and the less concerned she was. I heard Thaine calling out, ‘Breakers ahead!’ as he watched her bring it back into the road in front of him with a sort of side kick of her foot.”

“What made Gimpke leave?” Jo asked, to cover her disappointment.

“She cut her hand badly last night. She insisted at first that she would help me today and go home later to stay till it gets well. Then she suddenly changed her mind. Possibly it was the spare-room bed,” Virginia said laughing. “When I told her not to wake you when she made up the other beds, she suddenly got homesick, her hand grew worse and she flew the premises. I’ll run up and attend to that bed while you finish your breakfast,” and Virginia left the room.

At that moment young Todd Stewart appeared on the side porch before the dining room door.

“Thaine stopped long enough to ask me to come over and move furniture for his mother,” Todd sang out. “He doesn’t think you were made to lift cupboards and carry chairs downstairs.”

“Oh, it’s his mother he’s thinking about,” Jo said with pretty petulance. In truth, she was angry with Thaine for taking Leigh home last night and for leaving home today.

“No, it’s his mother he’s ceased to love,” Todd said, coming inside. “He said he’d quit the old home and was moving his goods up to Wolf Creek for keeps. And with that fat tow-headed Gimpke girl sitting on the frisky bay colt as unconcerned as a bump on a log, it was the funniest sight I ever saw.”

Jo tossed her head contemptuously.

“Say, Curly Locks, Curly Locks, you ought to always sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam and wear a dress to breakfast with those little pink du-dads scattered over it.”

“Not if I was a farmer’s wife,” Jo responded quickly.

“Oh, Jo, do you really want to be a city girl?” Todd’s face was frankly sorrowful. “Could you never be satisfied on a farm?”

“I don’t believe I ever could,” Jo said prettily.

“Thaine’s a farmer all right, Jo.”

“He isn’t going to be one always,” Jo broke in quickly. “He’s going to the Kansas University and there’s no telling after that.”

“No, he’s just going to Wykerton, that’s all. Nay, he have went. Him and him fraulein. And say, there’s another pretty fraulein went up the trail just ahead of the Aydelot horse party. A sweetheart of a girl whom Thaine Aydelot took home after all last night.”

“I don’t care where Thaine goes,” Jo cried.

“And you don’t care for a farmer anyhow,” Todd said suavely.

“Oh, that depends on how helpful he is,” Jo responded tactfully.

Todd sprang up and began to fling the chairs about with extravagant energy in his pretense of being useful.

“Let’s help Mrs. Aydelot as swift as possible. It’s hot as the dickens this morning, and the prognostics are for a cyclone before twelve hours. It’s nearly eleven of ’em now. I’ll take you home when we are through. Thaine isn’t the whole of Grass River and the adjacent creeks and tributaries and all that in them is.”

CHAPTER XV

The Coburn Book

And I see, from my higher level,It is not the path but the paceThat wearies the back, and dims the eye,And writes the lines on the face.– Margaret E. Sangster.

Meanwhile the May sunshine beat hot upon the green prairie, and the promised storm gathered itself together behind the horizon where the three headlands were lost in an ash-colored blur. Wykerton, shut in by the broken country about Big Wolf Creek, was more uncomfortable than the open prairie. And especially was it uncomfortable in the “blind tiger” of the Wyker eating-house.

Today the men of the old firm of Champers & Co. were again holding a meeting in this little room that could have told of much lawless plotting if walls could only tell.

“It’s danged hot in here, Wyker. Open that window,” Darley Champers complained. “What kept you fellows so long, anyhow?”

“Business kep’ me, and Smith here, he stop to peek at a pretty girl for goot as ten minute,” Hans Wyker said jocosely.

Champers stared at Thomas Smith, whose small eyes gleamed back at him.

“Oh, I just turned to look at Miss Shirley in the dining room. Can’t a man look at a pretty girl if he is past forty-five? She didn’t see me, though.”

“Naw, she see nopotty but young Aydelot sitting mit her. Why you take oop precious time peekin’ trough der crack in der kitchen door? I be back in a minute vonce. Smitt haf business mit you,” Wyker declared as he turned to the kitchen again.

Left together, the two men sat silent a moment. Then Champers said with a frown:

“What do you want now? We’ve got no business with each other except as I am agent for your rents and mortgages.”

“You seem to fatten on them, or something,” Smith answered insinuatingly. “You lose no flesh with the years, I see.”

“I’ve little occasion to worry,” Darley Champers replied meaningly.

“Not with a fat income like yours and small returns to your employer who’s kept you all these years,” Smith began, but Darley Champers mentally blew up. It was in the bluffer’s game that he always succeeded best.

“Now, see here, dang you. Get to business. You and Wyker and me dissolved partnership long ago. I’ve been your agent years and years. I’ve did my best. I never got so rich you could notice it on my breath. I’m not a thief nor a murderer. I keep inside the law. I broke with you fellows years ago, except straight contract that’ll probate in any court. You are a bully in power and a coward out of it. What the devil do you want with me? I’m no bank. Be clear and quick about it and quit your infernal dodgin’ human beins like a cut-throat. I’ve signed your name to no end of papers for you when you wouldn’t put your own left-handed writin’ in sight. I have your written permit safe for doin’ it. I reckon somebody must a’ put that right hand of yours out of commission sometime. I’ll find out about it one of these days myself.”

Thomas Smith sat looking at the speaker with steady gaze. Many lines crossed his countenance now, but the crooked scar had not faded with time. In a coffin his would be the face of an old man. Alive, it was so colorless and uninteresting in expression that not one person in a hundred would turn to take a second look at him nor dream of the orgies of dissipation his years could recount. Withal, he had the shabby, run-down appearance as of a man in hard lines financially.

“I want money and I want it quick, or I’d not come clear out here. And you are going to get it for me. That Cloverdale quarter I’ve held grown to weeds so long you will sell to the first buyer now. Jim Shirley’s at the last of his string. I did what I wanted to do with him. He’ll never own a quarter again,” Smith spoke composedly.

“Yes, I guess you’re right. You’ve done him to his ruin. Jacobs has a mortgage on his home, too, and a Jew’s a Jew. He’ll close on Jim with a snap yet. It won’t be the first time he’s done it,” Darley Champers declared.

“And that niece, Tank’s girl, he was to protect for Alice Leigh?” Smith asked.

“Oh, eventually she’ll either marry some hired man, I reckon, or go to sewin’ or something like it for a livin’. She’s a danged pretty girl now, but girls fade quick,” Champers said.

For just one instant something like remorse swept Smith’s face. Then he hardened again as the ruling passion asserted itself.

“Serves her right,” he said in a tone so brutal that Champers remembered it.

“But I tell you I must have money. Two hundred dollars tonight and fourteen hundred inside of two weeks. And you’ll get it for me. You understand that. And listen, now.” Smith’s voice slowly uncoiled itself to Champers’ senses as a snake moves leisurely toward a bird it means to draw to itself. “You say you have signed my name for me and transacted business, handling my money. If you care to air the thing in court, I’m ready for you anytime. But do you dare? Well, bring me two hundred dollars before tomorrow and the other fourteen hundred inside of two weeks. And after this look out for yourself.”

The threat in the last words was indescribable, and Champers would have shuddered could he have seen Smith’s countenance as he left the room.

“So he taunts me with being a coward and a brute, a thief and a cut-throat; dares to strike me in the face when I’ve given him a living so long he’s forgotten who did it. I’m done with him. But he don’t dare to say a word.”

He shut his lips tightly and slowly clinched his hands.

“For wy you stare so at dat door yet? Where’s Champers?” Hans Wyker demanded as he came in.

“The game’s between us two now,” Thomas Smith declared, turning to Hans Wyker.

And a grim game was plotted then and there. Hans, who had been a perpetual law-breaker since the loss of his brewery business, had let his hatred of John Jacobs grow to a virulent poison in his system. While Thomas Smith, whose character Darley Champers had read truly, followed so many wrong paths down the years that conscience and manhood were strangers to him. From being a financier he had dropped to the employment of a brewers’ association. His commission was to tempt young men and boys to drink; to create appetites that should build up the brewing business for the future. In the game now, Smith was to deliver beer and whisky into Wyker’s hands. Wyker would do the rest. Whoever opposed him must suffer for his rashness.

It was cooler in the large dining-room where Thaine Aydelot and Leigh Shirley had met by chance at noontime. Leigh’s face wore a deeper bloom and her eyes were shining with the exciting events of the day: the going of Pryor Gaines and the business that had brought her to Wykerton. Something like pain stabbed suddenly into Thaine Aydelot’s mind as he caught sight of her, a surprise to find how daintily attractive she was in her cool summer gown of pale blue gingham and her becoming hat with its broad brim above her brown-gold hair.

“I didn’t expect to find you here,” Leigh said as Thaine took the chair opposite her at the little table.

“I came over to Little Wolf with Rosie Gimpke and some other colts. Then I walked over here to catch a ride to Careyville, if I could,” Thaine said carelessly.

“You can ride with me if you want to. I’ll be going soon after dinner,” Leigh suggested.

“Oh, I’ll want to all right. It may be well to start early. It’s so hot I expect there’ll be a storm before night,” Thaine suggested, wondering the while what Leigh’s business in Wykerton might be.

Darley Champers was in a fever when he came from his conference with Thomas Smith. Smith had played large sums into his hands in the first years of their partnership. Of late the sums had all gone the other way. But Champers was entangled enough to know that he must raise the money required, and the land was the only asset. Few things are more difficult to accomplish than to find a buyer for what must be sold.

At the office Leigh was waiting for him. “Mr. Champers, I am Leigh Shirley from the Cloverdale place on Grass River,” she said, looking earnestly up at him.

Darley Champers was no ladies’ man, but so far as in his coarse-grained nature lay, he was never knowingly rude to a woman, and Leigh’s manner and presence made the atmosphere of his office comfortingly different from the place he had just quitted. The white lilac bush in the yard behind the office whose blossoms sent a faint odor through the rear door, seemed to double its fragrance.