Winning the Wilderness

Thaine studied it carefully, but offered no comment.

“Doctor Carey, what brought you to the Philippines?” he asked suddenly.

“To look after you,” Carey replied frankly.

“Me! Do I need it?”

“You may. In that case I’ll be first aid to the injured,” Carey answered. “I’m to go with the ’Fighting Twentieth’ when it starts out of these hog wallows toward the insurgents’ capital. I must get back to Manila and pack for it. I have my orders to be ready in twenty-four hours.”

In twenty-four hours the “Fighting Twentieth” left its six-weeks’ habitation in the trenches and began its campaign northward, and the young-hearted, white-haired physician with magnetic smile and skillful judgment found a work in army service so broad and useful that he loved it for its opportunity.

Fortunately, Thaine had no need for “first aid” from Doctor Carey, and he saw the doctor only rarely in the sixty days that followed. When the two had time for each other again, Colonel Fred Funston’s name had been written round the world in the annals of military achievement, the resourceful, courageous, beloved leader of a band of fighters from the Kansas prairies who were never defeated, never driven back, never daunted by circumstances. Great were the pen of that historian that could fittingly set forth all the deeds of daring and acts of humanity of every company under every brave captain, for they “all made history, and left records of unfading glory.”

The regiment had reached the Rio Grande, leaving no unconquered post behind it. Under fire, it had forded the Tulijan, shoulder-deep to the shorter men. Under fire, it had forged a way through Guiguinto and Malolos. Under fire, it had swam the Marilao and the Bagbag. And now, beyond Calumpit, the flower of Aguinaldo’s army was massed under General Luna, north of the Rio Grande. A network of strong fortifications lay between it and the river, and it commanded all the wide water-front.

As the soldiers waited orders on the south side of the river, Doctor Horace Carey left his work and sought out Thaine’s company, impelled by the same instinct that once turned him from the old Sunflower Trail to find Virginia Aydelot lost on the solitary snow-covered prairie beyond Little Wolf Creek.

“What’s before you now?” the doctor asked, as he and Thaine sat on the ground together.

“The Rio Grande now. We must be nearly to the end if we rout General Luna here,” Thaine replied.

“You’ve stood it well. I guess you don’t need me after all,” Carey remarked.

“I always need you, Doctor Carey,” Thaine said earnestly. “Never more than now. When I saw Captain Clarke wounded and carried away on the other side of the Tulijan, and could only say ’Captain, my captain,’ I needed you. When Captain Elliot was killed, I needed you; and when Captain William Watson was shot and wouldn’t stay dead because we need him so, and when Metcalf, Bishop, Agnew, Glasgow, Ramsey, and Martin, and all the other big-brained fellows do big things, I need you again. Life is a great game; I’m glad I’m in it.”

Horace Carey had never before seen Thaine’s bright face so alert with manly power and beauty and thoughtfulness. War had hardened him. Danger had tried him. Human needs, larger than battle lines alone can know, had strengthened him. Vision of large purposes had uplifted him. As he stood before the white-haired physician whom he had loved from earliest memory, Carey murmured to himself:

“Can the world find grander soldiers to fight its battles than these sun-browned boys from our old Kansas prairies?”

“We are going across to Luna’s stronghold in a few minutes. Watch him go into eclipse before Fred Funston. If you stand right here, you’ll see me helping at the job. Good-by,” Thaine declared, and, at the bugle call, fell into his place.

Beyond the river a steady fire was opened on the American forces, and no bridge nor boat was there by which to cross. Doctor Carey stood watching the situation with a strange sense of unrest in his mind.

“There must be rafts,” declared Colonel Funston.

And there were rafts, hastily made of bamboo poles.

“Somebody must swim across and fasten a cable over there by which to tow the rafts across. Who will volunteer? You see what’s before you,” Funston asserted.

Horace Carey saw two soldiers, Corporal Trembly and Private Edward White, seize the cable, plunge into the river, and strike out directly toward the farther side filled with Filipino forces. Rifle balls split the water about them. Bullet after bullet cut the air above them. Shot after shot from the ambushed enemy hurtled toward them. The two young men surged steadily ahead, bent only on reaching the bank and fastening the cable. They knew only one word, duty, and they did the thing they had agreed to do. Once across the river, they ran nimbly up the bank and made fast the rope’s end, while cheer after cheer rose from their comrades watching them, and the battle cry of the Fighting Twentieth, “Rock Chalk, Jay Hawk, K. U.,” went pulsing out across the waters of the Rio Grande as full and strong as in the days when it rolled out on the university campus on far-away Mount Oread, beside the Kaw.

The rafts sped along the cable, and squad after squad went pell mell into General Luna’s stronghold, under stubborn fire from the frantic rebels.

Thaine Aydelot was on the last raft to cross the river. Doctor Carey watched with eager gaze as the last men reached the farther bank. He saw them scrambling up from the water’s edge. He saw Thaine turn back to lift up a comrade blinded, but not injured, by the smoke of a gun. He saw the two start forward. Then the faint “ping” of a Mauser came to his ears, and Thaine threw up his hands and fell backward into the water and sank from sight, while the other soldiers, unknowing, rushed forward into battle.

For a moment, Horace Carey stood like a statue, then he sprang into the river and swam against the fire of the hidden foe to where Thaine Aydelot had disappeared. Ten minutes later, while Luna’s forces were trying vainly to resist the daring Americans, Thaine Aydelot lay on a raft which Carey, with a Red Cross aid, was pulling toward the south bank.

When the Fighting Twentieth soldiers were relieved from service, and turned their faces gladly toward the Kansas prairies, whither hundreds of proud fathers and mothers and wives and sweethearts were waiting to give eager, happy welcome, Thaine Aydelot lay hovering between life and death in the hospital at Manila. The white-haired doctor who had saved him from the waters of the Rio Grande watched hourly beside him, relying not so much on the ministrations of his calling as in his trust in an Infinite Father, through whom at last the sick may be made whole.

CHAPTER XX

The Crooked Trail

Life may be given in many ways,And loyalty to truth be sealedAs bravely in the closet as the field.– Lowell.

“Here’s yo’ letter from the Fillippians, Mis’ Virginia; Mr. Champers done bring hit for you all.” Boanerges Peeperville fairly danced into the living room of the Sunflower Inn. “They ain’t no black mournin’ aidge bindin’ it round nuthah, thank the good Lawd foh that.”

Virginia Aydelot opened the letter with trembling fingers. It was only a brief page, but the message on it was big with comfort for her.

“It is from Horace,” she said, as her eyes followed the lines. “He was with Thaine when he wrote it. Thaine is perfectly well again and busy as ever. He and Horace seem to be needed over there yet awhile. Isn’t it wonderful how Thaine ever lived through that dreadful bullet wound and fever?”

“I jus’ wondeh how you all stand up undeh such ’flictions. Seems to me a motheh done wilt down, but they don’t. Mothehs is the bravest things they is,” Bo Peep declared with a broad grin of admiration.

“Oh, we get schooled to it. Asher’s mother waited through six years while he was in army service; and remember how long I waited in Virginia for him to come back to me! I wondered at the test of my endurance then. I know now it was to prepare me for Thaine’s time of service for his country.”

“I done remember, all right, ’bout that time in ol’ Virginia, an’ the day I taken you the letteh up in the little glen behind the ol’ mansion house whah hit wah so cool and the watah’s so cleah. Misteh Horace wah home that day, too. Say, Mis’ Virginia, did – did he done mention my name anywhar in that letteh?”

The pathos of the dark face was pitiful.

“‘My best love to Bo Peep.’” Virginia pointed to the line as she read.

“Kin I please have this huh envelope?” Bo Peep pleaded, and, clutching it as a sacred treasure, he said: “Mis’ Virginia, didn’t I done tellen you Misteh Thaine would come back?”

“How did you know?” Virginia asked with shining eyes.

“Becuz of what Doctoh Horace lef for me to tell you. It cain’t do no hahm to tell hit thus fah.”

Bo Peep hesitated, and Virginia looked curiously at him.

“Doctor Horace won’t never come back. I tol’ you that sufficiency times. When he lef, he say, ’Tel Mis’ Virginia, if I don’t come back, I’se done goin’ to be with Misteh Thaine an’ take care of him, ’cause I love the boy, – hit cain’t do no hahm to tell you that while Misteh Horace still writen to us. An’ didn’t he tak’ care of Misteh Thaine? Didn’t he lef his place an’ go down to that Rigrand Riveh, an’ didn’t he see Misteh Thaine fall back with a bullet pushin’ him right into the watah? Yes, an’ be drownded if Doctoh Horace hadn’t done swum right then and fish him out. An’ didn’t he stay night time an’ day time right by the blessed boy, till he’s pullin’ him out of dangeh of death’s wing? Oh, yo’ son done comin’ back ’cause Misteh Horace say he sho’ goin’ jus’ tak’ care of him.”

“But, Bo Peep, why do you not believe we’ll have Horace here again?” Virginia asked.

The black man only shook his head mournfully as he answered determinedly, “Ef yo’ saves a life, you has to give one for hit, mos’ eveh time, an’ mo’ specially in the Fillippians whah they’s so murderful and slaughterous.”

“Oh, you ought not think that way,” Virginia urged. “Run quick, now, and take the news to Asher. I don’t know where he is this morning.”

“He’s talkin’ to Mr. Dabley Champehs out to the barn,” Bo Peep said as he hurried away.

Asher Aydelot was standing before the big barn doors when Darley Champers turned from the main road and drove into the barnyard. It was a delicious April morning, with all the level prairie lands smiling back at the skies above them, and every breath of the morning breeze bearing new vigor and inspiration in its caressing touch.

“Good morning, Champers; fine morning to live,” Asher called out cheerily.

“Mornin’, Aydelot; fine day, fine! Miss Shirley told me last fall she got her first inspiration for buyin’ a quarter of land with nothin’ and faith, and makin’ it pay for itself, out of one of Coburn’s Agricultural Reports. I reckon if a book like that could inspire a woman, they’s plenty in a mornin’ like this to inspire old Satan to a more uprighteous line of goods than he generally carries. I never see the country look better. Your wheat is tremendous. How’s the country look to you?” Champers responded.

“I can remember when it looked a good deal worse,” Asher replied. “The Coburn Reports must have helped to turn bare prairie and weedy boom lots into harvest fields.”

The two men had seated themselves on the sloping driveway before the barn doors. Asher was chewing the tender joint of a spear of foxtail grass, and Champers had lighted a heavy cigar.

“You don’t smoke, I believe,” he said cordially, “or I’d insist on offering the mate.”

“No, I just chew,” Asher replied, as he bent the foxtail thoughtfully in his fingers and looked out toward the wheat fields already rippling like waves under the morning breeze.

“Say, Aydelot, do you remember the day I come down this valley and tried my danged best to get you to sell out for a song? I’ve done some pretty scaly things, all inside the letter of the law, since then, but never anything that’s stuck in my craw like that. I guess you ain’t forgot it, neither?”

“I remember more of those first years than of these later ones, and I haven’t forgotten when you came to the Grass River schoolhouse one hot Sunday about grasshopper time, but I don’t believe anybody holds it against you. You were out for business just as we were,” Asher replied with a genial smile.

“Say! D’recollect what you said to me when I invited you to cast your glims over this very country, a burnt-up old prairie that day, so scorched it was too dry and hot to cut up into town lots for an addition to Hades?”

Asher laughed now.

“No, I don’t remember anything about that. It was just the general line of events that stayed with me,” he said.

“Well, I do; and I’ll never forget the look in your eyes when you said it, neither. I’d told you, as I say, just to look at this God-forsaken old plain and tell me what you see. And you looked, like you was glimpsin’ heaven a’most, and just said sorter solemn like an’ prophetic: ‘I see a land fair as the Garden of Eden, with grazing herds on broad meadows, and fields on fields of wheat, and groves and little lakes and rivers – a land of comfortable homes and schoolhouses and churches, and no saloons nor breweries.’ And then I broke in and told you I see a danged fool, and you says, ‘Come down here in twenty-five year and make a hunt for me then.’ And, by golly, Aydelot, here I am. You’ve everlastingly conquered the prairies for sure, and you are a young man, not fifty-five yet.”

“Well, you can see most of those things that I saw that day out yonder, can’t you?”

Asher’s eyes followed the waving young wheat and the blossoming orchards, the grove, full of birds’ songs, and the line of Grass River running deeper year by year. Then he looked at his hard, brown hands and thought of the toil and faith and hope that had gone into the conquest.

“Yes, I’m still among the middle-aged,” he said, straightening with his habitual military dignity of bearing. “But I don’t know about this everlasting conquest of the prairies. There’s still some of it waiting over beyond those headlands in the open range where John Jacobs has a big holding. I’ll never feel that I have conquered until my boy proves himself in civil life as well as on the battlefield. If I can bring him back when he is through with the Orient, then, Darley Champers, I will have done something beside subdue the soil. Through him, I’ll keep the wilderness from ever getting hold again. If we live so narrowly that our children hate the lines we follow and will not go on and do still bigger things than we have done, do we really make a success of life?”

At that moment Bo Peep appeared with Doctor Carey’s letter, and the subject shifted to the problems of the far East.

“We aren’t the only people who are having trouble,” Asher said. “I read in the papers that the Boxer uprising that began in southern China last year is spreading northward and making no end of disturbance.”

“What’s them Boxers wantin’? Are they a band of prize ring fellers?” Darley Champers asked.

“Pryor Gaines writes Jim Shirley that they are a secret order of fanatics bent on stamping out all Christianity and all western ideas of advancement in the Orient. Things begin to look ugly in China, even from this distance. When a band of religious fanatics like the Boxers go on the warpath, their atrocities make a Cheyenne raid or a Kiowa massacre look like a football game. I hope Pryor will not be in their line of march.”

“Pryor Gaines’d better stayed right here. It’s what’s likely to happen to a man who goes missionarying too far, and we could ’a used him here.”

It was an unusual concession for Darley Champers to make regarding the church, and Asher looked keenly at him.

“Say, Aydelot,” Champers said suddenly, “you have more influence with John Jacobs ’n anybody else, I know. If you see the Jew, pass it on to him that Wyker’s at his old cut-ups again over in Wykerton, and he’s danged bitter against Jacobs. I can help him on the side like I did before, but the Jew’s got hold of enough over there now to run things, with ownin’ land all round and holdin’ mortgages on town property just to keep joints out of ’em. I do no end of business for Jacobs now. Never had dealin’s with a straighter man. But he’d better look out for Wyker. The Dutchman’s insides is all green with poison, he’s hated Jacobs so many years.”

“I guess John will make it hard on him if they come to blows again. The jail sentence and fine Jacobs fastened on him let Wyker down easy. John Jacobs is one of the state’s big men,” Asher responded.

“We lost another big man when we let Doc Carey go,” Champers went on. “I used to set up nights and rest myself hatin’ him. He done the biggest missionary work in me the two weeks I stayed at his house ever was done for a benighted heathen. I hated to see him go.” The sadness of the tone was genuine. “But I mustn’t be hangin’ round here all the mornin’; I’ve got other things to do. Hope your boy’ll keep a-goin’ till his term’s out. Goodday!” And Champers was gone.

“Till his term’s out!” Asher repeated with a smile. “Wouldn’t that six-footer of a soldier boy, whose patriotism burns like a furnace, see the joke to that! Till he gets his stripes off and forgets the lock-step! My Thaine, who is giving a young man’s strength of body and inspiration of soul to his country’s service! But Carey did do a missionary work in Champers. The fellow was crooked enough ’inside the law always,’ as he said, but no more out of line than scores of reputable business men are today. And the fact that he’s Jacobs’ agent now measures the degree of trustworthiness Carey has helped to waken in him.”

Darley Champers’ business took him down the river to the Cloverdale Ranch, where he found Leigh Shirley training the young vines up the trellis by the west porch.

“You got a mighty pretty place here; just looks like Jim Shirley,” Champers declared as he greeted the young gardener.

“Yes, Uncle Jim is never so happy as when he is puttering about the lawn and garden,” Leigh answered.

“How’s your alfalfa doin’?” Champers asked as he turned toward the level stretch of rich green alfalfa fields. “Danged money-maker for you,” he added jovially.

“We’ll clear the place with the first cutting this year. It’s just the thing for Uncle Jim,” Leigh asserted.

“Yep, Jim’s in clover – alfalfa, ruther. You had a good business head when you run your bluff some years ago, an’ you wan’t only nineteen then. You walked into my place an’ jest bought that land on sheer bluff.” Champers laughed uproariously, but he grew sober in the next minute.

“Miss Shirley,” he said gravely, “I ain’t got much style nor sentiment in my makin’s, but I’ve honestly tried to be humane by widders an’ orphans. I’ve done men to keep ’em from doin’ me, or jest ’cause they was danged easy, but I never wronged no woman, not even my wife, who divorced me years ago back East ’cause I wouldn’t turn my old mother out o’ doors, but kep’ her and provided for her long as she lived.”

Nobody in Kansas had ever heard Darley Champers mention his home relations before. Leigh looked at him gravely, and the sympathy in her deep blue eyes was grateful to the uncultured man before her.

“Miss Shirley, I ain’t wantin’ to meddle none, but I come down here to ask you if you know anything about your father?”

Leigh gave a start and stared at her questioner, but her woman’s instinct told her that only kindly purpose lay back of his question.

He had sat down on the edge of the porch and Leigh stood leaning against the trellis, clutching the narrow slats, as she looked at him.

“I think he is dead,” she answered slowly. “Uncle Jim says he must be. He was a bad man, made bad not by blood but by selfishness. The Shirleys are a fine family.”

“Excuse me for sayin’ it, Miss, but you took every good trait of that family, an’ Nature jest shied every bad trait as far from you as it took the sins of our old savage Anglo-Saxon ancestors off of our heads; them that used to kill an’ eat their neighborin’ tribes, like the Filipinos, they was. Don’t never forget that you’re a Shirley an’ not a Tank. Your grandma’s name was Tank, I’ve been told.”

Leigh made no response, but something in her face and in the poise of her figure bespoke the truth of Darley Champers’ words.

“I jest come down to tell you,” he continued, “that the man I represented when I sold you this quarter, he represented your father, Tank Shirley, and Tank got it through this man away from Jim out of pure hate. I sold it back to you out of pure spite to Tank’s agent, who was naggin’ me. If your father is dead, there’d ought to be somethin’ comin’ back, as the money you paid for the land would help you some if we could get it back. I come as a friend. I’m kinder in Doc Carey’s shoes while he’s gone, you see. You’ve got the land as good as paid for. It will be clear, you say, by June. Buyin’ it of your own father, if there’s any estate left of him, you’d ought to have it. Money’s always a handy commodity, an’ I’d like to see you git what’s your’n after your plucky bluff and winnin’. You could use it, I reckon?”

“We need it very much,” Leigh assured him.

“Say, would you mind tellin’ me if you find out anything about your father’s whereabouts or anything?” Champers queried.

“Yes, I will,” Leigh replied, “but will you tell me what you know about him; you must know something?”

It was Champers’ turn to start now. “N-not much; not as much as I’m goin’ to know, and it’s not for my profit, neither. I don’t make money out of women’s needs. I never made a cent on this sale to you, but it was worth it to get to do that agent once,” Champers declared.

Leigh waited quietly.

“I’ll be in better shape inside of two days to tell you something definite. I wish Carey was here. Do you know where he got the money he loaned you?”

“I never asked him,” Leigh answered.

“He borrowed it of Miss Jane Aydelot of Cloverdale, Ohio.”

Champers did not mean to be brutal, but the sharp cry of pain and the look of anguish on Leigh Shirley’s face told how grievous was the wound his words had made.

“Why, you paid it all back; she ain’t lost nothin’. Besides, I heard with my own ears folks sayin’ she’d always loved you and it was a pity Jim ever took you away from her. She might ’a done well by you, they said. You got no wrong due. Lord knows you’ve paid it conscientiously enough,” Darley Champers insisted.

“Mr. Champers, will you be sure to tell me all you know as soon as possible? Meantime, I’ll try to find out something to tell you.”

“I sure will. Goodday to you.”

When Champers rose to leave, Leigh put out her hand to him, and the winning smile that made all Grass River folk love her as they loved her uncle Jim now touched the best spot in the heart of the man before her.

“God knows it’s a lot better to do for folks than to do ’em, and in the end I believe you prosper more at it. My business, except the infernal boom days, never was so good as it’s been since I had that time with Carey, and it’s all clean business, too, not a smirch on it. Wish I could forget a few things I’ve did, though.” So Darley Champers thought, as he drove up the old Grass River trail in the glory of the April morning.

That morning, Leigh Shirley wrote a long letter to Jane Aydelot of Cloverdale, Ohio. Leigh had written many letters to her before, but never one with a plea like this. Miss Jane had mentally grown up with Leigh and had built many a romance about her, which was only hinted at in the letters she received.

In the letter of this morning, Leigh begged for all the information Miss Jane could give concerning her father, and further, she pleaded boldly for the reconciliation of the Aydelot family, a thing she had never written of before. Five days later her letter came back “unclaimed” with a brief statement from the Cloverdale postmaster that Miss Jane Aydelot had passed away on the day the letter was written, much beloved, etc.

John Jacobs had no need to be warned by Asher Aydelot of Hans Wyker’s doings. He knew all of Wyker’s movements through Rosie Gimpke. Jacobs had been kind to Rosie, whose bare, loveless life knew few kindnesses, and she harbored the memory of a good deed as her grandfather harbored his hatred. Moreover, the Wyker joint had played havoc with the Gimpke family. Her father had died from a fall received in a drunken brawl there. Two brothers, too drunk to know better, had driven into Little Wolf in a spring flood and been drowned. A sister had married a drinking man who regularly beat her in his regular sprees. For a heavy-footed, heavy-brained, fat German girl, Rosie Gimpke could get into action with surprising alacrity for the safety of one who had shown her a kindness.