Winning the Wilderness

Slowly Darley Champers read. Then, laying down the pages, he said as slowly: “‘Unknown’ in the Grass River graveyard. ’Unknown’ to Jim Shirley and Asher Aydelot, whose eyes he’d never let see him. I understand now, why. Known to me as Thomas Smith, an escaped defaultin’ bank cashier who didn’t commit suicide. Known to the late Miss Aydelot as Tank Shirley’s murderer. If the devil knows where to git on the track of that scoundrel an’ locate him properly in hell, he’ll do it without my help. By the Lord Almighty, I’ll never tell what I know. An’ this paper goes to ashes here. Oh, Caesar! If I could only burn up the recollection that I was ever low-down an’ money-grubbin’ enough to collute with such as him for business. I’m danged glad I had that quarter kep’ in Leigh’s name ’stead of Jim’s. That’s why Thomas Smith threatened and didn’t act. He didn’t dare to go against Leigh as long as Jane Aydelot was livin’.”

He stuck a blazing match to the letter and watched it crumple to ashes on the rusty stove-hearth. Then he carefully swept the ashes on a newspaper, and, opening his doors again, he scattered them in the dusty main street of Wykerton.

That afternoon Champers went again to the Cloverdale Ranch. Leigh was alone, busy with her brushes and paint-board in the seat on the lawn where Thaine Aydelot had found her on the summer day painting sunflowers. The first little sunflower was blooming now by the meadow fence.

“Don’t git up, Miss Shirley. Keep your seat, mom. I dropped in on a little business. I’m glad to set out here.”

Champers took off his hat and fanned his red face as he sat on the ground and looked out at the winding river bordered by alfalfa fields.

“Nice stand you got out there.” He pointed with his hat toward the fields. “Where’s Jim?”

“He and Asher Aydelot have gone to Careyville to settle some of John Jacobs’ affairs. They and Todd Stewart are named as trustees in the will,” Leigh replied.

She had laid aside her brushes and sat with her hands folded in her lap. Champers pulled up a spear of blue-grass and chewed it thoughtfully. At length he said:

“Yes, I knew that. Jacobs left no end of things in the way of property for me to look after. I’ll report to them now. I seem to be general handy man. Doc Carey left matters with me, too.”

“Yes?” Leigh said courteously.

“Well, referrin’ to that matter regardin’ your father we spoke of the other day, I find, through Doc Carey’s helpin’ an’ some other ways, that your father, Mr. Tank Shirley, was accidentally drowned in Clover Creek, Ohio, some years ago. So far as I can find out, he died insolvent. If I discover anything further, I’ll let you know.”

Leigh sat very still, her eyes on the far-away headlands that seemed like blue cloud banks at the moment.

“Had you heard of Miss Jane Aydelot’s demise? I reckon you had, of course. But do you know what her intentions were?”

Leigh looked steadily at her questioner. All her life she had had a way of keeping her own counsel, nor was it ever easy to know what her thoughts might be.

“Miss Shirley, the late Miss Jane Aydelot trusted Doc Carey to look after her affairs. Doc Carey, he trusted me to take his place. Can you trust me to be the last link of the chain in doin’ her business? My grammar’s poor, but my hands is clean now, thank the Lord!”

“Yes, Mr. Champers, I am sure of your uprightness.”

Leigh did not dream how grateful these words were to the man before her, honestly trying to beat back to better ideals of life.

“When I was a very little girl,” Leigh went on, “Miss Jane told me I was to be her heir.”

Darley gave a start, but as Leigh’s face was calm, he could only wonder how much she had remembered.

“All the years since I’ve lived in Kansas I’ve been kept in mind in many ways of her favor toward me. I came to know long ago that she was determined to leave me all the old Aydelot estate. And I knew also that it should have been Asher’s, not mine.”

Darley thought of Thaine, and, dull as he was, he read in a flash a romance that many a finer mind might have missed.

“Well, sufferin’ catfish!” he said to himself. “Danged plucky girl; forges along an’ bucks me into sellin’ her this ranch an’ sets it into alfalfy an’ sets up Jim Shirley for life, ’cause putterin’ in the garden an’ bein’ kind to the neighbors is the limit to that big man’s endurance. An’ this pretty girl, knowin’ that Aydelot property ought to be Thaine Aydelot’s, just turns it down, an’, by golly, I’ll bet she turns him down, too, fearin’ he wouldn’t feel like takin’ it. An’ he’s clear hiked to the edges of Chiny. Well, it’s a danged queer world. I’m glad I’ve only got Darley Champers to look out for. The day I see them two drivin’ out of Wykerton towards Little Wolf, the time she’d closed the Cloverdale ranch deal, I knowed the white lilac mother used to love was sweeter in my back lot.”

“I could not take Miss Jane’s property and be happy,” Leigh went on. “Besides, I can earn a living. See what my brushes can do, and see the secret I learned in the Coburn book.”

Leigh held up the sketch she was finishing, then pointed to the broad alfalfa acres, refreshingly green in the May sunlight.

“Well, I brought down a copy of the late Miss Aydelot’s will that she left with Doc Carey, who is goin’ to Chiny in a few days, him an’ Thaine Aydelot, Doc writes me. An’ you can look over it. I’ve got to go to Cloverdale next week an’ settle things there, an’ see that the probatin’s are straight. Lemme hear from you before I go. I must be gettin’ on. Danged fine country, this Grass River Valley. Who’d a’ thought it back in the seventies when Jim Shirley an’ Asher Aydelot squatted here? Goodday.”

Left alone, Leigh Shirley opened the big envelope holding the will of Francis Aydelot and read in it the stern decree that no child of Virginia Thaine should inherit the Aydelot estate in Ohio.

“That’s why Miss Jane couldn’t leave it to Asher’s son,” she murmured.

Then she read the will of the late Jane Aydelot. When she lifted her face from its pages, her fair cheeks were pink with excitement, her deep violet eyes were shining, her lips were parted in a glad smile. She went down to the meadow fence and plucked the first little golden sunflower from its stem, and stood holding it as she looked away to where the three headlands stood up clear and shimmering in the light of the May afternoon. That night two letters were hurried to the postoffice. One went no farther than Wykerton to tell Darley Champers that Leigh would heartily approve of any action he might take in the business that was taking him to Ohio.

CHAPTER XXII

The Farther Wilderness

And beyond the baths of sunset found new worlds.– London.

Dr. Carey and Thaine Aydelot sat watching the play of a fountain in a moonlit garden of tropical loveliness. In the Manila hospital Thaine had gone far down the Valley of the Shadow of Death before he reached a turning point. But youth, good blood, a constitution seasoned by camp and field, the watchful care of his physician, and the blessing of the Great Physician, from whom is all health, at last prevailed, and he came back sturdily to life and strength.

As the two men sat enjoying the hour Dr. Carey suddenly asked:

“After this hospital service, what next?”

“How soon does this involuntary servitude end?” Thaine inquired.

“A fortnight will do all that is possible for us,” Carey answered.

“Then I’ll enlist with the regulars,” Thaine declared.

“Do you mean to follow a military life?” Carey inquired, bending forward to watch the play of light on the silvery waters, unconscious of the play of moonbeams on his silvery hair.

“No, not always,” Thaine responded.

“Then why don’t you go home now?” Carey went on.

Thaine sat silent for some minutes. Then he rose to his full height, the strong, muscular, agile embodiment of military requirement. On his face the firing line had graven a nobility the old brown Kansas prairies had never seen.

He did not know how to tell Dr. Carey, because he did not yet fully understand himself, that war to him must be a means, not an end, to his career; nor that in the long quiet hours in the hospital the call of the Kansas prairies, half a world away, was beginning to reach his ears, the belief that the man behind the plow may be no less a patriot than the man behind the gun; that the lifelong influence of his farmer father and mother was unconsciously winning him back to the peaceful struggle with the soil. At length he said slowly:

“Dr. Carey, when I saw Lieutenant Alford brought in I counted the cost again. Only American ideals of government and civilization can win this wilderness. For this Alford’s blood was shed. He wrote to his mother on Christmas day that he was studying here to get his Master’s Degree from the Kansas University. I saw him just after he had received his diploma for that Degree. I was a fairly law-abiding civilian. The first shot of the campaign last February began in me what Alford’s sacrifice completed. I am waiting to see what next. But I have one thing firmly fixed now. Warfare only opens the way for the wilderness winners to come in and make a kingdom. The Remington rifle runs back the frontier line; the plowshare holds the land at last. I want, when my service here is done, to go back to the wheatfields and the cornfields. I want to smell the alfalfa and see the prairie windbreaks and be king of a Kansas farm. I’ve lost my ambition for gold lace. I want a bigger mental ring of growth every year, and I believe the biggest place for me to get this will be with my feet on the prairie sod. Meantime, I shall reenlist, as I said.”

“Sit down, Thaine, and let me ask you one question,” Dr. Carey said.

The young man dropped to his seat again.

“When your service is done is there anything to hold you from going straight to the Grass River Valley again?”

Thaine leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head while he looked steadily at the splashing waters before him as he said frankly:

“Yes, there is. When I go back I want Leigh Shirley – and it’s no use wanting.”

“Thaine, you were a law-abiding civilian at home. The university made you a student. You came out here a fearless soldier to fight your country’s enemies. Alford’s death made you a patriot who would plant American ideals in these islands. May I tell you that there is still one more lesson to learn?”

Thaine looked up inquiringly.

“You must learn to be a Christian. You must know what service for humanity means. Then the call to duty will be a bugle note of victory wherever that duty may be. You needn’t hunt for opportunity to prove this. The opportunity is hurrying toward you now from out of the Unknown.”

The fine head with the heavy masses of white hair seemed halo-crowned at that moment. It was as he appeared that night that Thaine Aydelot always remembers him. Two weeks later Thaine enlisted in the Fourteenth United States Infantry, stationed in Luzon. Dr. Carey was also enrolled in its hospital staff. In July the regiment was ordered from the Philippines to join the allied armies of the World Powers at Tien-Tsin in a northern Chinese province, where the Boxer forces were massing about Peking. And Thaine’s opportunity for learning his greatest lesson came hurrying toward him from out of the Unknown.

This notorious Boxer uprising, gone now into military annals, had reached the high tide of its power. Beginning in the southern province of China, it spread northward, menacing the entire Empire. A secret sect at first, it was augmented by the riffraff that feeds on any new, and especially lawless, body; by deserters disloyal to the imperial government; by the ignorant and the unthinking; by the intimidated and the intimidating. It enrolled an armed force of one hundred and seventy-five thousand soldiers. Its purposes were fanatical. It aimed by the crudest means to root out every idea of modern life and thought in China; every occidental invention, every progressive method of society, every scientific discovery for the betterment of humanity. And especially did it aim to put to death every native Chinese Christian, to massacre every missionary of the Christ, and to drive out or destroy every foreign citizen in China. Its resources were abundant, its equipment was ample, its methods unspeakably atrocious. Month after month the published record of this rebellion was sickening – its unwritten history beyond human imagining. Impenetrable were its walled cities, countless in numbers, unknown the scenes of its vast plains and rivers and barren fields and mountain fastnesses. Fifteen thousand native Christians and hundreds of foreigners were brutally massacred. At last it centered its strength about the great city of Peking. And a faint, smothered wail for deliverance came from the Foreign Legation shut in behind beleaguered walls inside that city to starve or perish at the hands of the bloody Boxers.

Very patiently the World Powers waited and warned the Chinese leaders of a day of retribution. Fanatics are fanatics because they cannot learn. The conditions only whetted the Boxers to greater barbarity. They believed themselves invincible and they laughed to scorn all thought of foreign interference. Then came the sword of the Lord and of Gideon to the battle lines at Tien-Tsin on the Peiho River, as it came once long ago to the valley of Jezreel.

In the mid-afternoon of an August day Thaine Aydelot heard the bugle note calling the troops to marching order. Thaine was fond of the bugler, a little fifteen-year-old Kansas boy named Kemper, because he remembered that Asher Aydelot had been a drummer boy once when he was no older than “Little Kemper,” as the regiment called him.

“I wish you were where my father is now, Kemper,” Thaine said as the boy skipped by him.

“Where’s that? It can’t be hell or he’d be with us,” Little Kemper replied.

“No, he’s in Kansas,” Thaine said.

“Oh, that’s right next door to heaven, but I can’t go just yet. There’s too much doing here,” the little bugler declared as he hurried away.

Young as he was, Little Kemper was the busiest member of the regiment. Life with him was a continual “doing” and he did it joyously and well.

“There’s something doing here.” Thaine hardly had time to think it as the armies came into their places. It was the third day after the regiment had reached Tien-Tsin. Along the Peiho river lay a sandy plain with scant tillage and great stretches of barren lands. Here and there were squalid villages with now and then a few more pretentious structures with adobe brick walls and tiled roofs. Everywhere was the desolation of ignorance and fear, saddening enough, without the Boxer rebellion to intensify it with months of dreadful warfare.

As Thaine fell into his place he thought of the Aydelot wheatfields and of the alfalfa that Leigh Shirley’s patient judgment had helped to spread over the Cloverdale Ranch. And even in the face of such big things as he was on his way to meet the conquest of the prairie soil seemed wonderful.

Big things were waiting him now, and his heart throbbed with their bigness as his regiment took its place. It was a wonderful company that fell into line and swung up the Peiho river that August afternoon. The world never saw its like before, and may never see it again. Not wonderful in numbers, for there were only sixteen thousand of the allied armies, all told, to pit themselves against an armed force able to line up one hundred and sixteen thousand against them. Not numbers, but varying nationalities, varying races, strange confusion of tongues, with one common purpose binding all into one body, made the company forming on the banks of the Peiho a wonderful one.

Thaine’s regiment was drawn up at an angle with the line, ready to fall into its place among the reserves, and the young Kansan watched the flower of the world’s soldiery file along the way.

In the front were the little brown Japanese Cavalry, Artillery, and Infantry – men who in battle make dying as much their business as living. Beside these were the English forces, the Scotch Highlanders, the Welsh Fusiliers, the Royal Artillery, all in best array. Behind them the Indian Empire troops, the Sikh Infantry with a sprinkling of Sepoys and the Mounted Bengalese Lancers. Then followed, each in its place, the Italian marines and foot soldiery, the well-groomed French troops from all branches of the military; the stalwart, fair-haired Germans, soldiers to a finish in weight and training; the Siberian Cossacks and the Russian Infantry and Cavalry, big, brutal looking men whom women of any nation might fear. In reserve at the last of the line were the American forces, the Ninth and Fourteenth Regiments of Infantry, the Sixth Cavalry, and F Battery of the Fifth Artillery.

So marched the host from Tien-Tsin along the sandy plains, led on by one purpose, to reach the old city of Peking and save the lives of the foreign citizens shut up inside their compound – whether massacred, or living, starved, and tortured, this allied army then could not know.

The August day was intensely hot, with its hours made grievous by a heavy, humid air, and the sand and thick dust ground and flung up in clouds by sixteen thousand troops, with all the cavalry hoofs and artillery wheels. It was only a type of the ten days that followed, wherein heat and dust and humid air, and thirst – burning, maddening thirst – joined together against the brave soldiery fighting not for fortune, nor glory, nor patriotism, but for humanity.

As they tramped away in military order, Thaine Aydelot said to his nearest comrade:

“Goodrich, I saw a familiar German face up in the line.”

“Friend of yours the Emperor sent out to keep you company?” Goodrich inquired with a smile.

“No, a Kansas joint-keeper named Hans Wyker. What do you suppose put him against the Boxers?”

“Oh, the army is the last resort for some men. It’s society’s clearing house,” Goodrich replied.

The speaker was a Harvard man, a cultured gentleman, in civil life a University Professor. The same high purpose was in his service that controlled Thaine Aydelot now.

“I don’t like being at the tail-end of this procession,” a big German from the Pennsylvania foundries declared, as he trudged sturdily along under the blazing sun. The courage in his determined face and his huge strength would warrant him a place in the front line anywhere.

“Nor I, Schwoebel,” Thaine declared. “I came out with Funston’s ’Fighting Twentieth.’ I’m used to being called back, not tolled along after the rear.”

“Rock Chalk! Jay Hawk! K U!” roared Schwoebel in a tremendous bellow.

“Rock Chalk! Jay Hawk! K U!” a Pennsylvania University man named McLearn followed Schwoebel.

“Rock Chalk! Jay Hawk! K U!” went down the whole line of infantry.

The old Kansas University yell, taken to the Philippines by college men, became the battle cry of the Twentieth Kansas Volunteers, who when they returned to civil life, left it there for the American, army – and “Rock Chalk! Jay Hawk! K U!” became the American watchword and cry of all that “far flung battle line” marching on through dust and heat to rescue the imperiled Christians in a beleagured fortress inside the impregnable city of Peking.

“You needn’t worry about the rear, Aydelot. One engagement may whip this line about, end to end, or it may scale off all that’s in front of us and leave nothing but the rear. All this before we have time to change collars again. We’ll let you or Tasker here lead into Peking,” an Indiana University man declared.

“That’s good of you, Binford. Some Kansas man will be first to carry the flag into Peking. It might as well be Aydelot.”

This from Tasker, a slender young fellow from a Kansas railroad office.

So they joked as they tramped along. It was nearly midnight when they pitched camp before the little village of Peit-Tsang beside the Peiho.

In the dim dawning of the August morning Little Kemper’s bugle sounded the morning reveille. Thaine was just dreaming of home and he thought the first bugle note was the call for him up the stairway of the Sunflower Inn. His windows looked out on the Aydelot wheatfields and the grove beyond, and every morning the sunrise across the level eastern prairie made a picture only the hand of the Infinite could paint. This morning he opened his eyes on a far different scene. The reveille became a call to arms and the troops fell into line ready for battle.

Before the sun had reached the zenith the line was whipped end to end, as Binford of Indiana had said it might be. In this engagement on the sandy plain about the little village of Peit-Tsang, Thaine with his comrades saw what it meant to lead that battle line. He saw the brave little Japanese mowed down like standing grain before the reaper’s sickle. He saw the ranks move swiftly up to take the places of the fallen, never wavering nor retreating, rushing to certain death as to places of vantage in a coronal pageantry. The Filipino’s Mauser was as deadly as the older style gun of the Boxer. A bullet aimed true does a bullet’s work. But in this battle that raged about Peit-Tsang Thaine quickly discovered that this was no fight in a Filipino jungle. Here was real war, as big and terrible above the campaigns he had known in Luzon as the purpose in it was big above loyalty to the flag and extension of American dominion and ideals.

When the thing was ended with the routing of the Boxer forces, of the sixteen thousand that went into battle a tithe of one-tenth of their number lay dead on the plains – sixteen hundred men, the cost of conquest in a far wilderness. The heaviest toll fell on the brave Japanese who had led in the attack.

Thaine Aydelot did not dream of home that night. He slept on his arms the heavy sleep of utter weariness, which Little Kemper’s bugle call broke at three o’clock the next morning. Before the August sun had crawled over the eastern horizon the armies were swinging up the Peiho river toward Peking. The American troops were leading the column now, as Thaine Aydelot had wished they might, and in all that followed after the day at Peit-Tsang the Stars and Stripes, brave token of a brave people, floated above the front lines of soldiery, even to the end of the struggle.

It was high noon above the Orient, where the Peiho flows beside the populous town of Yang-Tsun. The Boxer army routed by the battle of Peit-Tsang had massed its front before the town, a formidable array in numbers, equipment, and frenzied eagerness to halt here and forever the poor little line of foreign soldiers creeping in upon it from the sea. The Boxers knew that they could match the fighting strength of this line with quadruple force. The troops coming toward them had marched twelve miles under the August heat of a hundred degrees, through sand and alkali dust, in the heavy humid air saturated with evil odors. They had had no food since the night before, nor a drink of water since daydawn. Joyful would it be to slaughter here the entire band and then rush back to the hoary old City of Peking with the triumphant message that the Allied Armies of the World had fallen before China. Then the death of every foreigner in the Empire would be certain.

At noon the battle lines were formed. In the swinging into place as Thaine Aydelot stood beside Tasker, surrounded by his comrades, Little Kemper dashed by him.

“Here’s where the corn-fed Kansans do their work,” he said gaily to the Kansas men.

“With a few bean-eaters from Boston to help,” Goodrich responded.

“And a Hoosier to give them culture,” Binford added.

“Yes, yes, with the William Penn Quakers and the Pennsylvania Dutch,” Schwoebel roared, striking McLearn on the shoulder.

Men think of many things as the battle breaks, but never do they fight less bravely because they have laughed the moment before.

Thaine was in the very front of the battle lines. In the pause before the first onslaught he thought of many things confusedly and a few most vividly. He thought of Leigh Shirley and her childish dream of Prince Quippi in China – the China just beyond the purple notches. He thought of his mother as she had looked that spring morning when he talked of enlisting for the Spanish War. He thought of his father, who had never known fear in his life. Of his last words:

“As thy days so shall thy strength be.”

And keenly he remembered Dr. Carey, somewhere among the troops behind him. The fine head crowned with white hair, caressed by the moonbeams, as he had seen it in the Manila garden, and his earnest words: