Winning the Wilderness Part 14

"You declare that I'll leave here as soon as I can get away, and that I'm brutal to use my influence to keep the settlers here; that I am working a trick _you_ have worked out already for me, to get the land myself because it is valuable; you, in your humane love for your fellowmen, you threaten me with all unknown calamities if I refuse your demand. And then you ask me what I have to say, what I am going to do, and, with fine gestures, what I see?"

"Well?" Champers queried urgently.

The plains life made men patient and deliberate of speech, and Asher did not hasten his words for all the bl.u.s.ter.

"I say I am not using my influence to keep any man here or push him out of here. I speak only for the family at the Sunflower Inn. I know 'danged well' I am not going to leave the Gra.s.s River country this fall. Further, I know your hand before you play it, and I know that if you can play it against Todd Stewart and Jim s.h.i.+rley and Cyrus Bennington and the rest of them, I haven't taken their measure right. I know, again, that I am not afraid of you, nor can any threat you make have an influence on my action.

And, lastly, as to what I see."

Asher turned toward the west where the hot air quivered between the iron earth and a sky of bra.s.s.

"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 schools and churches--and no saloons nor breweries."

"I see a danged fool," Darley Champers cried, springing up.

"Come down here in twenty-five years and make a hunt for me, then," Asher said with a smile, but Champers had already plunged inside the schoolhouse.

The council following was a brief one. Three or four Gra.s.s River settlers agreed to give up the equity on their claims of one hundred and sixty acres for enough money to transport themselves and their families to their former homes east of the Mississippi River. This decision left only one child of all the little ones there, Todd Stewart, a stubby little fellow, as much of a Scotchman as his fair-haired father, who wound one arm about his father's neck, and whispered:

"They can't budge us, can they, dad?"

When the matter was concluded, Darley Champers rose to his feet.

"I want to say one thing," he began doggedly. "I give you the chance.

Don't never blame me because you are too green to know what's good for you. You are the only green things here, though. And don't forget, there ain't a man of you can get out of here on your own income or on your own savin's. Not a one. You're all locked into this valley an' the key's in purgatory. An' I'd see you all with the key before I'd ever lift a finger to help one of you, and not a one of you can help yourselves."

With these words Champers left the company and rode away up the trail toward civilization and safety.

In the silence that followed, Pryor Gaines said:

"Friends, let us not forget that this is the Sabbath day on the prairie as in the crowded city. Let us not leave until we ask for His blessing in whose sight no sparrow falls unnoticed."

And together the little band of resolute men and women offered prayer to Him whose is the earth and the fulness, or the emptiness, thereof.

Four days and nights went by. On the fifth morning at daybreak the cool breeze that sweeps the prairies in the early dawn flowed caressingly along the Gra.s.s River valley. The settlers rose early. This was the best part of the day, and they made use of it.

"You poor Juno!" Virginia Aydelot said, as she leaned against the corral post in the morning twilight, and patted the mare gently.

"You and I are 'plains-broke' for certain. We don't care for hot winds, nor cold winds, nor prairie fire, nor even a hailstorm, if it would only come. Never mind, old Juno, Asher has the greenest fields of all the valley because he hasn't stopped plowing. That's why you must keep on working. Maybe it will rain today, and you'll get to rest. Rain and rest!"

She looked toward the shadowy purple west, and then away to the east, decked in the barbaric magnificence of a plains sunrise.

"It may rain today, but it won't rain rain. It will be hot air and trouble. The sod shack is cool, anyhow, Juno. Not so cool, though, as that little glen in the mountains where the clear spring bubbles and babbles all day long." She brushed her hair back from her forehead and, squeezing Juno's mane, she added, "We don't want to go back yet, though. Not yet, do we, Juno, even if it rains trouble instead of rain? Inherited pride and the will to do as we please make us defy the plains, still."

The day was exceedingly hot, but by noon a cloud seemed rising in the northwest; not a glorious, black thunder-cloud that means cool wind and sharp lightning and a shower of longed-for rain. A yellow-gray cloud with no deeper nor shallower tints to it, rising steadily, moving swiftly, shut off the noonday glare. The shadows deepened below this strange un-cloud-like cloud, not dark, but dense. The few chickens in the settlement mistook the clock and went to roost. At every settler's house, wondering eyes watched the unheard-of phenomenon, so like, yet utterly unlike, the sun's eclipse.

"Listen, Asher," Virginia exclaimed, as the two stood on the low swell behind the house. "Listen to the roar, but there's no wind nor thunder."

"Hear that rasping edge to the rumble. It isn't like anything I ever knew," Asher said, watching the coming cloud intently.

From their height they could see it sweeping far across the land, not high in the air, but beclouding the prairie like a fog. Only this thing was dry and carried no cool breath with it. Nearer it came, and the sun above looked wanly through it, as surging, whipping, s.h.i.+mmering with silver splinters of light, roaring with the whir of grating wings, countless millions of gra.s.shoppers filled the earth below and the air above.

"The plague of Egypt," Asher cried, and he and Virginia retreated hastily before its force.

But they were not swift enough. The mosquito netting across the open windows was eaten through and the hopping, wriggling, flying pest surged inside. They smeared greasily on the floor; they gnawed ravenously at every bit of linen or cotton fabric; they fell into every open vessel.

Truly, life may be made miserable in many ways, but in the Kansas homes in that memorable gra.s.shopper year of 1874 life was wretchedly uncomfortable.

Out of doors the cloud was a disaster. Nor flood, nor raging wind nor prairie fire, nor unbroken drouth could claim greater measure of havoc in its wake than this billion-footed, billion-winged creature, an appet.i.te grown measureless, a hunger vitalized, and individualized, and endowed with power of motion. No living shred of gra.s.s, or weed, or stalk of corn, or straw of stubble or tiniest garden growth; no leaf or bit of tender bark of tree, or shrub, escaped this many-mouthed monster.

In the little peach orchard where there were a few half-ripe peaches, the very first fruits of the orchards in this untamed land, the hard peach stones, from which the meat was eaten away, hung on their stems among the leafless branches. The weed-grown bed of Gra.s.s River was swept as by a prairie fire. And for the labor of the fields, nothing remained. The cottonwood trees and wild plum bushes belonged to a mid-winter landscape, and of the many young catalpa groves, only stubby sticks stood up, making a darker spot on the face of the bare plains.

For three days the Saint Bartholomew of vegetation continued. Then the pest, still hungry, rose and pa.s.sed to the southeast, leaving behind it only a honey-combed soil where eggs were deposited for future hatching, and a famine-breeding desolation.

In days of great calamity or sorrow, sometimes little things annoy strangely, and it is not until after the grief has pa.s.sed that the memory recalls and the mind wonders why trifles should have had such power amid such vastly important things. While the gra.s.shopper was a burden, one loss wore heavily on Virginia Aydelot's mind. She had given up hope for vines and daintier flowers in the early summer, but one clump of coa.r.s.e sunflowers she had tended and watered and loved.

"It is our flower," she said to Asher, who laughed at her care. "I won't give them up. I can get along without the other blooms this year, but my sunflowers are my treasure here--the only gold till the wheat turns yellow for us."

"You are a sentimental sister," Asher declared. But he patiently carried water from the dwindling well supply to keep the drouth from searing them.

When they fell before the ravenous gra.s.shoppers, foolish as it was, Virginia mourned their loss above the loss of crops--so scanty were the joys of these women state builders.

The day after the pests left was the Sabbath. When Asher Aydelot read the morning lesson in the Sunday school, his voice was deep and unfaltering.

He had chosen the eighth chapter of Deuteronomy, with its sublime promises to a wilderness-locked people.

Then Pryor Gaines offered prayer.

"Although the figtree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines"--the old, old chant of Habakkuk on Mount s.h.i.+gionoth--"the labor of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the G.o.d of my salvation. The Lord G.o.d is my strength, and He will make my feet like hind's feet, and He will make me to walk upon mine high places."

So the scholarly man, crippled and held to the land, prayed; and comfort came with his words.

Then Jim s.h.i.+rley stood up to sing.

"I'm no preacher," he said, holding the song book open a moment, "but I do believe the Lord loves the fellow who can laugh at his own hard luck. We weren't so green as Darley Champers tried to have us believe, because the hoppers didn't bite at us when they took every other green and growing thing, and we have life enough in us to keep on growing. Furthermore, we aren't the only people that have been pest-ridden. It's even worse up on Big Wolf Creek, where Wyker's short on corn to feed his brewery this fall.

I'm going to ask everyone who is still glad he's in the Gra.s.s River settlement in Kansas to stand up and sing just like he meant it. It's the old Portuguese hymn. Asher and I learned it back on Clover Creek in Ohio.

How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord, Is laid for your faith--in His excellent word!"

Every man and woman rose at once.

"The 'ayes' have it," Jim declared.

Then strong and sweet the song floated out across the desolate drouth-ridden, pest-despoiled prairie. The same song was sung that day, no doubt, where many wors.h.i.+pers were met together. The same song, sung in country chapel and city church; in mining villages, and in lonely lumber camps; on vessels far out at sea, and in the missionary service of distant heathen lands; by sick beds in humble homes, and beneath the groined arches of the Old World cathedrals.

But nowhere above the good green sod of Christendom did it rise in braver, truer wors.h.i.+p from trustful and unconquered hearts than it rose that day in the little sod schoolhouse on the Kansas prairie, pouring its melody down the wide s.p.a.ces of the Gra.s.s River Valley.

CHAPTER VII