Winning the Wilderness Part 2

"There is only one way to win that kingdom," Mrs. Aydelot declared. "The man who takes hold of the plow-handles is the man who will really conquer the prairies. His scepter is not the rifle, but the hoe."

For all his life, Asher Aydelot never forgot his mother's face, nor the sound of her low prophetic words on that moonlit night on the shadowy veranda of his childhood home.

"You are right, mother. I don't want to fight any more. It must be the soil that is calling me back to the West, the big, big West! And I mean to go when the time comes. I hope it will come soon, and I know you will give me your blessing then."

His mother's hands were pressed lovingly upon his forehead, as he leaned against her knee.

"My blessing, and more than mine. The blessing of Moses to Asher of old, as well. 'Thy shoes shall be iron and bra.s.s; and as thy days, so shall thy strength be. The eternal G.o.d is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.'"

She bent over her boy, and pus.h.i.+ng back the hair from his forehead, she kissed it reverently, nor dreamed in how many a bitter strife would the memory of this sacred hour come back to him, with the blessed note of victory.

The next morning Asher put on his working clothes and began the life of a hired man on his father's farm. The summer was long and hot, and in the late August the dread typhoid malaria swept up from the woods marshes. It was of virulent form and soon had its way with Asher's father and mother.

When the will of Francis Aydelot was read in court, the inexorable will of a stubborn man, it declared that the Cloverdale Hotel, the bank stock, and the farm with all the appurtenances thereunto pertaining, should descend to Asher Aydelot, provided he should remain a resident of Ohio and should never be united in marriage to any descendant of Jerome Thaine of the State of Virginia. Failing in this, all the property, except a few hundred dollars in cash, should descend to one Jane Aydelot, of Philadelphia, and her heirs and a.s.signs forever; provided these heirs were not the children of Virginia Thaine of the state of Virginia.

On the same day, Asher wrote to one Jane Aydelot, of Philadelphia, to come to Ohio and take possession of her property. Then he carefully sodded the two mounds in the graveyard, and planted old-fas.h.i.+oned sweet pinks upon them, and bidding good-by to the home of his boyhood, he turned his face hopefully to the West.

CHAPTER II

THE SIGN OF THE SUNFLOWER

Little they knew what wealth untold Lay hid where the desolate prairies rolled: Who would have dared, with brush or pen, As this land is now, to paint it then?

--Allerton.

The trail had left the woodland far to the eastward, and wound its way over broad prairie billows, past bluffy-banked streams, along crests of low watersheds, until at last it slid down into an open endlessness of the Lord's earth--just a vasty bigness of landstuff seemingly left over when geography-making was done. It was untamed stuff, too, whereon one man's marking was like to the track of foam in the wake of one s.h.i.+p in mid-ocean. Upon its face lay the trail, broad and barren of growth as the dusty old National pike road making its way across uplands and valleys of Ohio. But this was the only likeness. The pike was a gravel-built, upgraded highway, bordered by little rail-fenced fields and deep forests hiding malarial marshes in the lower places.

This trail, flat along the ungraded ground, tended in the direction of least resistance, generally toward the southwest. It was bounded by absence of landmarks, boulder or tree or cliff. Along either side of it was a fringe of spindling sunflower stalks, with their blooms of gold marking two gleaming threads across the plains far toward the misty nothingness of the western horizon.

The mid-September day had been intensely hot, but the light air was beginning to flow a bit refres.h.i.+ngly out of the sky. A gray cloud-wave, creeping tide-like up from the southwest, was tempering the afternoon glare. In all the landscape the only object to hold the eye was a prairie schooner drawn by a team of hard-mouthed little Indian ponies, and followed by a free-limbed black mare of the Kentucky blue blood.

Asher Aydelot sat on the wagon seat holding the reins. Beside him was his wife, a young, girlish-looking woman with large dark eyes, abundant dark hair, a straight, aristocratic nose, and well-formed mouth and chin.

The two, coming in from the East on the evening before, had reached the end of the stage line, where Asher's team and wagon was waiting for them.

The outfit moved slowly. It had left Carey's Crossing at early dawn and had put twenty-five miles between itself and that last outpost of civilization.

"Why don't you let the horses trot down this hill slope, Asher?" The woman's voice had the soft accent of the South.

"Are you tired, Virgie?" Asher Aydelot looked earnestly down at his wife.

"Not a bit!" The bright smile and vigorous lift of the shoulders were a.s.suring.

"Then we won't hurry. We have several miles to go yet. It is a long day's run from Carey's to our claim. Wolf County is almost like a state. The Crossing hopes to become the county seat."

"Why do they call that place Carey's Crossing?" Mrs. Aydelot asked.

"It was a trading post once where the north and south trail crossed the main trail. Later it was a rallying place for cavalry. Now it's our postoffice," Asher explained.

"I mean, why call it Carey? I knew Careys back in Virginia."

"It is named for a young doctor, the only one in ten thousand miles, so far as I know."

"And his family?" Virginia asked.

"He's a bachelor, I believe. By the way, we aren't going down hill. We are on level ground."

Mrs. Aydelot leaned out beyond the wagon bows to take in the trail behind them.

"Why, we are right in a big saucer. All the land slopes to the center down there before us. Can't you see it?"

"No, I've seen it too often. It is just a trick of the plains--one of the many tricks for the eye out here. Look at the sunflowers, Virgie. Don't you love them?"

Virginia Aydelot nestled close to her husband's side and put one hand on his. It was a little hand, white and soft, the hand of a lady born of generations of gentility. The hand it rested on was big and hard and brown and very strong looking.

"I've always loved them since the day you sent me the little one in a letter," she said in a low voice, as if some one might overhear. "I thought you had forgotten me and the old war days. I wasn't very happy then." There was a quiver of the lip that hinted at the memory of intense sorrow. "I had gone up to the spring in that cool little glen in the mountain behind our home, you know, when a neighbor's servant boy, Bo Peep, Boanerges Peeperville, he named himself, came grinning round a big rock ledge with your letter. Just a crushed little sunflower and a sticky old card, the deuce of hearts. I knew it was from you, and I loved the sunflower for telling me so. Were you near here then? This land looks so peaceful and beautiful to me, and homelike somehow, as if we should find some neighbors just over the hill that you say isn't there."

"Neither the hill nor the neighbors, yet, although settlers will be coming soon. We won't be lonesome very long, I'm sure."

Asher s.h.i.+fted the reins to his other hand and held the little white fingers close.

"It wasn't anywhere near here. It was away off in the southwest corner of--nowhere. I was going to say a shorter word, for that's where we were.

I took that card out of an old deck from the man nearest me. The Comanches had fixed him, so he didn't need it in his game any more. There were only two of us left, a big half-breed Cheyenne scout and myself. I picked the sunflower from the only stalk within a hundred miles of there. I guess it grew so far from everything just for me that day. Weak as I was, I'll never forget how hopefully it seemed to look at me. The envelope was one mother had sent me, you remember. I told the Cheyenne how to start it to you from the fort. He left me there, wounded and alone--'twas all he could do--while he went for help about a thousand miles away it must have seemed, even to an Indian. I thought it was my last message to you, dearie, for I never expected to be found alive; but I was, and when you wrote back, sending your letter to 'The Sign of the Sunflower,' Oh, little girl, the old trail blossom was glorified for me forever."

He broke off so suddenly that his wife looked up inquiringly.

"I was thinking of the cool spring and the rocks, and that shady glen, and the mountains, and the trees, and the well-kept mansion houses, and servants like Bo Peep to fetch and carry--and here--Virginia, why did you let me persuade you away from them? Everything was made ready for you there. The Lord didn't do anything for this country but go off and leave it to us."

"Yes, to us. Here is the sunflower and the new home in the new West and Asher Aydelot. And underfoot is the prairie sod that is ours, and overhead is heaven that kept watch over you for me, and over both of us for this.

And I persuaded you to bring me here because I wanted to be with you always."

"You can face it all for me?" he asked.

"With you, you mean. Yes, for we'll stop at 'The Sign of the Sunflower' so long as we both shall live. How beautiful they are, these endless bands of gold, drawing us on and on across the plains. Asher, you forget that Virginia is not as it was before the war. But we did keep inherited pride in the Thaine family, and the will to do as we pleased. You see what has pleased me."

"And it shall please me to make such a fortune out of this ground, and build such a home for you that by and by you will forget you ever were without the comforts you are giving up now," Asher declared, looking equal to the task. "Virgie," he added presently, "on the night my mother told me to come out West she gave me her blessing, and the blessing of the old Bible Asher also--'Thy shoes shall be iron and bra.s.s; and as thy days, so shall thy strength be.' I believe the blessing will stay with us; that the Eternal G.o.d will be our refuge in this new West and new home-building."

They rode awhile in silence. Then Asher said:

"Look yonder, Virginia, south of the trail. Just a faint yellow line."

"Is it another trail, or are you lost and beginning to see things?"

"No, I'm found," Asher replied. "We scattered those seeds ourselves; did it on Sundays when I was living on my claim, waiting till I could go back and bring you here. We blazed the way, marked it with gold, I'd better say; a line clear to Gra.s.s River. It leaves the real Sunflower Trail right here."

"Who were _we_ in this planting?" Virginia asked.