Winning the Wilderness

CHAPTER I

The Blessing of Asher

The old Aydelot farm reached quite down to the little village of Cloverdale, from which it was separated by Clover Creek. But the Aydelot farmhouse stood a good half-mile away up the National pike road toward the Virginia state line. The farm consisted of two long narrow strips of ground, bordering the road on either side and walled about by forests hiding stagnant marshes in their black-shadowed depths. Francis Aydelot had taken up the land from the government before the townsite was thought of. Farming was not to his liking and his house had been an inn, doing a thriving business with travelers going out along that great National highway in ante-railway days. But when the village took root and grew into a little town, the village tavern absorbed the revenue from the traveling public, and Francis Aydelot had, perforce, to put his own hands to the plow and earn a living from the land. It was never a labor of love with him, however, and although he grew well-to-do in the tilling, he resented the touch of the soil as something degrading.

Cloverdale did not grow toward him, because, out of prejudice at its being, he would not sell one foot of his ground for town lot purposes. Nevertheless, since he was upright in all his dealings, the villagers grew proud of him, deferred to his judgment, quoted his opinions, and rated him generally the biggest asset of the community, with one exception. That exception was young Asher Aydelot, a pink-cheeked, gray-eyed boy, only son of the House of Aydelot and heir to all the long narrow acres from the wooded crest on the east to the clear waters of Clover Creek on the west. He was heir to more than these, however, if the heritage of ancestry counts for anything.

Jean Aydelot, the first of the name in America, driven from France by his family on account of his Huguenot beliefs, had settled in Virginia. He had quickly grasped the American ideals of freedom, the while he affiliated easily with the exclusive English Cavaliers. Something of the wanderlust in his blood, however, kept him from rooting too firmly at once. It happened that when a band of Quaker exiles had sought refuge in Virginia and was about to be driven out by the autocratic Cavaliers, young Aydelot, out of love for a Quaker girl, had championed their cause vehemently. And he was so influential in the settlement that he might have succeeded, but for one family – the wealthy and aristocratic Thaines. Through the son of this family the final expulsion of these Quakers was accomplished. The woman in the case was Mercy Pennington, a pretty Quakeress with whom young Jerome Thaine fell in love, promising protection to all her people in return for her hand. When she refused his offer, the Thaines carried the day, and the Quakers again became exiles. Jean Aydelot followed them to Pennsylvania and married Mercy Pennington, who was promptly disowned by the Quaker Church for this marriage to one outside its membership.

In spite of all this heresy, however, the Aydelots became one of the leading families in the development of the colonies. Their descendants fell heir to the traits of their French-English forbears: freedom of belief, courage to follow a cause, a touch of the wanderlust, the mercurial French mind, and the steady poise of the followers of the Inward Light. A trace of bitterness had come down the years, however, with the family history; a feud-like resentment against the family of Jerome Thaine of Virginia.

Francis Aydelot had crossed the Alleghanies and settled in Ohio in frontier days. Here his life, like his narrow, woods-bound farm, was clean and open but narrowed by surroundings and lack of opportunity. What had made for freedom and reform in his ancestors, in him became prejudice and stubborn will. Mrs. Aydelot was a broad-minded woman. Something of vision was in her clear gray eyes. Love of beauty, respect for learning, and an almost statesman-like grasp of civic duty and the trend of national progress were hers, too.

From such ancestry came Asher Aydelot, the healthiest, happiest country boy that ever waked the echoes of the old Ohio woodlands, or dared the currents of her mad little rivers, or whistled fearlessly as he scampered down the dusty pike road in the soft black summer nights.

Asher was just fifteen when the Civil War swept the nation off its feet. The Quaker spirit of Mercy Pennington made fighting repulsive to his father, but in Asher the old Huguenot courage of Jean Aydelot blazed forth, together with the rash partisanship of a young hot-blood whose life has been hemmed in too narrowly by forest walls. Almost before Cloverdale knew there was a war, the Third Ohio Regiment was on its way to the front. Among its bearded men was one beardless youth, a round-faced drummer boy of fifteen, the only child of the big farmhouse beside the National road. In company with him was his boyhood chum, Jim Shirley, son of the Cloverdale tavern keeper.

An April sun was slipping behind the treetops, and the twilight mists were already rising above the creek. Francis Aydelot and his wife sat on the veranda watching Asher in the glory of a military suit and brass buttons coming up the pike with springing step.

“How strong he is! I’m glad he is at home again,” the mother was saying.

“Yes, he’s here to stay at last. I have his plans all settled,” Francis Aydelot declared.

“But, Francis, a man must make some plans for himself. Asher may not agree,” Mrs. Aydelot spoke earnestly.

“How can our boy know as well as his father does what is best for him? He must agree, that’s all. We have gone over this matter often enough together. I won’t have any Jim Shirley in my family. He’s gone away and nobody knows where he is, just when his father needs him to take the care of the tavern off his hands.”

“What made Jim go away from Cloverdale?” Mrs. Aydelot asked.

“Nobody seems to know exactly. He left just before his brother, Tank, married that Leigh girl up the Clover valley somewhere. But everything’s settled for Asher. He will be marrying one of the Cloverdale girls pretty soon and stay right here in town. We’ll take it up with him now. There’s no use waiting.”

“And yet I wish we might wait till he speaks of it himself. Remember, he’s been doing his own thinking in the time he’s been away,” the mother insisted.

Just then, Asher reached the corner of the door yard. Catching sight of the two, he put his hands on the top of the paling fence, leaped lightly over it, and came across to the veranda, where he sat down on the top step.

“Just getting in from town? The place hasn’t changed much, has it?” the father declared.

“No, not much,” Asher replied absently, looking out with unseeing eyes at the lengthening woodland shadows, “a church or two more, some brick sidewalk, and a few stores and homes – just added on, not improved. I miss Jim Shirley everywhere. The older folks seem the same, but some of the girls are pushing baby-carriages and the boys are getting round-shouldered and droopy-jawed.”

He drew himself up with military steadiness as he spoke.

“Well, you are glad to settle down anyhow,” his father responded. “The old French spirit of roving and adventure has had its day with you, and now you will begin your life work.”

“Yes, I’m done with fighting.” Asher’s lips tightened. “But what do you call my life work, father?”

It was the eighth April after the opening of the Civil War. Asher had just come home from two years of army service on the western plains. Few changes had come to the little community; but to the young man, who eight springtimes ago had gone out as a pink-cheeked drummer boy, the years had been full of changes. He was now twenty-three, straight as an Indian, lean and muscular as a veteran soldier. The fair, round cheeks of boyhood were brown and tinged with red-blooded health. There was something resolute and patient in the clear gray eyes, as if the mother’s own far vision had crept into them. But the ready smile that had made the Cloverdale community love the boy broke as quickly now on the man’s face, giving promise that his saving sense of humor and his good nature would be factors to reckon with in every combat.

Asher had staid in the ranks till the end of the war, had been wounded, captured, and imprisoned; had fought through a hospital fever and narrowly escaped death in the front of many battle lines. But he did not ask for a furlough, nor account his duty done till the war was ended. Just before that time, when he was sick in a Southern prison, a rebel girl had walked into his life to stay forever. With his chum, Jim Shirley, he had chafed through two years in a little eastern college, the while bigger things seemed calling him to action. At the end of the second year, he broke away, and joining the regular army, began the hazardous life of a Plains scout.

Two years of fighting a foe from every way the winds blow, cold and hunger, storms and floods and desert heat, poisonous reptiles, poisoned arrows of Indians, and the deadly Asiatic cholera; sometimes with brave comrades, sometimes with brutal cowards, sometimes on scout duty, utterly and awfully alone; over miles on endless miles of grassy level prairies, among cruel canyons, in dreary sand lands where men die of thirst, monotonous and maddening in their barren, eternal sameness; and sometimes, between sunrises of superb grandeur, and sunsets of sublime glory, over a land of exquisite virgin loveliness – it is small wonder that the ruddy cheeks were bronze as an Indian’s, that the roundness of boyhood had given place to the muscular strength of manhood, that the gray eyes should hold something of patience and endurance and of a vision larger than the Cloverdale neighborhood might understand.

When Asher had asked, “What do you call my life work, Father?” something impenetrable was in his direct gaze.

Francis Aydelot deliberated before replying. Then the decisive tone and firm set of the mouth told what resistance to his will might cost.

“It may not seem quite homelike at first, but you will soon find a wife and that always settles a man. I can trust you to pick the best there is here. As to your work, it must be something fit for a gentleman, and that’s not grubbing in the ground. Of course, this is Aydelot soil. It couldn’t belong to anybody else. I never would sell a foot of it to Cloverdale to let the town build this way. I’d as soon sell to a Thaine from Virginia as I’d sell to that town.”

He waved a hand toward the fields shut in by heavy woodlands, where the shadows were already black. After a moment he continued:

“Everything is settled for you, Asher. I’ve been pretty careful and lucky, too, in some ways. The men who didn’t go to war had the big chances at money making, you know. While you were off fighting, I was improving the time here. I’ve done it fairly, though. I never dodged a law in my life, nor met a man into whose eyes I couldn’t look squarely.”

As he spoke, the blood left Asher’s cheeks and his face grew gray under the tan.

“Father, do you think a man who fights for his country is to be accounted below the man who stays at home and makes money?”

“Well, he certainly can do more for his children than some of those who went to this war can do for their fathers,” Francis Aydelot declared. “Suppose I was helpless and poor now, what could you do for me?”

There was no attempt at reply, and the father went on: “I have prepared your work for you. You must begin it at once. Years ago Cloverdale set up a hotel, a poor enough tavern even for those days, but it robbed me of the patronage this house had before that time, and I had to go to farming. Every kind of drudgery I’ve had to do here. Cutting down forests, and draining swamps is a back-breaking business. I never could forgive the founders for stopping by Clover Creek, when they might have gone twenty miles further on where a town was needed and left me here. But that’s all past now. I’ve improved the time. I have a good share of stock in the bank and I own the only hotel in Cloverdale. I closed with Shirley as soon as I heard you were coming home. Shirley’s getting old, and since Jim has gone there’s no one to help him and take his place later, so he sold at a very good figure. He had to sell for some reason, I believe. The Shirleys are having some family trouble that I don’t understand nor care about. You’ve always been a sort of idol in the town anyhow. Now that you are to go into the Shirley House as proprietor I suppose Cloverdale will take it as a dispensation of Providence in their favor, and you can live like a gentleman.”

“But, father, I’ve always liked the country best. Don’t you remember how Jim Shirley was always out here instead of my going down town when we were boys?”

“You are only a boy, now, Asher, and this is all I’ll hear to your doing. You ought to be thankful for having such a chance open to you. I have leased the farm for five years and you don’t want to be a hired man at twenty dollars a month, I reckon. Of course, the farm will be yours some day, unless you take a notion to run off to Virginia and marry a Thaine.”

The last words were said jokingly, but Asher’s mother saw a sudden hardening of the lines of his face as he sat looking out at the darkening landscape.

There was only a faint glow in the west now. The fields toward Cloverdale were wrapped in twilight shadows. Behind the eastern treetops the red disk of the rising moon was half revealed. Asher Aydelot waited long before he spoke. At length, he turned toward his father with a certain stiffening of his form, and each felt a space widening gulf-wise between them.

“You stayed at home and grew rich, Father.”

“Well?”

The father’s voice cut like a steel edge. He saw only opposition to his will here, but the mother forecasted the end from that moment.

“Father, war gives us to see bigger things than hatred between two sections of the country. There is education in it, too. That is a part of the compensation. Once, when our regiment was captured and starving, the Fifty-fourth Virginia boys saved our lives by feeding us the best supper I ever tasted. And a Rebel girl – ” he broke off suddenly.

“Well, what of all this? What are you trying to say?” queried the older man.

“I’m trying to show you that I cannot sit down here in the Shirley House and play mine host any more than I could – ” hesitatingly – “marry a Cloverdale girl on demand. No Cloverdale girl would have me so. I’ve seen too much of the country for such a position, Father. Let the men who staid at home do the little jobs.”

He had not meant to say all this, but the stretch of boundless green prairies was before his eyes, the memory of heroic action where men utterly forget themselves was in his mind, making life in that little Ohio settlement seem only a boy’s pastime, to be put away with other childish things. While night and day, in the battle clamor, in the little college class room, on boundless prairie billows, among lonely sand dunes – everywhere, he carried the memory of the gentle touch of the hand of a rebel girl, who had visited him when he was sick and in prison. And withal, he resented dictation, as all the Aydelots and Penningtons before him had done.

“What do you propose to do?” his father asked.

“I don’t know yet what I can do. I only know what I cannot do.”

“And that is – ?”

“Just what I have said. I cannot be a tavern keeper here the rest of my days with nothing to do half of the time except to watch the men pitch horseshoes behind the blacksmith shop, and listen to the flies buzz in the windows on summer afternoons; and everything else so quiet and dead you don’t know whether you are on the street or in the graveyard. If you’d ever crossed the Mississippi River you’d understand why.”

“Well, I haven’t, and I don’t understand. But the only way to stop this roving is to make a home of your own. Will you tell me how you expect to support a Cloverdale girl when you marry one?”

“I don’t expect to marry one.” The smile was winning, but the son’s voice sounded dangerously like the father’s.

“Why not?”

“Because when I marry it will be to a southern girl – ” Asher hesitated a moment. When he went on, his voice was not as son to father, but as man to man.

“It all happened down in Virginia, when I was wounded and in prison. This little girl took care of me. Only a soldier really knows what a woman’s hand means in sickness. But she did more. She risked everything, even her life, to get letters through the lines to you and to get me exchanged. I shiver yet when I think of her, disguised as a man in soldier’s clothes, taking the chance she did for me. And, well, I left my heart down there. That’s all.”

“Why haven’t you ever told us this before, Asher?” his father asked.

Asher stood up where the white moonlight fell full on his face. Somehow the old Huguenot defiance and the old Quaker endurance of his ancestors seemed all expressed in him.

“I wasn’t twenty-one, then, and I have nothing yet to offer a girl by way of support,” he said.

“Why, Asher!” Mrs. Aydelot exclaimed, “you have everything here.”

“Not yet, mother,” he replied. “And I haven’t told you because her name is Virginia Thaine, and she is a descendant of Jerome Thaine. Are the Aydelots big enough to bury old hates?”

Francis Aydelot sat moveless as a statue. When at length he spoke, there was no misunderstanding his meaning.

“You have no means by which to earn a living. You will go down to town and take charge of the Shirley House at once, or go to work as a hired hand here. But remember this: from the day you marry a Thaine of Virginia you are no longer my son. Family ties, family honor, respect for your forefathers forbid it.”

He rose without more words, and went into the house.

Then came the mother’s part.

“Sit down, Asher,” she said, and Asher dropped to his place on the step.

“We don’t seem to see life through the same spectacles,” he said calmly. “Am I wrong, mother? Nobody can choose my life for me, nor my wife, either. Didn’t old grandfather, Jean Aydelot, leave his home in France, and didn’t grandmother, Mercy Pennington, marry to suit her own choice?”

Even in the shadow, his mother noted the patient expression of the gray eyes looking up at her.

“Asher, it is Aydelot tradition to be determined and self-willed, and the bitterness against Jerome Thaine and his descendants has never left the blood – till now.”

She stroked his hair lovingwise, as mothers will ever do.

“Do you suppose father will ever change?”

“I don’t believe he will. We have talked of this many times, and he will listen to nothing else. He grows more set in his notions as we all do with years, unless – ”

“Well, you don’t, mother. Unless what?” Asher asked.

“Unless we think broadly as the years broaden out toward old age. But, Asher, what are your plans?”

“I’m afraid I have none yet. You know I was a farmer boy until I was fifteen, a soldier boy till I was nineteen, a college student for two years, and a Plains scout for two years more. Tell me, mother, what does all this fit me for? Not for a tavern in a town of less than a thousand people.”

He sat waiting, his elbow resting on his knee, his chin supported by his closed hand.

“Asher, when you left school and went out West, I foresaw what has happened tonight,” Mrs. Aydelot began. “I tried to prepare your father for it, but he would not listen, would not understand. He doesn’t yet. He never will. But I do. You will not stay in Ohio always, because you do not fit in here now. Newer states keep calling you westward, westward. This was frontier when we came here in the thirties; we belong here. But, sooner or later, you will put your life into the building of the West. Something – the War or the Plains, or may be this Virginia Thaine, has left you too big for prejudice. You will go sometime where there is room to think and live as you believe.”

“Mother, may I go? I dream of it night and day. I’m so cramped here. The woods are in my way. I can’t see a mile. I want to see to the edge of the world, as I can on the prairies. A man can win a kingdom out there.”

He was facing her now, his whole countenance aglow with bright anticipation.

“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 brass; and as thy days, so shall thy strength be. The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.’”