Winning the Wilderness

One Spring day, John Jacobs and Asher Aydelot rode out to Jacobs’ ranches together.

“You are improving your stock every year, Stewart tells me,” Asher was saying. “I may try sheep myself next year.”

“I am hoping to have only thoroughbreds some day. That’s a good horse you ride,” Jacobs replied.

“Yes, he has a strain of Kentucky blue-blood. My wife owned a thoroughbred when we came West. We keep the descent still. We’ve never been without a black horse in the stable since that time. Do we turn here?”

They were following the lower trail by the willows, when Jacobs turned abruptly to a rough roadway leading up a shadowy hollow.

“Yes. It’s an ugly climb, but much shorter to the sheep range and the cattle are near.”

“How much land have you here, Jacobs?” Asher asked.

“From Little Wolf to the corporation line of Wykerton. Five hundred acres, more or less; all fenced, too,” Jacobs added. “This creek divides Wyker’s ground from mine. All the rest is measured by links and chains. We agreed to metes and bounds for this because it averages the same, anyhow, and I’d like a stream between Wyker and myself in addition to a barbed wire fence. It gives more space, at least.”

They had followed the rough way only a short distance when Asher, who was nearest the creek, halted. The bank was steep and several feet above the water.

“Does anybody else keep sheep around here?” he inquired.

“Not here,” John Jacobs answered.

“Look over there. Isn’t that a sheep?”

Asher pointed to a carcass lying half out of the water on a pile of drift where the stream was narrow, but too deep for fording.

“Maybe some dog killed it and the carcass got into the creek. My sheep can’t get to the water because my pasture is fenced. That’s on Wyker’s side, anyhow. I won’t risk fording to get over there. It’s as dead right now as it will ever be,” Jacobs asserted.

Their trail grew narrower and more secluded, winding up a steep hill between high banks. Half way up, where the road made a sharp turn, a break in the side next to the creek opened a rough way down to the water. As they neared this, a woman coming down the hill caught sight of the two horsemen around the bend, and made a swift movement toward this opening in the bank, as if to clamber down from their sight. She was not quick enough, however, and when she found she had been seen, she waited by the roadside until the men had passed on.

Asher, who was next to her, looked keenly at her as he bade her good morning, but John Jacobs merely lifted his hat without giving her more than a glance.

The woman stared at both, but made no response to their greetings. She was plainly dressed, with a black scarf tied over her tow-colored hair. She had a short club in one hand and a big battered tin can in the other, which she seemed anxious to conceal. When the men had passed, she looked after them with an ugly expression of malice in her little pale gray eyes.

“That’s a bad face,” Asher said, when they were out of her hearing. “I wonder why she tried to hide that old salt can.”

“How do you know it was a salt can?” Jacobs asked.

“Because it is exactly like a salt can I saw at Pryor Gaines’ old cabin, and because some salt fell out as she tipped it over,” Asher replied.

“You have an eye for details,” Jacobs returned. “That was Gretchen Gimpke, Hans Wyker’s girl. She married his bartender, and is raising a family of little bartenders back in the hilly country there, while Gimpke helps Hans run a perfectly respectable tavern in town.”

“Well, I may misjudge her, but if I had any interest near here, I should want her to keep on her own side of the creek,” Asher declared.

And somehow both remembered the dead sheep down in the deep pool at the foot of the hill.

The live sheep were crowding along the fence on the creek side of the big range when the two men entered it.

“What ails the flock?” Asher asked, as they saw it following the fence line eagerly.

“Let’s ride across and meet them,” Jacobs suggested.

The creek side was rough with many little dips and draws hiding the boundary line in places. The men rode quietly toward the flock by the shortest way. As they faced a hollow deepening to a draw toward the creek, Asher suddenly halted.

“Look at that!” he cried, pointing toward the fence.

John Jacobs looked and saw where the ground was lowest that the barbed wires had been dragged out of place, leaving an opening big enough for two or more sheep to crowd through at a time. As they neared this point, Asher said:

“It’s a pretty clear case, Jacobs. See that line of salt running up the bare ground, and here is an opening. The flock is coming down on that line. They will have a chance to drink after taking their salt.”

John Jacobs slid from his horse, and giving the rein to Asher, he climbed through the hole in the fence and hastily examined the ground beyond it.

“It’s a friendly act on somebody’s part,” he said grimly. “The creek cuts a deep hole under the bank here. There’s a pile of salt right at the edge. Somebody has sprinkled a line of it clear over the hill to toll the flock out where they will scramble for it and tumble over into that deep water. All they need to do is to swim down to the next shallow place and wade out. The pool may be full of them now, waiting their turn to go. Sheep are polite in deep water; they never rush ahead.”

“They swim well, too, especially if they happen to fall into the water just before shearing time when their wool is long,” Asher said ironically.

“What did you say Gretchen Gimpke had in that tin can?” Jacobs inquired blandly.

“Oil of sassafras, I think,” Asher responded, as he tied the horses and helped to mend the weakened fence.

“Nobody prospers long after such tricks. I’ll not lose sleep over lost sheep,” John Jacobs declared. “Let’s hunt up the cattle and forget this, and the woman and the scary little twist in the creek trail.”

“Why scary?” Asher asked. “Are you so afraid of women? No wonder you are a bachelor.”

Jacobs did not smile as he said:

“Once when I was a child I read a story of a man being killed at just such an out-of-the-way place. Every time I go up that crooked, lonesome hill road, I remember the picture in the book. It always makes me think of that story.”

When the fence was made secure, the two rode away to look after the cattle. And if a Shadow rode beside them, it was mercifully unseen, and in nowise dimming to the clear light of the spring day.

It was high noon when they reached Wykerton, where Hans Wyker still fed the traveling public, although the flourishing hotel where Virginia Aydelot first met John Jacobs had disappeared. The eating-place behind the general store room was divided into two parts, a blind partition wall cutting off a narrow section across the farther end. Ordinary diners went through the store into the dining room and were supplied from the long kitchen running parallel with this room.

There were some guests, however, who entered the farther room by a rear door and were likewise supplied from the kitchen on the side. But as there was no opening between the two rooms, many who ate at Wyker’s never knew of the narrow room beyond their own eating-place and of the two entrances into the kitchen covering the side of each room. Of course, the prime reason for such an arrangement lay in Wyker’s willingness to evade the law and supply customers with contraband drinks. But the infraction of one law is a breach in the wall through which many lawless elements may crowd. The place became, by natural selection, the council chamber of the lawless, and many an evil deed was plotted therein.

“How would you like to keep a store in a place like this, Jacobs?” Asher Aydelot asked, as the two men waited for their meal.

“I had the chance once. I turned it down. How would you like to keep a tavern in such a place?” Jacobs returned.

“I turned down a bigger tavern than this once to be a farmer. I have never regretted it,” Asher replied.

“The Sunflower Ranch has always interested me. How long have you had it?” Jacobs asked.

“Since 1869. I was the first man on Grass River. Shirley came soon afterward,” Asher said.

“And your ranches are typical of you, too,” John Jacobs said thoughtfully. “How much do you own now?”

“Six quarters,” Asher replied. “I’ve added piece by piece. Mortgaged one quarter to buy another. There’s a good deal of it under mortgage now.”

“You seem to know what’s ahead pretty well,” Jacobs remarked.

“I know what’s in the prairie soil pretty well. I know that crops will fail sometimes and boom sometimes, and I know if I live I mean to own three times what I have now; that I’ll have a grove a mile square on it, and a lake in the middle, and a farmhouse of colonial style up on the swell where we are living now and that neither John Jacobs nor the First National Bank of Careyville will hold any mortgage on it.” Asher’s face was bright with anticipation.

“You are a dreamer, Aydelot.”

“No, Jim Shirley’s a dreamer,” Asher insisted. “Mrs. Aydelot and I planned our home the first night she came a bride to our little one-roomed soddy. There are cottonwoods and elms and locust trees shading our house now where there was only a bunch of sunflowers then, and except for Jim’s little corn patch and mine, not a furrow turned in the Grass River Valley. We have accomplished something since then. Why not the whole thing?”

“You have reason for your faith, I admit. But you are right, Shirley is a dreamer. What’s the matter with him?”

“An artistic temperament, more heart than head, a neglected home life in his boyhood, and a fight for health to do his work. He’ll die mortgaged, but he has helped so many other fellows to lift theirs, I envy Jim’s ‘abundant entrance’ by and by. But now he dreams of a thousand things and realizes none. Poor fellow! His dooryard is a picture, while the weeds sometimes choke his garden.”

“Yes, he’ll die mortgaged. He’s never paid me interest nor principal on my little loan, yet I’d increase it tomorrow if he asked me to do it,” John Jacobs declared.

“You are a blood-sucking Shylock, sure enough,” Asher said with a smile. “I wish Jim would take advantage of you and quit his talking about the boom and his dreams of what it might do for him.”

“How soon will you be platting your Sunflower Ranch into town lots for the new town that I hear is to be started down your way?” John Jacobs inquired.

“Town lots do not appeal to me, Jacobs,” Asher replied. “I’m a slow-growing Buckeye, I’ll admit, but I can’t see anything but mushrooms in these towns out West where there is no farming community about them. I’ve waited and worked a good while; I’m willing to work and wait a while longer. Some of my dreams have come true. I’ll hold to my first position, even if I don’t get rich so fast.”

“You are level-headed,” Jacobs assured him. “You notice I have not turned an acre in on this boom. Why? I’m a citizen of Kansas. And while I like to increase my property, you know my sect bears that reputation – ”Jacobs never blushed for his Jewish origin – “I want to keep on living somewhere. Why not here? Why do the other fellows out of their goods, as we Jews are always accused of doing, if it leaves me no customer to buy? I want farmers around my town, not speculators who work a field from hand to hand, but leave it vacant at last. It makes your merchant rich today but bankrupt in a dead town tomorrow. I’m a merchant by calling.”

“Horace Greeley said thirty years ago that the twin curses of Kansas were the land agent and the one-horse politician,” Asher observed.

“You are a grub, Aydelot. You have no ambition at all. Why, I’ve heard your name mentioned favorably several times for the legislature next winter,” Jacobs insisted jokingly.

“Which reminds me of that rhyme of Hosea Bigelow:

If you’re arter folks o’ gumptionYou’ve a darned long row to hoe.

“I’m not an office seeker,” Asher replied.

“Do I understand you won’t sell lots off that ranch of yours to start a new town, and you won’t run for the legislature when you’re dead sure to be elected. May I ask how you propose to put in the fall after wheat harvest?” Jacobs asked, with a twinkle in his black eyes.

“I propose to break ground for wheat again, and to experiment with alfalfa, the new hay product, and to take care of that Aydelot grove and build the Aydelot lake in the middle of it. And I’ll be supplying the wheat market and banking checks for hay one of these years when your town starters will be hunting clerkships in your dry goods emporium, and your farmers, who imagine themselves each a Cincinnatus called to office, will be asking for appointment as deputy county assessor or courthouse custodian. Few things can so unfit a Kansas fellow for the real business of life as a term in the lower house of the Kansas legislature. If you are a merchant, I’m a farmer, and we will both be booming the state when these present-day boomers are gone back East to wife’s folks, blaming Kansas for their hard luck. Now, mark my words. But to change the subject,” Asher said smiling, “I thought we should have company for dinner. I saw Darley Champers and another fellow head in here before us. Darley is in clover now, planning to charter a town for every other section on Grass River. Did you know the man who was with him?”

“That’s one fly-by-night calling himself Thomas Smith. Innocent name and easy to lose if you don’t want it. Not like Gimpke or Aydelot, now. He’s from Wilmington, Delaware – maybe.”

“You seem to doubt his genuineness,” Asher remarked.

“I don’t believe he will assay well,” Jacobs agreed. “I’ve doubted him since the day he landed in Carey’s Crossing fifteen years ago. Inside of an hour and a half I caught him and Champers in a consultation so secret they fastened newspapers across the window to keep from being seen.”

“Where were you meanwhile?”

“Up on the roof, fixing the sign the wind had blown loose. When they saw me through the uncovered upper pane, they shaded that, too. I’ve little interest in a man like that.”

“Does he come here often?” Asher inquired.

“He’s here and away, but he never sets foot in Careyville. My guess is that he’s a part of the ’Co.’ of ‘Champers and Co.’ and that Hans Wyker is the rest of it. Also that in what they can get by fair means, each of the trio reserves the right to act alone and independently of the other two, but when it comes to a cut-throat game, they combine as readily as hydrogen and sulphur and oxygen; and, combined, they have the same effect on a proposition that sulphuric acid has on litmus paper. But this is all only a Jew’s guess, of course. For myself, I have business with only one of the three, Wyker. He doesn’t like my sheep, evidently, because he knows I keep track of his whisky selling in this town and keep the law forever hanging over him. But I’ve sworn under high heaven to fight that curse to humanity wherever I find it threatening, and under high heaven I’ll do it, too.”

Jacobs’ face was the face of a resolute man with whom law was law. Then the two talked of other things as they finished their meal.

John Jacobs was city bred, a merchant by instinct, a Jew in religion, and a strictly honest and exacting business man. Asher Aydelot had been a country boy and was by choice a farmer. He was a Protestant of the Methodist persuasion. It must have been his business integrity that first attracted Jacobs to him. Jacobs was a timid man, and no one else in Kansas, not even Doctor Carey, understood him or appreciated him quite as keenly as Asher Aydelot did.

CHAPTER XII

The Fat Years

“The lean years have passed, and I approve of these fat ones.”“Be careful, old man. That way lies bad work.”– The Light That Failed.

John Jacobs little realized how true was his estimate of the firm of “Champers & Co.” Nor did he suspect that at this very minute the firm was in council in the small room beyond the partition wall – the “blind tiger” of the Wyker eating-house.

“I tell you it’s our chance,” Darley Champers was declaring emphatically. “You mustn’t hold back your capital now. This firm isn’t organized to promote health nor Sunday Schools nor some other fellow’s fortune. We are together for yours truly, every one of us. If you two have some other games back of your own pocketbooks, they don’t cut any against this common purpose. I’m for business for Darley Champers. That’s why I’m here. I’ve got no love for Doc Carey, ruling men’s minds like they was all putty, and him a putty knife to shape ’em finer yet. And another fellow I’d like to put down so hard he’ll never get over it is that straight-up-and-down farmer, Asher Aydelot of the Sunflower Ranch, who walks like a military captain, and works like a hired man, and is so danged independent he don’t give a damn for no man’s opinion of him. If it hadn’t been for him we’d a had the whole Grass River Valley now to speculate on. I’m something of a danged fool, but I knowed this boom was comin’. I felt it in my craw.”

“So you always said, Champers,” Thomas Smith broke in, “but it’s been a century coming. And look at the capital I’ve sunk. If you’d worked that deal through, time of the drouth in seventy-four, we’d be in clover and no Careyville and no Aydelots in the way. I could have saved Asher’s little bank stock then, too.”

“You could?” Darley Champers stared at the speaker.

“Yes, if he’d given up right that first trip of yours down there. When he refused I knew his breed too well. He’s as set and slow and stubborn as his old dad ever was. That’s what ailed those two, they were too near alike; and you’ll never catch Asher Aydelot bending to our plans now. I warn you.”

“Well, but about this bank account?” Champers queried.

“Oh, the fates played the devil with everything in two weeks. Doc Carey got in with Miss Jane Aydelot down at Philadelphia, and she came straight to Cloverdale, and, womanlike, made things so hot there I had to let loose of everything at once or lose everything I had saved for myself. Serves her right, for Asher’s pile went into the dump, although there’s naturally no love lost between the two. But this Miss Jane is Aydelot clear through. She’s so honest and darned set you can’t budge her. But she’s a timid woman and so she’s safe if you keep out of her range. She won’t chase you far, but she’s got fourteen rattles and a button.”

“Well, well, let her rattle, and get to pusiness,” Hans Wyker demanded. “Here’s Champers says he’s here yust for pusiness and he wants to get Aydelot and Carey, too.”

“Gentlemen!” Champers struck the table with his fist. “Let’s play fair now, so’s not to spoil each other’s games. I’ll fix Aydelot if it’s in me to do it, just because he’s stood in my way once too often. But he’s my side line, him and Carey is. I’m here for business. Tell me what you are here for.”

Hans Wyker’s little eyes were red with pent-up anger and malice as he burst out:

“Shentlemen, you know my hart luck. You see where I be today. I not repeat no tiresome history here. Kansas yust boomin’! Wykerton dead! Yon Yacob own all der groun’ right oop to der corporation line on tree side, an’ he not sell one inch for attitions to dis town. He say dere notings to keep town goin’ in two, tree year. What we care? We be rich by den an’ let it go to der devil. But he not sell. Den I go mit you and we organize town company. We mark townsite, we make Grass River sell to us. We boom! boom! boom! We knock Careyville from de prairie alretty, mak’ Yon Yacob go back to Cincinnati where he belong mit his Chews. He damned queer Chew, but he Chew all de same all right, all right. I want to down Yon Yacob, an’ I do it if it take tree hundred fifty years. I’ll kill him if he get in my way. I hate him. He run me off my saloon in ol’ Carey Crossin’; my prewery goin’ smash mit der damned prohibittery law; he growin’ rich in Careyville, an’ me!”

His voice rose to a shriek and he stamped his foot in rage.

“Hold your noise, Wyker!” Champers growled. “Don’t you know who’s on the other side of that partition?”

“I built that partition mineself. It’s von dead noise-breaker,” Wyker began. But Champers broke in:

“It’s your turn, Smith.”

Dr. Carey had described Smith once as rather small, with close-set dark eyes and a stiff, half-paralyzed right arm and wrist, a man who wrote in a cramped left-handed style. There was a crooked little scar cutting across his forehead now above the left eye that promised to stay there for life. He had a way of evading a direct gaze, suggesting timidity. And when Hans Wyker had threatened to kill John Jacobs he shivered a little, and for the instant a gray pallor crept across his face, unnoted by his companions.

“We propose to start a town in the Grass River country that will kill Careyville. We two put up the capital. You do the buying and selling. We’ll handle real estate lively for a few months. We’ll advertise till we fill the place with buyers, and we’ll make our pile right there and then – and it’s all to be done by Darley Champers & Co. We two are not to be in the open in the game at all.”

Thomas Smith spoke deliberately. There seemed to be none of Champers’ bluster nor Wyker’s malice in the third part of the company, or else he was better schooled in self-control.

“You have it exactly,” Champers declared. “The first thing is to take in fellows like Jim Shirley and Cyrus Bennington and Todd Stewart, and Aydelot, if we can.”

“Yes, if we can, but we can’t,” Thomas Smith insisted.

“And having got the land, with or without their knowing why, we boom her to destruction. But to be fair, now, why do you want to keep yourself in hiding, and who’s the fellow you want to kill?” Darley Champers said with a laugh.

“I may as well let you know now why I can’t be known in this,” Thomas Smith said smoothly, even if the same gray hue did flit like a shadow a second time across his countenance – a thing that did not escape the shrewd eye of Darley Champers this time.

“Wyker is pitted against Jacobs. You are after Asher Aydelot’s scalp, if you can get it. I must get Jim Shirley, fair or foul.”

Smith’s low voice was full of menace, boding more trouble to his man than the bluster and threat of the other two could compass.

“I paid you well, Darley Champers, for all information concerning Jim when I came here fifteen years ago. I was acting under orders, and as Jim would have known me then I had to keep out of sight a little.”

“Vell, and vot has Shirley ever done mit you that you so down on him?” Hans Wyker asked.

The smooth mask did not drop from Smith’s face, save that the small dark eyes burned with an intense glow.

“I tell you I was acting under orders from Shirley’s brother Tank in Cloverdale, Ohio. And if Dr. Carey hadn’t been so blamed quick I’d have gotten a letter Mrs. Tank Shirley had written to Jim the very day I got to Carey’s Crossing. No brother ever endured more from the hands of a relative than Tank Shirley endured from Jim. In every way Jim tried to defraud him of his rights; tried to prejudice their own father against him; tried to rob him of the girl, a rich girl, too, that he married in spite Of Jim – and at last contrived to prejudice his wife against him, and with Jane Aydelot interfering all the time, like the old maid that she is, managed to get Tank Shirley’s only child away from him and given legally to Jim. Do you wonder Tank hates his brother? You wouldn’t if I dared to tell you all of Jim’s cussedness, but some things I’m sworn to secrecy on. That’s Tank’s streak of kindness he can’t overcome. Gets it from his mother. I’m his agent, and I’m paid for my work. You both understand me, I reckon.”

“We unterstant, an’ we stay py you to der ent,” Hans Wyker exclaimed enthusiastically. But Darley Champers had a different mind.

“I’ll watch you, my man, and I’ll do business with you accordin’,” he said to himself. “Devil knows whether you are Thomas Smith workin’ for Tank Shirley, or Tank Shirley workin’ for hisself under a assoomed name. Long as I get your capital to push my business I don’t care who you are.” Aloud he remarked:

“So that’s how Jim Shirley got that little girl. She’s a comely youngun, anyhow. But Smith, since you are only an agent and nobody knows it but us, why keep yourself so secret? Where’s the harm in letting Shirley lay eyes on you? Why not come out into the open? How’ll Shirley know you from the Mayor of Wilmington, Delaware, anyhow?”

Thomas Smith’s face was ashy and his voice was hoarse with anger as he replied: