Winning the Wilderness

“It’s just the same old pioneer spirit, though, and you are fighting a mortgage just like they fought loneliness, and besides, Asher Aydelot had Virginia Thaine to help him to keep his courage up.”

A sudden flush deepened on his ruddy cheeks and he continued:

“Of course you are going to the picnic? You’ll have to start early. It’s a goodish way to ’The Cottonwoods.’ The Sunflower Ranch needs my talents, so I can’t go with the crowd, but I may draggle in about high noon. I’ll drive over in the buggy, and I’ll try to snake some pretty girl off the wagons to ride home with me when it’s all over.”

“Maybe the pretty girls will all be preempted before you get there,” Leigh replied.

“I know one that I hope won’t be,” Thaine said.

Leigh was bending over her drawing board and did not look up for a long minute. It was her gift to make comfort about her while she followed her own will unflinchingly. The breeze had blown the golden edges of her hair into fluffy ripples about her forehead and the deep blue of August skies was reflected in her blue eyes shaded by their long brown lashes. Thaine sat watching her every motion, as he always did when he was with her.

“Well?” Leigh looked up with the query. “And what’s to hinder your getting the pretty girl you want if she understands and you are swift enough to cut off the enemy from a flank movement?”

“The girl herself,” Thaine replied.

“Serious! Tragical! Won’t you give me that chrome-yellow tube by your elbow there?” Leigh reached for the paint and their hands met.

“Say, little Sketcher of Things, will you be missing me when I go to school next month? Or will your art and your ranch take all your thoughts?”

“I wish they would, but they won’t,” Leigh said. “They will help to fill up the time, though.”

“Leigh, may I bring you home tomorrow night? I’m going away the next day, and I won’t see you any more for a long time.”

“No, you may not,” Leigh replied, looking up, and her sunny face framed by her golden brown hair was winsomely pleasing.

“Why not, Leigh? Am I too late?”

“Too early. You haven’t asked Jo and been refused yet. But you are kind to put me on the ‘waiting list.’”

Thaine was standing beside her now.

“I mean it. Has anybody asked you specially – to be your very particular escort?”

“Oh, yes. The very nicest of the crowd.” Leigh’s eyes were shining now. “But I’ve refused him,” she added.

“Who was it?”

“Thaine Aydelot, and I refused because it was good taste for me to do it. If it’s his last day at home – and – oh, I forget what I was going to say.”

“I wish you wouldn’t make a joke of it, anyhow. Tell me why you are so unkind to an old neighbor and lifelong pal,” Thaine insisted.

But Leigh made no reply.

“Leigh!”

“Tell me why you insist when by all the rules you are due to snake the prettiest girl in the crowd off the wagon and into your buggy. Why aren’t you satisfied to make the other boys all envy you?” Leigh had risen and stood beside the rustic seat, her arm across its high back.

“Because it is the last time. Because we’ve known each other since childhood and have been playmates, chums, companions; because I am going one way and you another, and our paths may widen more and more, and because – oh, Leigh, because I want you.”

He leaned against the back of the seat and gently put one hand on her arm.

The yellow August sunshine lay on the level prairies beyond the river. The shining thread of waters wound away across the landscape under a play of light and shadow. The clover sod at their feet was soft and green. The big golden sunflowers hung on their stalks along the border of the lawn, and overhead the ripple of the summer breezes in the cottonwoods made a music like pattering raindrops. Under their swaying boughs Leigh Shirley stood, a fair, sweet girl. And nothing in the languorous beauty of the midsummer afternoon could have been quite so pleasing without her presence there.

She looked down at Thaine’s big brown hand resting against her white arm, and then up to his handsome face.

“It would only make trouble for, for everybody. No, I’m coming home with the crowd on the hayrack.” She lifted her arm and began to pull the petals from a tiny sunflower that lay on the seat beside her.

“Very well.” There was no anger in Thaine’s tone. “Do you remember the big sunflower we found to send to Prince Quippi, once?”

“The one that should bring him straight from China to me, if he really cared for me?” Leigh asked.

“You said that one was to tell him that you loved him and you knew it would bring him to you. But he never came.”

“It’s a way my princes have of doing,” Leigh said with a little laugh.

“If I were in China and you should send me a sunflower, I’d know you wanted me to come back.”

“If I ever send you one you will know that I do,” Leigh said. “Meantime, my prince will wear a sprig of alfalfa on his coat.”

“And a cockle burr in his whiskers, and cerulean blue overalls like mine, and he’ll drudge along in a slow scrap with the soil till the soil gets him,” Thaine added.

“Like it got your father,” Leigh commented.

“Oh, he’s just one sort of a man by himself,” Thaine declared. “A pretty good sort, of course, else I’d never have recommended him to be my father. Good-by. I’ll see you across the crowd tomorrow.”

He turned at once and left her.

“The Cottonwoods” was a picturesque little grove grown in the last decade about a rocky run down which in the springtime a full stream swept. There was only a little ripple over a stony bed now, with shallow pools lost in the deeper basins here and there. The grasses lay flat and brown on the level prairie about it. Down the shaded valley a light cool breeze poured steadily. Beyond the stream a gentle slope reached far away to the foot of the three headlands – the purple notches of Thaine Aydelot’s childhood fancies.

The day was ideal. Such days come sometimes in a Kansas August. The young people of the Grass River neighborhood had made merry half of the morning in the grove, and as they gathered for the picnic lunch someone called out:

“Jo Bennington, where’s Thaine Aydelot? Great note for him to disappear when this Charity Ball was executed mainly for him.”

“Better ask Todd Stewart. He’s probably had Thaine kidnaped for this occasion,” somebody else suggested.

“I tried to do it and failed,” Todd Stewart assented. “I don’t need him in my business. He can start to school today if he wants to.”

“Well, you don’t want him to go, do you, Jo?”

“Oh, I don’t care especially. I’m going away myself, but not to the University, but I’m not going till papa’s elected,” Jo replied.

“And if papa’s defeated we stay home all winter, eh?” Todd questioned.

“That all depends,” Jo replied.

“Of course it does. What is it, and who depends on it? Jo, I’ll help you if you must defend yourself.”

Thaine Aydelot bounced down from the rocky bank above into the midst of the company and became at once Jo’s escort by common consent.

“Now life’s worth living, Thaine’s here. Let’s have dinner,” the boys urged.

It was not Leigh Shirley’s fault that Thaine should be placed between her and Jo at the spread of good things to eat; nor Jo’s planning that she should be between Thaine and Todd Stewart. But nobody could be unhappy today.

In the late afternoon the crowd strolled in couples and quartettes and groups up and down the picturesque place.

Thaine had been with Jo from the moment of his coming and Leigh was glad that she had not yielded to his request of the afternoon before. She had become a little separated from the company as she followed a trail of golden sunflowers down the edge of the wide space between the stream and the foot of the headlands towering far beyond it. The sun had disappeared suddenly and the gleam of the blossoms dulled a trifle. Leigh sat down on a slab of shale to study the effect of the shadow.

“Are you still looking for a letter that will bring Prince Quippi back?” Thaine Aydelot asked as he climbed up from the rough stream bed to a seat beside her.

“I’m watching the effect of sunshine and shadow on the sunflowers,” Leigh replied.

“It will be all shadow if you wait much longer. The clouds are gathering now and we must start home.”

“Then I must be going, too. It’s a lovely, lazy place here, though. Some time I’m going to the top of those bluffs, away off there.”

“Let’s go up now,” Thaine suggested.

“But it’s too late. I mustn’t keep the crowd waiting,” Leigh insisted. “It’s a stiff climb, too.”

“I can drive up. I know a trail through the brush. Let me drive you up, Leigh. It won’t take long. There’s something worth seeing up there,” Thaine insisted.

“Well, be quick, Thaine. We’ll get into trouble if we are late,” Leigh declared.

The trail up the steep slope twisted its way back and forth through the low timber that covered the sides of the bluffs, and the two in the buggy found themselves shut away in its solitary windings.

“What a shadowy road,” Leigh said. “And see that cliff dropping down beyond that turn. How could there be such a romantic place out on these level plains?”

“It was my fairy land when I was a little tot,” Thaine replied. “I came here long ago and explored it myself.”

“I’d like to come here sketching sometime. See how the branches meet overhead. The odors from the bluffside are like the odors of the woodland back in the Clover valley in Ohio. I remember them yet, although I was so little when I left there,” Leigh said, turning to Thaine.

He shifted the reins, and throwing his hat in the buggy before him he pushed back the hair from his forehead.

“Leigh, will you let me take you home? I didn’t ask Jo after all. Todd wouldn’t wait long enough for me to do that, as I knew well enough he wouldn’t. Don’t be mad at me. Please don’t,” he pleaded.

“Why, I’m glad if you really want me to go with you, but you shouldn’t have staid away this morning.”

“I did it on purpose. I knew Todd wouldn’t let the chance slip – nor Jo neither, if I let him have it.”

“You let him have it merely because you didn’t want the chance today. Your kindness will be your undoing some day,” Leigh said with a smile that took off the edge of sarcasm.

Thaine said nothing in response, and they climbed slowly to the top of the bluff and stood at last on the crest of the middle headland.

Below them lay “The Cottonwoods” and the winding stream whose course, marked by the dark green line of shrubbery, stretched away toward Grass River far to the southeast. To the westward a wonderful vista of level prairie spread endlessly, wherein no line of shrubbery marked a watercourse nor tree rose up to break the circle of the horizon. Over all this vast plain the three headlands stood as sentinels. In the west the sunlight had pierced a heavy cloudbank and was pouring through the rift in one broad sheet of gold mist from sky to earth. Purple and silver and burnt umber, with green and gray and richest orange, blended all in the tones of the landscape, overhung now by a storm-girdled sky.

“This prairie belongs mostly to John Jacobs now and it is just as it was when the Indians called it the Grand Prairie and the old Pawnees came down here every summer to hunt buffalo. Some day, soon, there will be a sea of wheat flowing over all that level plain,” Thaine said.

“And up here a home with nothing to cut off a fragment of the whole horizon. Think of seeing every sunrise and every sunset from a place like this,” Leigh said, her face aglow with an artist’s love of beauty. “It’s farther to China than I used to think when I dreamed of a purple velvet house decorated with gold knobs beyond these three headlands.”

“I always did want to live on the Purple Notches,” Thaine said reminiscently. “I’m glad we came up here today.”

The sound of singing came faintly up from the valley far away.

“The crowd is mobilized. See the wagons crawling out of the grove and the civilians in citizens’ clothes following in carriages,” Thaine said as he watched the picnic party pushing out toward the eastward. “I’m so glad we aren’t with them.”

Leigh sat leaning forward, looking at the majestic distances lost in purple haze, overshadowed by purple clouds with gold-broidered edges of sunlight.

“The world is all ours for once. We see all there is of it and yet we are alone in it up here on the purple notches I used to dream about,” she said softly.

Thaine leaned back in his buggy and looked at Leigh with the same impenetrable expression on his countenance that was always there when she was present.

“Leigh,” he said at last, “if you didn’t have Uncle Jim what would you do?”

“I don’t know,” the girl answered.

“I never knew one of the fellows who didn’t like you, but you, you don’t seem to care for any of them. Don’t they suit you?” Thaine asked.

“Yes, but I can’t think much about them.”

“Why not?”

Leigh drew a long breath.

“Thaine, you have always been a good friend to me. Some day I’ll tell you why.”

“Tell me now,” Thaine insisted gently.

Leigh looked up, a mist of tears in her violet eyes.

“Oh, little girl, forgive me. It’s because – because,” Thaine hesitated. “Because deep down where nobody ever knew I’ve loved you always, Leigh. I didn’t know how much until the night of my party and the day we were at Wykerton.”

“Thaine! Thaine! you mustn’t say such things,” Leigh cried, gripping her hands together. “You mustn’t! You mustn’t!”

“But I must, and I will,” Thaine declared.

“Then I won’t listen to you. You are a flirt. Not satisfied with making one girl love you, you want to make all of us care for you.”

“I know what you mean. I thought I loved Jo. Then I knew I didn’t, and I felt in honor bound to keep her from finding it out. But that’s a dead failure of a business. You can’t play that game and win. I’ve learned a good many things this summer, and one of them is that Todd Stewart is the only one who really and truly loves Jo, and she cares as much for him as she does for anybody.”

“How do you know?” Leigh asked as she leaned back now and faced Thaine.

“Because she doesn’t know herself yet. She’s too spoiled by the indulgence of everybody and too pretty. She wants attention. But I found finally, maybe mother helped me a little, that if she has Todd’s attention she’s satisfied. More, she’s comfortable. She was always on thorns with me. Isn’t that enough about Jo?”

“Well?” Leigh queried.

“No, nothing is well yet. Leigh, let me go away to the University. Let me make a name for myself, a world-wide name, maybe, let me fight on my frontier line and then come back and lift the burden you carry now. I want to do big things somewhere away from the Kansas prairies, away from the grind of the farm and country life. Oh, Leigh, you are the only girl I ever can really love.”

He leaned forward and took her hands in his own, his dark eyes, beautiful with the light of love, looking down into hers, his face aglow with the ambition of undisciplined youth.

“Let me help you,” he pleaded.

“It is only sympathy you offer, Thaine, and I don’t want sympathy. You said that game wouldn’t win with Jo. Neither would it with me. I am happy in my work. I’m not afraid of it. The harder part is to get enough money to buy seed and pay interest, and Uncle Jim and I will earn that. I tell you the mortgage must be lifted by alfalfa roots just as Coburn’s book says it will be.”

There was a defiant little curve on her red lips and the brave hopefulness of her face was inspiring.

“Go and do your work, Thaine. Fight your battles, push back your frontier line, win your wilderness, and make a world-wide name for yourself. But when all is done don’t forget that the fight your father and mother made here, and are making today, is honorable, wonderful; and that the winning of a Kansas farm, the kingdom of golden wheat, bordered round by golden sunflowers, is a real kingdom. Its sinews of strength uphold the nation.”

“Why, you eloquent little Jayhawker!” Thaine exclaimed. “You should have been an orator on the side, not an artist. But all this only makes me care the more. I’m proud of you. I’d want you for my chum if you were a boy. I want you for my friend, but down under all this I want you for my girl now, and afterwhile, Leigh, I want you for my own, all mine. Don’t you care for me? Couldn’t you learn to care, Leigh? Couldn’t you go with me to a broader life somewhere out in the real big world? Couldn’t we come some time to the Purple Notches and build a home for just our summer days, because we have seen these headlands all our lives?”

Leigh’s head was bowed, and the pink blooms left her cheeks.

“Thaine,” she said in a low voice that thrilled him with its sweetness, “I do care. I have always cared so much that I have hoped this moment might never come.”

Thaine caught her arm eagerly.

“No! no! We can never, never be anything but friends, and if you care more than that for me now, if you really love me – ”the voice was very soft – “don’t ask me why. I cannot tell you, but I know we can never be anything more than friends, never, never.”

The sorrow on her white face, the pathos of the great violet eyes, the firm outline of the red lips told Thaine Aydelot that words were hopeless. He had known her every mood from childhood. She never dallied nor hesitated. The grief of her answer went too deep for words to argue against. And withal Thaine Aydelot was very proud and unaccustomed to being denied what he chose to want very much.

“Leigh, will you do two things for me?” he asked at length. The sad, quiet tone was unlike Thaine Aydelot.

“If I can,” Leigh answered.

“First, will you promise me that if you want me you will send for me. If you ever find – oh, Leigh, ever is such a long word. If you ever think you can care enough for me to let me come back to you, you will let me know.”

“When I send you the little sunflower letter Prince Quippi never answered you may come back,” Leigh said lightly, but the tears were too near for the promise to seem trivial. “What is the other thing?”

“I want you just once to let me kiss you, Leigh. It’s our good-by kiss forever. Hereafter we are only friends, old chums, you know. Will you let me be your lover for one minute up here on the Purple Notches, where the whole world lies around us and nobody knows our secret? Please, Leigh. Then I’ll go away and be a man somewhere in the big world that’s always needing men.”

Leigh leaned toward him, and he held her close as he kissed her red lips. In all the stormy days that followed the memory of that moment was with him. A moment when love, in all its purity and joy, knew its first realization.

The next day Leigh Shirley made butter all the morning, and in the afternoon she tried to retouch her sketch of sunflowers as she had seen the shadows dull the brightness of their petals in the valley below the Purple Notches.

The same day Thaine Aydelot left home for the winter, taking the memory of the most sacred moment of his life with him out into the big world that is always needing men.