Winning the Wilderness

CHAPTER II

The Sign of the Sunflower

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 ship 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 refreshingly 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 assuring.

“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 shifted 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 brass; and as thy days, so shall thy strength be.’ I believe the blessing will stay with us; that the Eternal God 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 Grass River. It leaves the real Sunflower Trail right here.”

“Who were we in this planting?” Virginia asked.

“Oh, me and my first wife, Jim Shirley, and his shepherd dog, Pilot. Jim and I have done several things together besides that. We were boys together back in Cloverdale. We went to the war together to fight you obstreperous Rebels.” There was a twinkle in Asher’s eyes now.

“Yes, but in the end who really won?” Virginia asked demurely.

“You did, of course – in my case. Jim went back to Cloverdale for awhile. Then he came out here. He’s a fine fellow. Plants a few more seeds by the wayside than is good for him, maybe, but a friend to the last rollcall. He was quite a ladies’ man once, and nobody knows but himself how much he would have loved a home. He has something of a story back of his coming West, but we never speak of that. He’s our only neighbor now.”

It was twilight when Asher and his wife slipped down over a low swell and reached their home. The afterglow of sunset was gorgeous in the west. The gray cloud-tide, now a purple sea, was rifted by billows of flame. Level mist-folds of pale violet lay along the prairie distances. In the southwest the horizon line was broken by a triple fold of deepest blue-black tones, the mark of headlands somewhere. Across the landscape a grassy outline marked the course of a stream that wandered dimly toward the darkening night shadows. The subdued tones of evening held all the scene, save where a group of tall sunflowers stood up to catch the last light of day full on their golden shields.

“We are here at last, Mrs. Aydelot. Welcome to our neighborhood!” Asher said bravely as the team halted.

Virginia sat still on the wagon seat, taking in the view of sunset sky and twilight prairie.

“This is our home,” she murmured. “I’m glad we are here.”

“I’m glad you are glad. I hope I haven’t misrepresented it to you,” her husband responded, turning away that he might not see her face just then.

It was a strange place to call home, especially to one whose years had been spent mainly in the pretty mountain-walled Virginia valleys where cool brooks babbled over pebbly beds or splashed down in crystal waterfalls; whose childhood home had been an old colonial house with driveways, and pillared verandas, and jessamine-wreathed windows; with soft carpets and cushioned chairs, and candelabra whose glittering pendants reflected the light in prismatic tintings; and everywhere the lazy ease of idle servants and unhurried lives.

The little sod house, nestled among sheltering sunflowers, stood on a slight rise of ground. It contained one room with two windows, one looking to the east and the other to the west, and a single door opening on the south. Above this door was a smooth pine board bearing the inscription, “Sunflower Inn,” stained in rather artistic lettering. A low roof extending over the doorway gave semblance to a porch which some scorched vines had vainly tried to decorate. There was a rude seat made of a goods box beside the doorway. Behind the house rose the low crest of a prairie billow, hardly discernible on the level plains. Before it lay the endless prairie across which ran the now half-dry, grass-choked stream. A few stunted cottonwood trees followed its windings, and one little clump of wild plum bushes bristled in a draw leading down to the shallow place of the dry watercourse. All else was distance and vastness void of life and utter loneliness.

Virginia Aydelot looked at the scene before her. Then she turned to her husband with a smile on her young face, saying again,

“I am glad I am here.”

There is one chord that every woman’s voice touches some time, no matter what her words may be. As Virginia spoke, Asher saw again the moonlight on the white pillars of the south veranda of the old Aydelot farmhouse, and his mother sitting in the shadows; and again he caught the tone of her voice saying,

“Thy shoes shall be iron and brass; and as thy days, so shall thy strength be.”

He leaped from the wagon seat and put up his arms to help his wife to the ground.

“This is the end of the trail,” he said gaily. “We have reached the inn with ’The Sign of the Sunflower.’ See the signboard Jim has put up for us.”

At that moment a big shepherd dog came bounding out of the weeds by the river and leaped toward them with joyous yelps; a light shone through the doorway, and a voice at once deep and pleasant to the ear, called out:

“Well, here you are, just as supper is ready. Present me to the bride, Asher, and then I’ll take the stock off your hands.”

“Mrs. Aydelot, this is Mr. James Shirley, at present the leading artistic house decorator as well as corn king of the Southwest. Allow me, Jim, to present my wife. You two ought to like each other if each of you can stand me.”

They shook hands cordially, and each took the other’s measure at a glance. What Shirley saw was a small, well-dressed woman whose charm was a positive force. It was not merely that she was well-bred and genial of manner, nor that for many reasons she was pretty and would always be pretty, even with gray hair and wrinkles. There was something back of all this; something definite to build on; a self-reliance and unbreakable determination without the spirit that antagonizes.

“A thoroughbred,” was Shirley’s mental comment. “The manners of a lady and the will of a winner.”

What Virginia saw was a big, broad-shouldered man, tanned to the very limit of brownness, painfully clean shaven, and grotesquely clean in dress; a white shirt, innocent of bluing in its laundry, a glistening celluloid collar, a black necktie (the last two features evidently just added to the toilet, and neither as yet set to their service), dark pantaloons and freshly blacked shoes. But it was Shirley’s face that caught Virginia’s eyes, for even with the tan it was a handsome face, with regular features, and blue eyes seeing life deeply rather than broadly. Just a hint of the artistic, however, took away from rather than added to the otherwise manly expression. Clearly, Jim Shirley was a man that men and women, too, must love if they cared for him at all.. And they couldn’t help caring for him. He had too much of the quality of eternal interest.

“I’m glad to meet you, and I bid you welcome to your new home, Mrs. Aydelot. The house is in order and supper is ready. I congratulate you, Asher,” he said, as he turned away to take the ponies.

“You will come in and eat with us,” Virginia said cordially.

“Not tonight. I must put this stock away and hurry home.”

Asher opened his lips to repeat his wife’s invitation, but something in Jim’s face held the words, so he merely nodded a good-by as he led his wife into the sod cabin.

Two decades in Kansas saw hundreds of such cabins on the plains. The walls of this one were nearly two feet thick and smoothly plastered inside with a gypsum product, giving an ivory-yellow finish, smooth and hard as bone. There was no floor but the bare earth into which a nail could scarcely have been driven. The furniture was meager and plain. There was only one picture on the wall, the sweet face of Asher’s mother. A bookshelf held a Bible with two or three other volumes, some newspapers and a magazine. Sundry surprising little devices showed the inventive skill of the home-builder, but it was all home-made and unpainted. It must have been the eyes of love that made this place seem homelike to these young people whose early environment had been so vastly different in everything!

Jim Shirley had a supper of fried ham, stewed wild plums, baked sweet potatoes, and hot coffee, with canned peaches and some hard little cookies. Surely the Lord meant men to be the cooks. Society started wrong in the kitchen, for the average man prepares a better meal with less of effort and worry than the average or super-average woman will ever do. It was not the long ride alone, it was this appetizing food that made that first meal in the sod mansion one that these two remembered in days of different fortune. They remembered, too, the bunch of sunflowers that adorned the table that night. The vase was the empty peach can wrapped round with a piece of newspaper.

As they lingered at their meal, Asher glanced through the little west window and saw Jim Shirley sitting by the clump of tall sunflowers not far away watching them with the eager face of a lonely man. A big white-throated Scotch collie lay beside him, waiting patiently for his master to start for home.

“I am glad Jim has Pilot,” Asher thought. “A dog is better than no company at all. I wish he had a wife. Poor lonely fellow!”

Half an hour later the two came outside to the seat by the doorway. The moon was filling the sky with its radiance. A chorus of crickets sang joyously in the short brown grass about the sunflowers. The cottonwoods along the river course gleamed like alabaster in the white night-splendor, and the prairie breeze sang its low crooning song of evening as it flowed gently over the land. “How beautiful the world is,” Virginia said, as she caught the full radiance of the light on the prairie.

“Is this beautiful to you, Virgie?” Asher asked, as he drew her close to him. “I’ve seen these plains when they seemed just plain hell to me, full of every kind of danger: cholera, poison, cold, hunger, heat, hostile Indian, and awful loneliness. And yet, the very fascination of the thing called me back and hardened me to it all. But why? What is there here on these Kansas prairies to hold me here and make me want to bring you here, too? Not a feature of this land is like the home country in Virginia. When the Lord gave Adam and Eve a tryout in the Garden of Eden, He gave them everything with which to start the world off right. Out here we doubt sometimes if there is any God west of the Missouri River. He didn’t leave any timber for shelter, nor wood, nor coal for fuel, nor fruit, nor nuts, nor roots, nor water for the dry land. All there is of this piece of the Lord’s leftovers is just the prairie down here, and the sky over it. And it’s so big I wonder sometimes that there is even enough skystuff to cover it. And yet, it is beautiful and maddening in its hold, once it gets you. Why?”

“Maybe it is the very unconquerableness that cries out to the love of power in you. Maybe the Lord, who knew how easily Adam let Eden slip through his fingers, decided that on the other side of the world He would give a younger race of men, a fire-tried race in battle, the chance to make their own Eden. So He left the stuff here for such as you and me to picture out our own plan and then work to the pattern. It is the real land of promise. Everything waiting to be done here.”

“And there’s only one way to do it. I am sure of that,” Asher replied. “Armies don’t win, they terrorize and destroy. We whipped back the Indians out here; they’d come again, if they dared – but they never will,” he added quickly, as he saw his wife’s face whiten in the moonlight. “It’s a struggle to win the soil, with loneliness and distance and a few thousand other things to fight, beside. But I told you all this before I asked you to come out here.”

“I wish I could have brought some property to you to help you, Asher, but you know how the Thaine estate was reduced.”

“Yes, I helped the family to that,” Asher replied.

“Well, I seem to have helped you to lose the Aydelot inheritance. We are starting neck and neck out here,” Virginia cried, “and we’ll win. I can see our plantation – ranch, you call it – now, with groves and a little lake and a big ranch house, and just acres of wheat and meadows, and red clover and fine stock and big barns, and you and me, the peers of a proud countryside when we have really conquered. ‘Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree.’ Isn’t that the promise?”

“Oh, Virgie, any man could win a kingdom with a wife like you,” Asher said tenderly. “Back in Ohio, when I grubbed the fence corners, I saw this country night and day, waiting for us here, and I wondered why the folks were willing to let the marshes down in the deep woods stagnate and breed malaria, and then fight the fever with calomel and quinine every summer, instead of opening the woodland and draining the swamps. Nevertheless, I’ve left enough money in the Cloverdale bank to take you back East and start up some little sort of a living there, if you find you cannot stay here. I couldn’t bring you here and burn all the bridges. All you have to do is to say you want to go back, and you can go.”

“You are very good, Asher.” His wife’s voice was low and soft. “But I don’t want to go back. Not until we have failed here. And we shall not fail.”

And together that night on the far unconquered plains of Kansas, with the moon shining down upon them, these two, so full of hope and courage, planned their future. In the cottonwood trees by the river sands a night bird twittered sleepily to its mate; the chirp of many crickets in the short grass below the sunflowers had dwindled to a mere note at intervals. The soft breeze caressed the two young faces, then wandered far and far across the lonely land, and in its long low-breathed call to the night there was a sigh of sadness.

CHAPTER III

The Will of the Wind

The next day, and for many days following, the wind blew; fiercely and unceasingly it blew, carrying every movable thing before it. Whatever was tending in its direction, it helped over the ground amazingly. Whatever tried to move in the face of it had to fight for every inch of the way. It whipped all the gold from the sunflowers and threshed them mercilessly about. It snapped the slender stems of the big, bulgy-headed tumble-weeds and sent them tumbling over and over, mile after mile, until they were caught at last in some draw, like helpless living things, to swell the heap for some prairie fire to feed upon. It lifted the sand from the river bed and swept it in a prairie simoon up the slope, wrapping the little cabin in a cloud of gritty dust. The cottonwoods along the waterway moaned as if in pain and flung up their white arms in feeble protest. The wild plum bushes in the draw were almost buried by the wind-borne drift smothering the narrow crevice, while out on the plains the long lashing waves of bended grass made the eyes burn with weariness. And the sun watched it all with unpitying stare, and the September heat was maddening. But it was cool inside the cabin. Sod houses shut out the summer warmth as they shed off the winter’s cold.

Virginia Aydelot stood at the west window watching her husband trying to carry two full pails of water which the wind seemed bent on blowing broadcast along his path. He had been plowing a double fireguard around the premises that morning and his face and clothes were gray with dust. These days of unceasing winds seemed to Virginia to sap the last atom of her energy. But she was young and full of determination.