Winning the Wilderness

And it was Rosie Gimpke, whom John Jacobs called the Wykerton W. C. T. U., who swiftly put the word to him that her grandfather was again defying the law and menacing the public welfare.

Unfortunately, the messenger who served Rosie in this emergency was overtaken by Hans and forced to divulge his mission, threatened with dire evils if he said a word to Rosie about Hans having halted him, and urged to go with all haste on his errand, and to be sure of the reward, a ticket to the coming circus and two dishes of ice cream from the Wyker eating house, as per Rosie’s promise.

The boy hastened from the grinning Hans and did his errand, and afterward held his peace, so far as Rosie was concerned. But he stupidly unloaded his message and Hans’ interference and threats to John Jacobs as an outsider whom the Wyker family rows could not touch, and had another dish of ice cream at Jacobs’ expense.

This messenger was able, for he brought the word to Rosie that John Jacobs would come to his Little Wolf ranch the next day, and late in the evening drop into Wykerton unexpectedly, where he knew Rosie would give him easy access to the “blind tiger” of the Wyker House. The boy carried a message also to Darley Champers to meet Jacobs at the top of the hill above Little Wolf where the trail with the scary little twist wound down by the opening to the creek, beyond which the Gimpke home was hidden. Then Hans Wyker, with threats of withholding the circus ticket and the ice cream, was told both messages just as they had been given to him for Rosie and Champers. Hans, for reasons of his own, hurried out of Wykerton and took the first train to Kansas City.

All this happened on the day that Darley Champers had made his trip to the Cloverdale Ranch. The fine spring weather of the morning leaped to summer heat in the afternoon, as often happens in the plains country. On the next day the heat continued, till late in the afternoon a vicious black storm cloud swirled suddenly up over the edge of the horizon, defying the restraining call of the three headlands to sheer off to the south, as storms usually sheered, and burst in fury on the Grass River Valley, extending east and north until the whole basin drained by Big Wolf was threshed with a cyclone’s anger.

Darley Champers sat half asleep in his office on the afternoon of this day. His coat and vest were flung on a chair, his collar was on the floor under the desk, his sleeves were rolled above his elbows. The heat affected his big bulky frame grievously. The front door was closed to keep out the afternoon glare, but the rear door, showing the roomy back yard, was wide open, letting in whatever cool air might wander that way.

Darley was half conscious of somebody’s presence as he dozed. He dreamed a minute or two, then suddenly his eyes snapped open just in time to see Thomas Smith entering through the rear doorway.

“How do you do?” The voice was between a whine and a snarl.

Champers stared and said nothing.

“It’s too hot to be comfortable,” Smith said, seating himself opposite Champers, “but you’re looking well.”

“You’re not,” Champers thought.

Thomas Smith was not looking well. Every mark of the down-hill road was on him, to the last and surest mark of poverty. The hang-dog expression of the face with its close-set eyes and crooked scar above them showed how far the evil life had robbed the man of power.

“I got in here yesterday morning, and you went out of town right away,” Smith began.

“Yes, I seen you, and left immediately,” Champers replied.

“Why do you dodge me? Is it because you know I can throw you? Or is it because I got full here once and beat you up a bit over in Wyker’s place?” Smith asked smoothly, but with something cruel leaping up in his eyes.

“I didn’t dodge you. I had business to see to and I hurried to it, so I wouldn’t miss you this afternoon,” Champers declared. “What do you want now?”

“Money, and I’m going to have it,” Smith declared.

“Go get it, then!” Champers said coolly.

“You go get it for me, and go quick,” Smith responded. “I’m in a bad fix, I needn’t tell you. I’ve got to have money; it’s what I live for.”

“I believe you. It’s all you ever did live for, and it’s brought you where it’ll bring any man danged soon enough who lives for it that way,” Champers asserted.

“Since when did you join the Young Men’s Christian Association?” Smith asked blandly.

“Since day before yesterday.”

In spite of himself, Darley Champers felt his face flush deeply. He had just responded to a solicitation from that organization, assuring the solicitors that he “done it as a business man and not that he was any prayer meetin’ exhorter, but the dollars was all cleaner’n a millionaire’s, anyhow.”

“I thought so,” Smith went on. “Well, briefly, you have a good many things to keep covered, you know, and, likewise, so have your friends, the Shirleys. The girl paid about all the mortgage on that ranch, I find.”

Darley Champers threw up his big hand.

“Don’t bring her name in here,” he demanded savagely.

“Oh, are you soft that way?” The sneer in the allusion was contemptible. “All the better; you will get me some money right away. Why, I haven’t let you favor me in a long time. You’ll be glad to do it now. Let me show you exactly how.”

He paused a moment and the two looked steadily at each other, each seeming sure of his ground.

“You will go to these Shirleys,” Smith continued, all the hate of years making the name bitter to him, “and you’ll arrange that they mortgage up again right away, and you bring me the money. They can easy get three thousand on that ranch now, it’s so well set to alfalfa. Nothing else will do but just that.”

“And if I don’t go?” Darley Champers asked.

“Oh, you’ll go. You don’t want this Y. M. C. A. crowd to know all I can tell. No, you don’t. And Jim Shirley and that girl Leigh don’t want me to publish all I know about the father and brother, Tank. It might be hard on both of ’em. Oh, I’ve got you all there. You can’t get away from me and think because I’m hard up I have lost my grip on you. I’ll never do that. I can disgrace you all so Grass River wouldn’t wash your names clean again. So run along. You and the Shirleys will do as I say. You don’t dare not to. And this pretty Leigh, such a gross old creature as you are fond of, she can work herself to skin and bone to pay off another mortgage to help Jim. Poor fellow can’t work like most men, big as he is. I remember when he got started wrong in his lungs back in Ohio when he was a boy. He blamed Tank for shutting him out in the cold one night, or something like it. That give him his start. He always blamed Tank for everything. Why, he and Tank had a fight the last time they were together, and he nearly broke his brother’s arm off – ”

“Oh, shut up,” Champers snapped out.

“Well, be active. I’ll give you till tomorrow night; that’s ample,” Smith snapped back. “Hans and you are all the people in town who know I’m here now except the fat woman who waits on the table at Wyker’s. I’m lying low right now, but I won’t stay hid long; Wyker’ll keep me over one more day, I reckon. Even he’s turned against me when I’ve got no money to loan him, but I’ll be on my feet again.”

“Say, Smith, come in tomorrow night, but don’t hurry away now.” The big man’s tone was too level to show which way his meaning ran. “I’d like to go into matters a little with you.”

Smith settled back in his chair and waited with the air of one not to be coaxed.

“You are right in sayin’ I’d like to hide some transactions. Not many real estate men went through the boom days here who don’t need to feel that way. We was all property mad, and you and me and Wyker run our bluff same as any of ’em, an’ we busted the spirit of the law to flinders. And our givin’ and gettin’ deeds and our buyin’ tax titles an’ forty things we done, was so irregular it might or mightn’t stand in court now, dependin’ altogether on how good a lawyer for technicalities we was able to employ. We know’d the game we was playin’, too, and excused ourselves, thinkin’ the Lord wouldn’t find us special among so many qualified for the same game. Smith, I know danged well I’m not so ’shamed of that as I should be. The thing that hurts me wouldn’t be cards for you at all. It’s the brutal, inhumane things no law can touch me for; it’s trying to do honest men out’n their freeholds; it’s holdin’ back them grasshopper sufferer supplies, an’ havin’ the very men I robbed treatin’ me like a gentleman now, that’s cutting my rhinoceros hide into strips and hangin’ it on the fence. But you can’t capitalize a thing like that in your business.”

“Well, I know what I can do.”

“As to what you can do to me, you’ve run that bluff till it’s slick on the track. And I’ve know’d it just as long as you have, anyhow. Here’s my particular stunt with you. I had business East in ’96, time of the big May flood, and I run down to Cloverdale, Ohio, for a day. The waters was up higher’n they’d been know’d for some years.”

Thomas Smith had stiffened in his chair and sat rigidly gripping the arms. But Champers seemed not to notice this as he continued:

“The fill where the railroad cuts acrost the old Aydelot farm was washed out and kep’ down the back water from floodin’ the low ground. But naturally it washed out considerable right there.”

Smith’s face was deadly pale now, with the crooked scar a livid streak across his forehead. Champers deliberated before he went on. All his blustering method disappeared and he kept to the even tone and unruffled demeanor.

“The danged little crick t’other side of town got rampageous late in the afternoon, and the whole crowd that had watched Clover Crick all day went pellmellin’ off to see new sights, leavin’ me entirely alone by the washout. I remember what you said about pretendin’ to commit yourself to your Maker there in an agreement between you as cashier an’ Tank Shirley, an’ the place interested me a lot.”

A finer-fibred man could hardly have resisted the agonized face of Thomas Smith. A cowardly nature would have feared the anger back of it.

“It was gettin’ late and pretty cloudy still, and nobody by, an’ I staid round, an’ staid round, when just at the right place the bank broke away and I see the body of a man – just the skeleton mainly, right where you didn’t commit your pretended suicide. Somebody committed it there for you evidently. There was only a few marks of identification, a big set ring with a jagged break in the set that swiped too swift acrost a man’s face might leave a ugly scar for life, and if the fellow tried too hard to drown hisself he might wrench a man’s right arm so out o’ plum he couldn’t never do much signin’ his name again. I disposed of the remains decent as I could, for Doc Carey was leisurely coming down National pike from Jane Aydelot’s, an’ it was gettin’ late, an’ no cheerful plate nor job in a crowd in sunshiny weather, let alone there in the dusk of the evening. Wow! I dreamt of that there gruesome thing two weeks. I throwed the shovel in the crick. Would you like me to show you where to go to dig, so’s you can be sure your plan with Tank Shirley worked and you didn’t drown, after all? And are you sure you ain’t been misrepresenting things to me a little as agent for Tank Shirley? Are you right sure you ain’t Tank Shirley himself? I’ve kep’ still for four years, not to save you nor myself, but to keep Leigh Shirley’s name from bein’ dragged into court ’longside a name like yours or mine. I never misuse the women, no matter how tricky I am with men.”

Then, as an afterthought, Champers added:

“It’s so danged hot this afternoon I can’t get over to Grass River; and I got word to meet Jacobs over at the Little Wolf Ranch later, so I think I’ll take the crooked trail up to that place; it’s a lot the coolest road, and I’ll wait till the sun’s most down. I guess that three thousand dollar mortgage can wait over a day now, less you feel too cramped.”

Thomas Smith rose from his chair. His face was ashy and his small black eyes burned with a wicked fire. He gave one long, steady look into Champers’ face and slipped from the rear door like a shadow.

Darley Champers knew he had won the day, and no sense of personal danger had ever troubled him. He settled back in his chair, drew a long sigh of relief, and soon snored comfortably through his afternoon’s nap.

When he awoke it was quite dark, for the storm cloud covered the sky and the hot breath from the west was like the air from a furnace mouth.

“It’s not late, but it’s danged hot. I wonder why that Jew wanted me to meet him over there. Couldn’t he have come here? I’m wet with sweat now. How’ll I be by the time I get out to that ranch?” Champers stretched his limbs and mopped his hot neck with his handkerchief. “I reckon I’d better go, though. Jacobs always knows why he wants a thing. And he’s the finest man ever came out of Jewey. With him in town and Asher Aydelot on a farm, no city nor rural communities could be more blessed.”

Then he remembered Thomas Smith and a cold shiver seized his big, perspiring body.

“I wonder why I dread to go,” he said, half aloud. “The creek trail will be cool, but, golly, I’m danged cold right now.”

Again his mind ran to Smith’s face as he had seen it last. He put on his hat and started to take his long raincoat off the hook behind the rear door.

“Reckon I’d better take it. It looks like storming,” he muttered. “Hello! What the devil!”

For Rosie Gimpke, with blazing cheeks and hair dripping with perspiration, was hidden behind the coat.

“Oh, Mr. Champers, go queek and find Yon Yacob, but don’t go the creek roat. I coom slippin’ to tell you to go sure, and I hit when that strange man coom slippin’ in. I hear all you say, an’ I see him troo der crack here, an’ he stant out there a long time looking back in here. So I half to wait an’ you go nappin’ an’ I still wait. I wait to say, hurry, but don’t go oop nor down der creek trail. I do anything for Miss Shirley, an’ I like you for takin’ care off her goot name; goot names iss hardt to get back if dey gets avay. Hurry.”

“Heaven bless your good soul!” Champers said heartily. “But why not take the cool road? I’ve overslept and I’ve got to hurry and the storm’s hustling in.”

“Don’t, please don’t take it,” Rosie begged.

The next minute she was gone and as Champers closed and locked his doors he said to himself, “She does her work like a hero and never will have any credit for it, ’cause she’s not a pioneer nor a soldier. But she has saved more than one poor fellow snared into that joint I winked at for years.”

Then, obedient to her urging, he followed the longer, hotter road toward the Jacobs’ stock ranch bordering on Little Wolf Creek.

Meantime, John Jacobs inspected his property, forgetful of the intense heat and the coming storm, his mind full of a strange foreboding. At the top of the hill above where the road wound down through deep shadows he sat a long while on his horse. “I wonder what makes me so lonely this evening,” he mused. “I’m not of a lonely nature, nor morose, thank the Lord! There’s no telling why we do or don’t want to do things. I wonder where Champers is. He ought to be coming up pretty soon. I wonder if I hadn’t had that dream two nights ago about that picture I saw in a book, when I was a little chap, if I’d had this fool’s cowardice about being out here alone today. And what was it that made me look over all those papers in my vault box last night? I have helped Careyville some, and the library I built will have a good endowment when I’m gone, and so will the children’s park, and the Temperance Societies. Maybe I’ve not lived in vain, if I have been an exacting Jew. I never asked for the blood in my pound of flesh, anyhow. I wonder where Champers can be.”

He listened intently and thought he heard someone coming around the bend down the darkening way.

“That’s he, I guess, now,” he said.

Then he turned his face toward the wide prairie unrolling to the westward. Overhanging it were writhing clouds, hurled hither and thither, twisted, frayed, and burst asunder by the titanic forces of the upper air, and all converging with centripetal violence toward one vast maelstrom. Its long, funnel-shaped form dipped and lifted, trailing back and forth like some sensate thing. With it came an increasing roar from the clashing of timber up the valley. The vivid shafts of lightning and the blackness that followed them made the scene terrific with Nature’s majestic madness.

“I must get shelter somewhere,” Jacobs said. “I am sorry Champers failed me. I wanted his counsel before I slipped up on Wyker tonight. I thought I heard him coming just now. Maybe he’s waiting for me under cover. I’ll go down and see.”

The roar of the cyclone grew louder and the long swinging funnel lifted and dipped and lifted again, as the awful forces of the air hurled it onward.

Down at the sharp bend in the road Thomas Smith was crouching, just where the rift in the bank opened to the creek, and the face of the man was not good to look upon nor to remember.

“I’ll show Darley Champers how well my left hand works. There’ll be no telltale scar left on his face when I’m through, and he can tumble right straight down to the water from here and on to hell, and Wyker’s joint may bear the blame. Damned old Dutchman, to turn me out now. I set him up in business when I had money. Here comes Champers now.”

The storm-cloud burst upon the hill at that moment. John Jacobs’ horse leaped forward on the steep slope, slid, and fell to its knees. As it sprang up again the two men could not see each other, for a flash of lightning blinded them and in the crash of thunder that burst at the same instant, filling the valley with deafening roar, the sharp report of a double pistol-shot was swallowed up.

An hour later Darley Champers, drenched with rain, stumbled down the crooked trail in the semi-darkness. The cool air came fanning out of the west and a faint rift along the horizon line gave promise of a glorious April sunset.

As Darley reached the twist in the trail which John Jacobs always dreaded, the place Thaine Aydelot and Leigh Shirley had invested with sweet memories, he suddenly drew his rein and stared in horror.

Lying in the rift with his head toward the deep waters of Little Wolf Creek lay Thomas Smith, scowling with unseeing eyes at the fast clearing sky. While on the farther side of the road lay the still form of John Jacobs, rain-beaten and smeared with mud, as if he had struggled backward in his death-throes.

As Champers bent tenderly over him, the smile on his lips took away the awfulness of the sight, and the serenity of the rain-drenched face rested as visible token of an abundant entrance into eternal peace.

Grass River and Big Wolf settlements had never before known a tragedy so appalling as the assassination of John Jacobs at the hands of an “unknown” man. Hans Wyker had gone to Kansas City on the day before the event and Wykerton never saw his face again. Rosie Gimpke, who did not know the stranger’s name, and Darley Champers, who thought he did, believed nothing could be gained by talking, so they held their peace. And Thomas Smith went “unknown” back to the dust of the prairie in the Grass River graveyard.

The coroner tried faithfully to locate the blame. But as Jacobs was unarmed and was shot from the front, and the stranger had only one bullet in his revolver and was shot from behind, and as nobody lost nor gained by not untangling the mystery, the affair after a nine days’ complete threshing, went into local history, the place of sepulchre.