Winning the Wilderness

CHAPTER XXIV

The Call of the Sunflower

Thaine Aydelot sat with Doctor Carey and Pryor Gaines in the latter’s home in the Foreign Compound in Peking.

“I have done my work here,” Pryor was saying. “I have only one wish – to go back to old Grass River in Kansas and spend my days with Jim Shirley. We two will both live to be old because we are useless; and Leigh will be marrying one of these times, if the Lord ever made a man good enough for her. So Jim and I can chum along down the years together.”

“It is the place for you, Pryor,” Doctor Carey asserted. “And now that the ranch is making money while Jim sleeps, you two will be happy and busy as bees. Every neighborhood needs a man or two without family ties. You’ll be the most useful citizens in that corner of the prairies. And think of eating Jim Shirley’s cooking after this.”

“And you, Thaine? What now?” Pryor asked as he looked fondly at the young battle-tried soldier.

“I have done my work here,” Thaine quoted his words. “I’ve only one wish – to go back to old Grass River in Kansas to take my place on the prairie and win the soil to its best uses; to do as good a work as my father has done.”

Thaine’s dark eyes were luminous with hopefulness, and if a line of pathos for a loss in his life that nothing could fill had settled about his firm mouth, it took nothing from the manliness of the strong young face.

“And you, Carey?” Pryor asked.

Doctor Carey did not reply at once. A strange weariness had crept over his countenance, and a far-away look was in his eyes. The man who had forgotten himself in his service for others was coming swiftly toward his reward. But neither of his friends noted the change now. At last he said:

“Years ago I loved a girl as I never could care for any other girl. She would have loved me sooner or later if something hadn’t happened. A message from the man she cared for most fell into my hands one day long ago: a withered flower and a little card. I could have kept them back and won her for my wife, but I didn’t. I sent the message to her by a servant boy – and she has been happy always in her love.”

Doctor Carey turned his face away for the moment. Thaine Aydelot’s eyes were so much like Virginia Thaine’s to him just then. Presently he went on:

“Sometimes the thing we fail to get helps us to know better how to live and to live happily. You will not be a coward, Thaine, when you come, year by year, to know the greater wilderness inside yourself. You will go back to the prairies where you belong, as you say, and you will do a man’s part in the big world that’s always needing men.”

Thaine recalled the evening hour when he and Leigh were on the Purple Notches and he had declared in the pride of his nineteen years that he wanted to go out into the big world that is always needing men and do a man’s part there.

“If the big world needs men anywhere, it is on the old prairies,” he declared, and the doctor continued: “I have found my future already. I shall not leave China again. Grass River may miss me as a friend but not as a doctor of medicine. Doctors are too plentiful there. My place is here henceforth, and I’m still young. I came to the Philippines to be with Thaine” – Horace Carey’s voice was low, and the same old winning smile was on his face – “because I love the boy and because I wanted to protect him if it should be my fortune to do it. I saved him from the waters of the Rio Grande and helped to pull him out of the hospital at Manila. He doesn’t need me now, for he goes to do a big work, and I stay here to do a big work.”

“Out of love for me alone?” Thaine asked affectionately, throwing one arm about Horace Carey’s shoulder.

“No, not you alone,” Carey answered frankly, “but because something in your face always reminds me of a face I loved long ago. Of one for whose sake I have cared for you here. You are going home a brave man. I believe your life will be full of service and of happiness.”

The silence that followed was broken by Pryor Gaines saying:

“All this time – such a tragical time – I have forgotten, Thaine, that I have a message for you, a little package that reached here late last May. It was sent to me because the sender thought you were coming to China soon, and I was asked to keep it for you. You didn’t come, and mails ceased to leave Peking – and then came the siege, the struggle to keep up the defenses, the sickness, the starvation, the deaths, the constant attacks, the final sight of Old Glory on the outer walls, and your triumphal entry through the sewer. You see why I forgot.”

He took a little package from his writing desk and gave it into Thaine Aydelot’s hand.

The young soldier tried to open it with steady fingers, for the address was in a handwriting he knew well. Inside a flat little box was a card bearing the words:

And underneath that lay a withered little yellow sunflower.

Two evenings later as the three men sat together, Horace Carey suddenly gripped Thaine’s hand in his, then sank back in his chair with eyes that seemed looking straight into eternal peace; and the same smile that had won men to him seemed winning the angels to welcome him heavenward. In the midst of his busy, useful years his big work was done.

The sunflowers were just beginning to blossom along the old Grass River Trail. The line of timber following every stream was in the full leafage of May. The wheat lay like a yellow-green sea over all the wide prairies. The breeze came singing down the valley, a morning song of gladness.

Leigh Shirley had come up early to the Sunflower Ranch to spend the day and night with Virginia Aydelot, while Asher and her uncle Jim took a two days’ business trip to Big Wolf with Darley Champers. Jim had brought Virginia a big bunch of exquisite roses which nobody but Jim Shirley could ever have grown to such perfection.

Virginia went into the house to find the tall cut-glass vase Doctor Carey had sent to her when he started West, while Leigh went to the gate of the side lot to pet a pretty black colt that whinnied to her.

“You beautiful Juno!” she cried, patting the creature’s nose. “Mrs. Aydelot says you are as graceful and well-bred as all your grandmothers have been since the time a Juno long ago followed a prairie schooner down the old Grass River Trail to a little sod shack on a treeless claim in the wilderness. This is too fine a morning to go indoors,” she added as she came back to the front lawn to the seat under the fragrant white honeysuckle.

She was as sweet as a blossom herself this morning, with her soft brown-gold hair waving back from her face, and her blue eyes full of light.

Somebody had turned from the road and was coming up the walk with springing step. Leigh turned her head to see who it might be, as she reached for a spray of the fragrant honeysuckle, and found Thaine Aydelot standing before her.

With a glad cry, she dropped the blossoms and sprang to her feet.

“Prince Quippi couldn’t come nor write, so he sent me. Will I do for an answer, Leighlie? I was coming back to the blessed old prairies, anyhow; to my father and mother and the life of a farmer. I have come to see at last through Asher Aydelot’s eyes that wars in any cause are short-lived, and, even with a Christian soldiery, very brutal; that after the wars come the empire-makers, who really conquer, and that the man who patiently wins from the soil its hundredfold of increase may be a king among men. I can see such big things to be done here, but, oh, Leigh, are you sure you want me here?”

Thaine was holding her hands in a gentle grip, looking with love-hungry eyes down into her face.

“I’ve always been sure I wanted you,” Leigh said softly, “and I’ve always hoped you would come back here to the prairies again. But, Thaine, I’m so proud of you, too, for all the heroic things you have helped to do in the Philippines and in China. I am glad now you did go for a while. You have been a part of a history-making that shall change all the future years.”

Thaine put his arm about her and drew her close to him as he said:

“Then we’ll go and build a house on the Purple Notches, a purple velvet house with gold knobs, and all that yellow prairie away to the west that was only grass land four years ago we’ll turn to wheat fields like Asher Aydelot’s here. John Jacobs was holding that ground for somebody like you and me. We’ll buy it of his estate. We’ll show the fathers what the sons can do.”

A thrill of happiness lighted Leigh’s face for a moment, then a shadow fell over it as she said:

“Thaine, Darley Champers and I have kept a secret for a year.”

“You kept it ’danged’ well. What was it?” Thaine asked gaily.

“Jane Aydelot, who died last year, left me all her property,” Leigh began.

“Good for Jennie,” Thaine broke in, but Leigh hurried on.

“I always knew she meant to do it, and that was one reason why I sent you away. I wouldn’t have your money and I felt if you knew you wouldn’t ask me for fear I’d think – Oh, money you don’t earn or inherit squarely is such a grief,” Leigh paused.

“So you wouldn’t let me have any hope because of this junk in Ohio that you were afraid you’d get and I’d seem to be wanting if I married you, and you thought I ought to have and you’d seem to be marrying me to get. If I ever have an estate, I’ll leave it to foreign missions. I’d like to make trouble for the cuss that got me at the Rio Grande. Money might do it,” Thaine declared.

Leigh did not laugh.

“You are right, Thaine. I was so unhappy about it all. For since I first came to Uncle Jim’s, I knew I ought not have Miss Jane’s love and the farm that you would have had if she knew you.”

“You’ve known this all these years and never told even me. You silent little subsoiler!” Thaine exclaimed.

“It grew in my mind from an almost babyhood impression to a woman’s principle,” Leigh declared. “I never thought of telling anybody. But there was another thing that kept me firm that day on the Purple Notches. Years ago, when I was a baby girl, I remember dimly seeing two men in an awful fight one night just at dusk down on the railroad track by Clover Creek in Ohio. I thought one of them was my father. Miss Jane would never tell me anything about it, and made me promise never to speak of it. So I grew up sure that my father had committed some dreadful crime, and, Thaine, until I knew better, I couldn’t take the risk of disgracing your name, the proud name of Aydelot.”

“Oh, Leigh, it is no matter what our forefathers do – they were all a bad lot if we go back far enough. It’s what we do that counts. It’s what I do as Thaine Aydelot, not as Asher Aydelot’s son, that I must stand or fall by. It’s how far we win our wilderness, little girl, not the wilderness our fathers won or lost.”

Thaine was sitting beside Leigh now, under the perfumy white honeysuckle blossoms.

“But, Thaine, the bans are all lifted now.”

Leigh sat with face aglow. “Your grandfather wouldn’t let his property go to a child of Virginia Aydelot, so Miss Jane couldn’t give it to you. She left it to me – all her property, provided, or hoping, I would – you should – ”she hesitated.

“Yes, we should, and we will,” Thaine finished the sentence. “Bless her good soul! I’ve always been rather fond of her, anyhow!”

“And Darley Champers found out that my father was accidentally drowned long ago in Clover Creek. Uncle Jim says he never could swim, and so that burden is lifted. But, Thaine, will you want to go back to Ohio to the Aydelot homestead? I could sell it for a club house to the Cloverdale Country Club, but I waited till you should come, to know what to do.”

There was just a little quaver in Leigh’s voice.

“Do you want to go back to Ohio?” Thaine inquired. “Unless you do, the country clubbers may have the place. There is no homestead there for me. This is my homestead. I want that open ranch-land beyond the Purple Notches. But, Leigh, if my father as administrator and trustee for John Jacobs’ estate can sell me the ground and your inheritance from Jane Aydelot pays for it, what is there left for me to do after all? I can’t take favors and give none. I’ll run away and enlist with the Regulars first.”

A rueful look came over his face now, and behind the words Leigh read a determined will.

“The real thing is left to you,” she replied, “the biggest work of all. You must go out and tame the soil. Your father bought his first quarter with money his father had left him by will, but he had no inheritance to buy all the other quarters that make the big Aydelot wheat fields of the Sunflower Ranch. If every acre of the prairie was covered with a layer of eastern capital, borrowed or inherited, it would not make one stalk of wheat grow nor ripen one ear of corn. But you may turn up the soil with your plow and find silver dollars in the furrow. You may herd cattle on the plains, and their dun hides will bring you cloth-of-gold. You may seed the brown fields with alfalfa, and it will take away the fear of protest or over-draft, as the Coburn book says it will. I know, because I’ve tried and proved it. Oh, Thaine, with all your grand battles in the East which is always our West, Luzon is still a jungle and China isn’t yet in the light. You have only prepared the way for the big things that are to follow. I never hear the old Civil War veterans telling of their achievements in a Grand Army meeting without wishing that, after their great story is told, the Grand Army of the Prairies would tell their tale of how the men and women fought out the battles here with no music of drums nor roar of cannon, nor bugle calls, nor shoulder straps, nor comradeship, nor inspiring heroic climaxes, and straight, fierce campaigns to victory. But just loneliness, and discouragements, and long waiting, and big, foolish-seeming dreams of what might be, with only the reality of the unfriendly land to work upon. I’m so glad you want to stay here and to take that open prairie beyond the Purple Notches for our kingdom.”

The happiness in Leigh Shirley’s eyes took from Thaine’s mind the memory of all the hardship and tragedy of his two years on the battlefield. Her pride in his achievements, her joy in his return and her dream of their future together in a work so full of service, filled his soul with rejoicing, as the May morning opened for these two its paradise of Youth and Love.

Asher and Virginia Aydelot had come out on the veranda to look for Leigh. A moment they waited, then Asher said softly:

“He has forgotten us, but he has come back to the life we love.”

“And he will come back to us tenfold more ours, because his heart is here,” Virginia answered, and the two stole softly indoors.

“See the roses Jim brought; they seem to belong to that beautiful vase,” Virginia said as they stood at the door of the dining room. “I think Jim must have meant them for Leigh and Thaine.”

“Yes, he brought us sunflowers in an old tin peach-can wrapped with a newspaper, and we had no mahogany dining room set and not so much cut-glass and china and silver in our cupboard, nor quite such a good rug on our hardwood floor,” Asher replied.

“But we had each other and the vision to see all these things coming to us,” Virginia said as she looked up into her husband’s face with love-lighted eyes. “I wonder where Jim is.”

“Jim is present.” Jim Shirley came in quietly from the side porch. “He prepared your wedding supper for you. He buried your first-born, and now he comes to give you a daughter, He’s been first aid to the Aydelots all along the line, as he will hope to continue to be, world without end, and a little more.”

The homestead on the Purple Notches looks out on a level land stretching away in an unbroken line to the far westward horizon. Broad fields of wheat grow golden in the summer sunshine, and acres of dark alfalfa perfume the air above them. With a clearer vision of what reward farm life may bring for him who goes forth and earns that reward, the man whom the Tondo road made a soldier, Caloocan a patriot, and Yang-Tsun a Christian, has found in the conquest of the soil a life of usefulness and power.

And the father and mother, Asher and Virginia Aydelot, who, through labor and loneliness and hopes long deferred, won a desert to fruitfulness, a wilderness to beauty – these two, in the zenith of their days, have proved their service not in vain, for that they have also won the second generation back to the kingdom whose scepter is the hoe.

Not in vain did the scout of half a century ago drive back the savage Indian from the plains; not in vain did Funston and his “Fighting Twentieth” wade the Tulijan and swim the Marilao; not in vain did Chaffee’s army burst the gates of Peking, nor Calvin Titus fling out Old Glory above its frowning walls.

Behind the scout came a patient, brave-hearted band of settlers who, against loneliness and distances and drouth and prairie fire and plague and boom, slowly but gloriously won the wilderness. Into the jungles of Luzon will go the saw and spade and spelling book. Upon the Chinese republic has a new light shined.

Not more to him who drives back the frontier than to him who follows after and wins that wilderness with sword re-shaped to a plowshare does the promise to Asher of old stand evermore secure!

“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.”