  Amid all the din Of the everyday battle some peace may begin, Like the silence of God in its regal content, Till we learn what the lesson of yesterday meant. |
Hans Wyker had managed skillfully when he pulled the prospective county seat of Wolf county up Big Wolf Creek to Wykerton, a town he hoped to build after his own ideals. And his ideals had only one symbol, namely, the dollar sign. Hans had congratulated himself not a little over his success.
“I done it all mineself,” he was wont to boast. “So long as Doc Carey tink he own der town vots name for him, an’ so long as Yon Yacob, der ding-busted little Chew, tink him an’ Todd Stewart run all der pusiness mitout regardin’ my saloon pusiness, an’ so long as Pryor Gaines preachin’ an’ teachin’ all time gifin’ black eye to me, ’cause I sells wisky, I not mak no hetway.”
“You are danged right,” Darley Champers would always assure him.
“Yah, I be. But von day I pull a lot of strinks at vonce. I pull der county seat locate to Pig Wolf Creek, an’ I put up mine prewery here mit water power here vot dey vassent not at Carey’s Crossing. An’ der railroat comin’ by dis way soon, I know. I do big business two times in vonce. I laugh yet to tink how easy Yon Yacob fall down. If Yon Yacob say so he hold Carey’s for der county seat.
Hans would laugh till the tears ran down his rough red cheeks. Then blowing his nose like a blast against the walls of Jericho he would add:
“Yon Yacob go back to Cincinnati. Doc Carey, he come Vest an’ locate again right here. Course he tak up claim on nort fork of Grass River. But dat’s yust for speculation some yet. Gaines an’ Stewart go to Grass River settlement an’ homestead. Oh, I scatter ’em like chaffs. Ho! Ho!” And again the laughter would bring tears to his watery little white-gray eyes.
What Hans Wyker said of John Jacobs was true, for in the council that decided the fate of the town it was his silence that lost the day and put Carey’s Crossing off the map. Hans, while rejoicing over the result, openly accused Jacobs of being a ding-busted, selfish Jew who cared for nobody but John Jacobs. Secretly Hans admired Jacobs for his business ability, and all men respected him for a gentleman. Hence it was no small disappointment to the brewery owner to find when Jacobs returned to Kansas that he did not mean to open a business in Wykerton. Instead, he loaned his money to Grass River homesteaders.
When crops began to bring returns Jacobs established a new town farther west on the claim that Dr. Carey had taken up. Jacobs insisted on calling the place Careyville in honor of the doctor, because he had been the means of annihilating the first town named after Carey. And since he had befriended the settlers in the days after the grasshopper raid he drew all the trade west of Big Wolf to
Then came the crushing calamity, the Prohibitory Law, which put Hans Wyker out of business. And hand in hand with this disaster, when the railroad came at last it drove its steel lines imperiously westward, ignoring Wykerton, with the ugly little canyons of Big Wolf on the north, and the site of Carey’s Crossing beside the old blossom-bordered trail on the south. Finding the new town of Careyville a strategic point, it headed straight thither, built through it, marked it for a future division point, and forged onward toward the sunset.
Dr. Carey had located an office on his claim when there were only four other buildings on the Careyville townsite. Darley Champers opened a branch office there about the same time, although he did not leave Wykerton. But the downfall of Wyker and his interests cut deeper into the interests of the Grass River settlement than anyone dreamed of at the time. It sifted into Wyker’s slow brain that the Jew, as he called Jacobs with many profane decorations, had been shrewd as well as selfish when his silent vote had
“Infernal scoundrel,” Hans would cry with many gestures, “he figger it out in his own little black het and neffer tell nobody, so. He know to hisself dat Carey’s Crossing’s too fur sout, so—an’ Big Wolf Creek too fur nort, so.” Hands wide apart, and eyes red with anger. “He know der survey go between like it, so! And he figger it hit yust fer it hit Grass River, nort fork. An’ he make a townsite dere, yust where Doc Carey take oop. Devil take him! An’ he pull all my town’s trade mit his fat pocketbook, huh! I send Champers to puy all Grass River claims. Dey don’t sell none. I say, ‘Champers, let ’em starf.’ Den Champers, he let ’em. When supplies for crasshopper sufferers cooms from East we lock ’em oop in der office, tight. An’ ve sell ’em. Huh! Cooms Yon Yacob an’ he loan claim-holters money—fife per cent, huh! Puy ’em, hide an’ hoof, an’ horn, an’ tail! Dey all swear py Yon Yacob. He rop me. I fix him yet sometime. I hate Yon Yacob!”
And Hans Wyker’s hate was slow, but it was incurably poison.
One morning in early autumn Dr. Horace Carey drove leisurely down the street of the town that bore his name. The air was crisp and invigorating, for the September heat had just been broken by copious showers. Todd Stewart stood in the doorway of Jacobs’ store, watching the doctor’s approach.
“Good morning, Doctor,” he called. “Somebody dying or a highwayman chasing after you for your pocketbook, that you drive so furiously?”
“Good morning, Stewart. No, nobody is in danger.
“I can’t do it, Carey. Jacobs is away up on Big Wolf appraising some land and I want to be here when he comes in. I must do some holding up myself pretty soon if things don’t pick up after this hot summer.”
“You’re an asset to the community, to be growling like that with this year’s crops fairly choking the market,” Horace Carey declared.
With a good-by wave of his hand he turned his horses’ heads toward the south and took his way past the grain elevator toward the railroad crossing. The morning train was just pulling up to the station, blocking the street, so Carey sat still watching it with that interest a great locomotive in motion always holds for thinking people.
“Papa, there’s Doctor Carey,” a child’s voice cried, and Thaine Aydelot bounded across the platform toward him, followed by his less-excited father.
Thaine was a sturdy, sun-browned little fellow of seven years, with blooming cheeks and big dark eyes. He was rather under than over normal size, and in the simplicity of plains life he had still the innocence of the very little boy.
“Good morning, Thaine. Good morning, Aydelot. Are you just getting home? Let me take you out. I’m going your way myself,” Dr. Carey said.
“Good morning. Yes, we are getting home a little earlier than we were expected and nobody is here to meet us. We’ll be glad to ride out with you.”
Asher lifted Thaine into the buggy with the words. A
The train cleared the crossing and the three went south over the bridge across the dry North Fork Creek, beyond the cattle pens, and on to the open country leading out toward the Grass River Valley. The morning was glorious with silvery mists lifting along the river’s course and a shimmering light above golden stubble and brown plowed land and level prairie; while far away, in all its beauty, hung the deep purple veil that Nature drops between her finite and her infinite, where the things that are seen melt into the things that are not seen.
“Take the lines, Aydelot, and let me visit with Thaine,” Horace Carey said, giving Asher the reins.
He was fond of children and children were more than fond of him. Thaine idolized him and snuggled up in his lap now with complete contentment of soul.
“Tell me all about it now, Thaine. Where have you been so long? I might have missed you down on the Sunflower Ranch this morning if I had driven faster and headed off the through train as it came in.”
“Oo-o!” Thaine groaned at the possible disaster to himself. “We’ve been to Topeka, a very long way off.”
“And you saw so many fine things?” Carey questioned.
“Yes, a big, awful big river. And a bridge made of iron. And it just rattled when we went across. And there were big pieces of the Statehouse lying around in the tall weeds. And such greeny green grass just everywhere. And, and, oh, the biggest trees. So many, all close together. Papa said it was like Ohio. Oh, so big. I
Little Thaine spread his short arms to show how wondrous large these trees were.
“He has never seen a tree before that was more than three inches through, except two or three lonesome cottonwoods. The forests of his grandfather’s farm in Ohio would be gigantic to him. How little the prairie children know of the world!” Asher declared.
Dr. Carey remembered what Jim Shirley had told him of that lost estate in Ohio, and refrained from comment.
“You’d like to live in Topeka where the big Kaw river is, and the big trees along its banks, and so much green grass, wouldn’t you, Thaine?”
“No!” The child’s face was quaintly contemptuous. “It’s too—too choky.” The little hand clutched at the fat brown throat. “And the grass is so mussy green, and you can’t see to anywhere for the bumpy hills and things. I like our old brown prairies best. It’s so—nice out here.” And with a sigh of perfect satisfaction Thaine leaned against Dr. Carey’s shoulder and gazed out at the wide landscape swathed in the early morning sunlight.
The two men exchanged glances.
“This will be the land of memory for him some day, as you look back to the mountains of Virginia and I to the woodlands of Ohio,” Asher said.
“It is worth remembering, anyhow,” Carey replied. “I can count twenty young windbreaks from the swell just ahead, and the groves are springing up on many ranches from year to year. Your grove is the finest in the valley now, Aydelot.”
“It is doing well,” Asher said. “Mrs. Aydelot and I planned our home-to-be on the first evening we came to the Sunflower Inn. It was a sort of mirage-of-the-desert picture, it is true, but we were like the tapestry weavers. We hung the pattern up before our eyes and worked to it. It is slow weaving, I’ll admit, but we kept on because we wanted to at first, then because we had to, and finally because our hearts took root in a baby’s grave. They say the tapestry makers work on the wrong side of the threads, but when their work is done the pattern comes out complete. I hope ours will too. But there’s many a day of aching muscles, and many a day of disappointment along the way. Crops prosper and crops fail, but we can’t let the soil go untilled.”
“I think we are all tapestry weavers. The trouble is sometimes in the pattern we hang up before us and sometimes in the careless weaving,” Dr. Carey added.
They rode a while in silence. The doctor’s cheek was against Thaine’s dark hair and Asher looked down at his hard brown hands and then away at the autumn prairie.
Fifteen years on a plains claim, with all the daily grind of sowing and reaping and care of stock and garden, had not taken quite all the military bearing from him. He was thirty-eight years old now, vigorous and wholesome and hopeful. The tanning Kansas sunshine had not hidden the old expression of patience and endurance, nor had the sight of many hardships driven the vision from the clear, far-seeing gray eyes.
“Look at the sunflowers, Papa,” Thaine cried as a curve of the trail brought a long golden line to view.
“You like the sunflowers, don’t you?” Carey asked.
“Oh, yes, better than all the flowers on the prairie. My mamma loves them, too, because they made her think once papa wasn’t dead.”
“Thaine, what do you mean to do when you grow up?” Horace Carey interrupted the child.
“I’m going to be a soldier like my papa was,” Thaine declared decisively.
“But there will probably be no wars. You see, your papa and I fought the battles all through and settled things. Maybe you can’t go to war,” Dr. Carey suggested.
“Oh, yes, I can. There’ll be another war by that time, and I’m going, too. And when I come back I’m going away to where the purple notches are and have a big ranch and do just like my papa,” Thaine asserted.
“Where are the purple notches?” the doctor asked.
“See yonder, away, way off?”
Thaine pointed toward the misty southwest horizon where three darker curves were outlined against a background of pale purple blending through lilac up to silvery gray.
“I’m going there some day,” the boy insisted.
“And leave your papa and mamma?”
“They left their papas and mammas, too,” Thaine philosophized.
The men laughed, although each felt a curious deep pain at the boy’s words.
Thaine settled back, satisfied to be silent as he watched the wonderful prairie landscape about him.
“I am going down to Shirley’s,” Carey began, as if to change the subject. “Strange fellow, Jim; I never knew another like him.”
“I was just thinking of Shirley,” Asher responded. “He is a royal neighbor and true friend, better to everybody else than he is to himself. His own crops suffer sometimes while he helps other folks lay theirs by. And yet his premises always look like he was expecting company. One cannot help wondering what purpose stays him in his work.”
“There is the tragedy of it,” Horace Carey declared. “I never knew a more affectionate man, yet he has lived a bachelor all these years.”
“How long have you known him, Carey?” Asher asked.
“Since the night at Kelley’s Ferry, back in the Civil War. Our regiment, the Fifty-fourth Virginia, was taken. We were worn out with fighting and marching, and we were nearly starved besides. The Third Ohio boys had been in the same fix once and our boys—”
“Yes, I was a Third Ohio boy. I know what you fellows did. You saved our lives,” Asher broke in.
“Well, you paid us back at Kelley’s Ferry. I first knew Jim Shirley that night, although he remembered me from the time we had your regiment at our mercy. He brought me bacon and hard tack and coffee. We have been friends ever since. How long have you known him?”
“I am going to war when I get big, before I ever go to the purple notches. I know I am.”
Thaine had been listening intently and now he broke in with face aglow and eyes full of eagerness.
“God forbid!” Carey said. “The lure of the drum beat might be hard for older men to resist even now.”
“Your hand will fit a plow handle better than a gun-stock, Thaine,” his father assured him, looking down at
Thaine shut his lips tightly and said no more. But his father, who knew the heart of a boy, wondered what thoughts might lie back of that silence.
“I have known Jim all my life,” Asher Aydelot took up the conversation where Thaine had interrupted it. “That is why I have wondered at the tenacity of his holding on out here. A man of his temperament is prone to let go quickly. Besides, Jim is far from being a strong man physically.”
“When he was down with pneumonia in the early seventies he was ready to give up. Didn’t want to get well and was bound not to do it,” Dr. Carey said, “but somehow a letter I had brought him seemed to change him with one reading. ‘I will do anything to get back to strength and work,’ he declared, and he has worked ever since like a man who knew his business, even if his business judgment is sometimes faulty.”
They rode awhile in silence, drinking in the delicious air of early autumn. Presently Dr. Carey said:
“Aydelot, I am taking a letter down to Jim this morning. It is in the same handwriting as the one I took when he had the pneumonia so severely. I learned a little something of Jim’s affairs through friends when I was East studying some years ago.”
He paused for a moment. Then, as if to change the subject, he continued:
“By the way, there was a bank failure at Cloverdale once that interested you. Did you ever investigate it?”
“There was nothing to investigate,” Asher replied.
It did not occur to him to connect the query with Carey’s knowledge of Shirley’s affairs or with his studying in the East.
“You have relatives there?” Carey asked.
“Yes, a Jane Aydelot. Married, single, widowed, I can’t tell. My father left his estate to her. I was in love with the West then, and madly in love with my wife. My father wasn’t impressed with either one. But, you see, I was rash about little things like money matters. I had so much faith in myself and I couldn’t give up a girl like Virginia Thaine. Understand, I have no quarrel with Jane Aydelot. Her property is absolutely her own, not mine to crave and look forward to getting some day.”
“I understand,” Horace Carey said, looking out toward the purple notches now more clearly outlined against the sky. “How this country has changed since that cold day when Mrs. Aydelot came almost to the old Crossing after me. The sand dunes narrow and the river deepens a little every year. The towns come and go on the prairies, but the homesteaders build better. It is the farmer who really makes a new country habitable.”
“That’s what my mother said when I talked of coming West. But the real test will come with the second generation. If it is loyal we will have won. Here is the old Grass River trail that Jim and I followed many lonely days. The valley is slowly coming out of the wilderness,” Asher replied, remembering his wife’s words long before when she said: “The real story of the plains is the story of the second generation. The real romance out here will be Thaine Aydelot’s romance.”
They had reached the old trail that led to the Grass River
Down at Jim Shirley’s ranch the changes were many, for Jim had an artist’s eye. And the energy other settlers spent on the needs of wives and children Jim spent on making his little dwelling attractive. He had brought clover seed from Ohio, and had carefully sowed a fire guard around his sod shack. Year by year the clover business increased; fire guard grew to clover-lot, and clover-lot to little meadow. Then the little meadow expanded along Grass River to a small cattle range. Over the door of his four-roomed cottage he put the name “Cloverdale,” as he had put it over his sod cabin years before. And the Cloverdale Ranch, like the Sunflower Ranch farther up the river, became a landmark on the trail.
Pryor Gaines, still the teacher-preacher of the Grass River settlement, had come to the Cloverdale Ranch on an
“Hello, Carey. How did you scent chicken pie so far? And a plum pudding all brown and ready?” Shirley called hospitably.
“It’s my business to find what produces sickness as well as to provide cures,” Carey responded as he stepped from his buggy to tie his horses.
“Take him in the house, Pryor, while I stable his crowbaits,” Jim said, patting one of the doctor’s well groomed horses the while.
“I hope you will stay, too,” Horace Carey said to Pryor Gaines. “I have some important news for Shirley, and you and he are fast friends.”
“The bachelor twins of Grass River,” Pryor Gaines declared. “Jim hasn’t any lungs and I haven’t any heart, so we manage to keep a half a household apiece, and added together make one fairly reputable citizen. I’ll stay if Jim wishes me to, of course.”
“The two most useful men in the community,” Carey declared. “Jim has been father and mother, big brother, and hired girl for half the settlement, while you, you marry and train up and bury. No neighborhood is complete without a couple of well-meaning old bachelors.”
“How about a bachelor M. D.?” Pryor Gaines asked. “I’ve not been able to get in my work on you yet.”
“Purely a necessary evil, the M. D. business,” Carey insisted. “Here’s Jim now. We wait the chicken and plum pudding, Host Shirley.”
Jim’s skill as a cook had not decreased since the day when he prepared Asher Aydelot’s wedding supper, and
“I have a letter for you, Shirley,” the doctor said at last. “It was sent to me some months ago with the request that I give it to you when I had word to do so. I have had word. Here it is.”
“I think I’ll be going now.” Pryor Gaines rose with the words.
“Don’t go,” Jim insisted. “I want you here.”
So Gaines sat down. Shirley, who was quick in intuitive power, knew instinctively what awaited him. He opened the letter and read it while the two friends busied themselves with a consideration of Jim’s bookcase, reading-table, and toolchest combined, all made out of one goods box with sundry trimmings.
Jim said nothing when he had finished, grateful that no painful silence on the part of the other two men forced him to words until he was ready to speak.
“Listen to me,” he said at length. “I need your help now. When I came West life didn’t seem worth living at first, but I had it on my hands and couldn’t throw it away. I tried to take an interest in Asher Aydelot’s home. But it is a second-rate kind of pleasure to sit by your own lonely fireside and enjoy the thought of the comfort another man has in his home with the wife of his choice.”
A shadow fell on Dr. Carey’s face as he sat looking through the open window at the stretch of green clover down the valley.
“I was about ready to call time on myself one winter here when Carey brought me a letter. It was from Alice Leigh, my brother Tank’s wife. Tank and I were
“So you have been father and mother, brother and sister to this whole settlement,” Pryor Gaines said.
“Which may be vastly satisfying to these relatives, but does not always fill the lack in one’s own life,” Horace Carey added, as a man who might know whereof he spoke.
“I won’t bore you with details,” Jim began again. “The letter I had from Alice Leigh, Tank’s wife, a dozen or more years ago, asked me if I would take the guardianship of her children if they should need a guardian. I knew they would need one, if she were—taken from earth, as she had reason to fear then that she might be soon. I began to live with a new motive—a sense that I was needed, a purpose to be ready to help her children—the one service I could give to her. There’s a long, cruel story back of her marriage to Tank—a story of deception,
Jim clinched his fists hard and shut his teeth with a grip as he sat silent for a moment. Then drawing a deep breath, as if he were lifting a weight from his life, he said calmly:
“Mrs. Shirley died some time ago. Only one child survived her—a little girl six years old. The letter says—”The letter fluttered in Jim’s trembling hands. “It says, ‘My little Leigh is just six. She has been taught to love her uncle Jim.... Through the help of a friend here’—she doesn’t give the name—‘I have made you her guardian. I want her to go to your home. Her father will not take any responsibility, nor try to keep her. I know you will not fail me.’”
Jim folded the letter abruptly. “It is a dead woman’s last wish. How can I make a home for a little girl? What shall I do?”
He looked at the two men for answer. The doctor lifted his hand to Pryor Gaines, but the preacher waited awhile before replying. Then he said thoughtfully:
“It is easy for us two to vote a duty on you, Shirley. I answer only because you ask, not because I would advise. From my angle of vision, this looks like your call to service. Your lonely fireside is waiting for a little child’s presence—the child already taught to love you. I would say send for her at once.”
“But how can I send?” Jim questioned. “How can
“‘As thy day, so shall thy strength be.’ If you have prepared yourself to do anything, you can do it,” Pryor Gaines assured him.
“Well, how can I send?” Jim asked again. “There’s nobody there to bring her, and nobody here to go after her. It’s an awfully long way from here to Ohio. A little six-year-old girl can’t come alone. I couldn’t go back myself. I may be a coward, but the Almighty made me as I am. I can’t go back to Cloverdale and see only a grave—I can stay here and remember, and maybe do a kind of a man’s part, but I can’t go back.” He bowed his head and sat very still.
“You are right, Shirley,” Pryor Gaines spoke softly still. “Unless you were close to the life in its last days, don’t hang any graves like dead weights of ineffectual sorrow about your neck. Look back to the best memories. Look up to the eternal joy no grave can withhold.”
There was a sympathetic chord in Pryor Gaines’ voice that spoke home to the heart, and so long as he lived in the Grass River valley, he gave the last service for everyone who left it for the larger life beyond it.
“I will go for you, Shirley,” Horace Carey said. “You forget who brought you this letter. That it was sent to me for you, and that the time to give it to you was left until I was notified. This friend of your brother’s wife is a friend of mine. Let me go.”
“Horace Carey, since the night your Virginia regiment fed us poor starving fellows in the old war times, you’ve been true blue.”
“Well, I wore the gray that night, and I’d probably do it again. I can’t tell. It was worth wearing, if only for men to find out how much bigger manhood and brotherhood are than any issue of war to be satisfied only by shedding of innocent blood,” Horace Carey replied, glad to lift the burden of thought from Shirley’s mind.
“Could a sectional war ever have begun out here on these broad prairies, where men need each other so?” Pryor Gaines asked, following the doctor’s lead.
“Something remarkably like it did make a stir out here once. Like it, only worse,” Horace Carey answered with a smile. “But the little girl, what’s her name? Leigh? We’ll have her here for you. Your service is only beginning, but think of the comfort of such a service. I envy you, Jim.”
“A little child shall lead them,” Pryor Gaines added reverently.
Then they fell to talking of the coming of little Leigh Shirley. The hours of the day slipped by. The breeze came pouring over the prairie from the far southwest where the purple notches stood sentinel. The warm afternoon sunlight streamed in at the door. The while these childless men planned together for the welfare of one motherless, and worse than fatherless, little girl away in the Clover Creek Valley in Ohio, waiting for a home and guardianship and love under far Kansas skies.
