Margaret Hill McCarter ...Scores of better men had died. I could reach the township living, but—He knew what terrors tore me— But I didn’t! But I didn’t! I went down the other side. —The Explorer.

Pryor Gaines never preached a better sermon than the one that followed the singing of that old Portuguese hymn; and there were no doleful faces in that little company when the service closed. The men stopped long enough to discuss the best crops to put in for the fall, and how and where they might get seeds for the same; to consider ways for destroying the eggs left by the grasshoppers in the honey-combed ground, and to trade help in the wheat-breaking to begin the next day. The women lingered to plan a picnic dinner for the coming Saturday. Jim Shirley hummed an old love tune as he helped Pryor Gaines to close the windows and door for the week. Only little Todd Stewart, with sober face, scratched thoughtfully at the hard earth with his hard little toes.

“Can’t there be no more little children where there’s grasshoppers and Darley Champerses?” he asked his mother.

“Yes, yes, Todd. You won’t be lonesome long,” his mother assured him. “Some time when you are a man you can say, ‘I was the only little boy the grasshoppers and Darley Champers didn’t get.’ You stout little Trojan!”

And then Todd, too, caught the spirit of the day and 104 went singing blithely away. Across the bare hollow of Grass River, and beyond the sand dunes into the brown wastes that had been grassy prairies, his young voice came trailing back still singing, as he rode behind his father, following the long hot trail toward their home. And the other settlers went their ways, each with courage renewed, for the new week’s work.

Yet, they were lonesomely few in number, and the prairies were vast; they were poverty-stricken, with little means by which to sustain life through the coming season; on every hand the desolate plains lay robbed of every green growth, and to this land they were nailed hand and foot as to a cross of crucifixion. But they were young. They believed in the West and in themselves. Their faces were set toward the future. They had voted themselves into holding on, and, except for the Aydelots, no one family had more resource than another. The Aydelots could leave the West if they chose. But they did not choose. So together they laughed at hardship; they made the most of their meager possessions; they helped each other as one family—and they trusted to Providence for the future. And Providence, albeit she shows a seamy side to poverty, still loves the man who laughs at hard luck. The seasons following were not unkind. The late summer rains, the long autumn, and the mild winter were blessings. But withal, there were days on days of real hunger. Stock died for lack of encouragement to live without food. And the grim while of waiting for seed time and signs of prosperity was lived through with that old Anglo-Saxon tenacity that has led the English speaking peoples to fight and colonize to the ends of the earth. 105

“Virginia,” Asher said one noontime, as the two sat at their spare meal, “the folks are coming up tonight to hold a council. I saw Bennington this morning and he had heard from the men over Todd Stewart’s way. Dust the piano, polish up the chandelier, and decorate with—smiles,” he added, as he saw the shadow on his wife’s face.

“I’ll have the maid put the reception room in order,” Virginia replied, with an attempt at merriment.

Then through the long afternoon she fought to a finish with the yearning for the things she missed daily. At supper time, however, she was the same cheery woman who had laughed at loss and lack so often that she wondered sometimes if abundance might not really make her sad.

In the evening the men sat on the ground about the door of the Sunflower Inn. Their wives had not come with them. One woman was sick at home; little Todd Stewart was at the beginning of a fever, and the other women were taking turns at nursing. Virginia’s turn had been the night before. She was weary now and she sat in the doorway listening to the men, and remembering how on just such a moonlit September night she and Asher had sat together under the Sign of the Sunflower and planned a future of wealth and comfort.

“The case is desperate,” Cyrus Bennington was saying. “Sickness and starvation and the horses failing every day and the need for all the plowing and getting winter fuel. Something must be done.”

Others agreed, citing additional needs no less pressing.

“There are supplies and money coming from the East right now,” Jim Shirley declared. “A hunting party crossed south two days ago. I was down on lower Plum 106 Creek searching for firewood, and I met them. They said we might get help from Wykerton if we went up right away.”

“Well, you are Mr. Swift, Jim,” one of the men exclaimed. “If you knew it two days ago, why in thunder didn’t you report. We’d have made a wooden horse gallop to Wykerton before night.”

“How’d I round up the neighborhood? I didn’t get home till nearly noon today. And, besides, they said Darley Champers has the distributing of the supplies and money, and he’s putting it where it will do the most good, not giving to everybody alike, he says.”

A sudden blankness fell upon each face, as each recalled the last words of Champers when he left them on the Sabbath day in August.

“Well, you said a wooden horse could have galloped up to Wykerton.” Jim Shirley tried to speak cheerfully. “A horse of iron might, too, but who’s got a critter in Grass River Valley right now that could make a trip like that? Mine couldn’t. It took me two days and a half to haul up a load of stuff, mostly sunflower stalks, that I gathered down south.”

“Aydelot’s black mare could do it if anything could,” Pryor Gaines declared, trying to speak cheerfully, yet he was the least able to meet the hardships of that season.

“Yes, maybe,” Shirley commented. “She’s a thoroughbred, and they finally win, you know. But knowing what you do, who of you wants to face Darley Champers?”

Again a hopeless despair filled the hearts of the little company. Todd Stewart clinched his hands together. The husband of the sick woman set his jaws like iron. Pryor 107 Gaines turned his face away and offered no further word. Asher Aydelot sat looking out across the prairie, touched to silvery beauty by the pitying moonlight, and Jim Shirley bowed his head and said nothing.

“I will go to Wykerton,” Virginia Aydelot’s soft voice broke the silence. “I’ll take Juno and go tomorrow morning. If Darley Champers refuses me, he would do the same to you.”

“Oh, Mrs. Aydelot, will you go? Can you try it? Do you think you could do it?” The questions came from the eager settlers.

“We’ll try it, Juno and I,” Virginia replied.

“Thoroughbreds, both of ’em,” Jim Shirley murmured under his breath, and Pryor Gaines’ face expressed the things he could not say.

“I believe that is the best thing to do,” Asher Aydelot declared.

Then the settlers said good night, and sought their homes.

As Virginia Aydelot rode away in the early morning, the cool breeze came surging to her out of the west. The plains were more barren than she had ever seen them before, but the sky above them had lost nothing of its beauty. No color had faded from the eastern horizon line, no magnificence had slipped away from the sunset.

“‘The heavens declare the glory of God,’” Virginia said to herself. “Has He forgotten the earth which is His also?”

She turned at the little swell to the northward to wave good-by to Asher, standing with arms folded beside a corral post, looking after her. 108

“Is he thinking of Cloverdale and the big cool farmhouse and the well-kept farm, and the many people coming and going along that old National pike road? He gave it all up for me—all his inheritance for me and this.”

She looked back once more at the long slope of colorless land and the solitary figure watching her in the midst of it all.

“I’ll tell him tonight I’m ready to go back East. We can go to Ohio, and Asher can live where his boyhood days were spent. My Virginia can never be as it was in my childhood, but Asher can have some of the pleasures of his eastern home.” She pushed back the sunbonnet from her face, and let the west breeze sweep across it.

“I used to wear a veil and was somewhat acquainted with cold cream, and my hands were really white and soft. They are hard and brown now. When I get home I’ll put it straight to Asher about going back to civilization, even if there are only a few dollars waiting to take us there, and nothing waiting for us to do.”

With a sigh, half of anticipation and half of regret, she rode away toward the little town of Wykerton in the Big Wolf Creek settlement.

There were few differences between the new county seat and Carey’s Crossing, except that there were a few more houses, and over by the creek bank the brewery, by which Hans Wyker proposed to save the West. There was, however, one difference between the vanished Carey’s Crossing and this place, the difference between the community whose business leaders have ideals of citizenship, and the community wherein commerce is advanced by the degradation of its citizens. Wykerton had no Dr. Carey nor John 109 Jacobs to control it. The loafers stared boldly at Virginia Aydelot as she rode up before the livery stable and slipped from her saddle. Not because a woman in a calico dress and sunbonnet, a tanned, brown-handed woman, was a novelty there, but because the license of the place was one of impudence and disrespect.

The saloon was on one side of the livery stable and the postoffice was on the other side. Darley Champers’ office stood next to the postoffice, a dingy little shack with much show of maps and real estate information. Behind the office was a large barren yard where one little lilac bush languished above the hard earth. The Wyker hotel and store were across the street.

Virginia had been intrusted with small sums for sundry purchases for the settlement, especially for the staple medicines and household needs—camphor and turpentine, quinine and certain cough syrups for the winter; castor oil, some old and tried ointment, and brand of painkiller; thread and needles and pins—especially pins—and buttons for everybody’s clothes. One settler had ridden back at midnight to ask for the purchase of a pair of shoes for his wife. It was a precious commission that Virginia Aydelot bore that day, although to the shopper in a Kansas city today, the sum of money would have seemed pitifully small.

In the postoffice, printed rulings and directions regarding the supplies were posted on the wall, and Virginia read them carefully. Then with many misgivings and a prayer for success, she crossed the street to Darley Champers’ place of business.

In spite of her plain dress, Virginia Aydelot was every inch a lady, and Darley Champers, dull as he was in certain 110 lines, felt the difference her presence made in the atmosphere of his office when she entered there.

“I understood, Mr. Champers, that you have charge here of the supplies sent into the state for the relief of those who suffered from the grasshoppers,” she said, when she was seated in the dingy little room.

“Yes, mom!” Champers replied.

“I am Mrs. Asher Aydelot, and I represent the Grass River settlement. I have come to ask for a share of this relief fund, and as I must start back as soon as possible after dinner, perhaps we can make all arrangements now.”

She never knew how near her gentle manner and pleasant voice came to winning the day at once. Champers’ first impulse was to grant her anything she asked for; his second was to refuse everything; his third, his ruling principle always, was to negotiate to his own advantage. He dropped his eyes and began to play for time.

“I don’t know as I can help you at all, madam,” he said, half sympathetically. “The supplies and money is about gone, except what’s promised, and, well—you ought to have come sooner. I’d a been glad to help you, but I thought you Grass River folks had about everything you needed for the winter.”

“Oh, Mr. Champers,” Virginia cried, “you know that nobody could foretell the coming of the plague. We were as well off as hundreds of other settlers this dry summer before the grasshoppers came.”

“Yes, yes, madam, but the supplies is gone, about.”

“And you cannot promise that any more will be coming soon?” The pathos of the woman’s voice was appealing. 111

“If you could only understand how poor and how brave those settlers are!”

“I thought your man had some little means to get you and him away, if he’d use it that way.”

The sorrow of failure here and the suffering that must follow it made Virginia sick at heart. A homesick longing suddenly possessed her; a wish to get away from the country and forget it altogether. And Champers was cunning enough to understand.

“You’d just like to get away from it, now, wouldn’t you?” he asked persuasively.

“I surely would, when I think of the suffering there will be,” Virginia replied. “Our staying won’t help matters any.”

“Not a bit! Not a bit,” Champers asserted. “It’s too bad you can’t go.”

Virginia looked up wonderingly.

“Madam, I haven’t no supplies. They’re all gone, I think. But if you’ll come in right after dinner, I’ll see if I can’t do something. I’m a humane man.”

“I’ll be here at one o’clock,” she replied.

It was the last hope, and anything was better than utter failure in her errand.

When she registered her name at the hotel for dinner, Virginia’s eye was caught by the two names on the page. Both belonged to strangers, but it was the sharp contrast of the writing that made her read them. One recorded in a cramped little hand the name of Thomas Smith, Wilmington, Delaware. The other in big, even, backward slanting letters spelled out the name of John Jacobs, Cincinnati, Ohio. 112

The dining room was crowded with men when Virginia entered. Whoever is hunting for evidence of good breeding and unselfishness, must not expect too much in any eating-house, be it dining car on the Empire Limited or grub shack on the western frontier, if only men are accustomed to feed there. The best places were filled with noisy talkers and eaters, who stared at her indifferently, and it was not until Gretchen Wyker, tow-haired, pimpled, and short-necked like her father, chose to do so, that she finally pointed out a chair at a shabby side table and waved her empty tin waiter toward it. Virginia was passing the long table of staring men to reach this seat, when a man rose from the small table at the other side of the room and crossed hastily to her.

“Excuse me, madam,” he said politely. “Will you come over to our table? We are strangers to you, but you will get better service here than you might get alone. My name is Jacobs. I saw you in the store this morning, and I know nearly every man in your settlement.”

It was a small service, truly, but to Virginia it was a grateful one in that embarrassing moment.

“You can take Dr. Carey’s place. He’s away today, locating a claim on the upper fork of Grass River somewhere. He hasn’t been back a month, but he’s busy as ever. Tell me about your neighborhood,” Jacobs said.

Virginia told the story of the community that differed little from the story of the whole frontier line of Kansas settlements in the early seventies.

“Do you have hope of help through Mr. Champers?” Jacobs asked. 113

“I don’t know what to hope for from Mr. Champers. He seems kind-hearted,” Virginia replied.

“I hope you will find him a real friend. He is pretty busy with a man from the East today,” Jacobs answered, with a face so neutral in its expression that Virginia wondered what his thought might be.

As she rose to leave the table, Mr. Jacobs said:

“I shall be interested in knowing how you succeed this afternoon. I hope you may not be disappointed. I happen to know that there are funds and goods both on hand. It’s a matter of getting them distributed without prejudice.”

“You are very kind, Mr. Jacobs,” Virginia replied. “It is a desperate case. I feel as if I should be ready to leave the West if I do not get relief for our neighborhood today.”

Jacobs looked at her keenly. “Can you go?” he asked. “I wonder you have waited until now.”

“I’ve never wanted to go before. I wouldn’t now. I could stand it for our household.” The dark eyes flashed with the old Thaine will to do as she pleased. “But it is my sympathy for other people, for our sick, for discouraged men.”

Jacobs smiled kindly and bowed as she left the room.

When she returned to Champers’ office Mr. Thomas Smith was already there, his small frame and narrow, close-set eyes and secretive manner seeming out of place in the breezy atmosphere of the plain, outspoken West of the settlement days. In the conversation that followed it seemed to Virginia that he controlled all of the real estate dealer’s words.

“I am sorry to say that there ain’t anything left in the 114 way of supplies, Mrs. Aydelot, except what’s reserved for worthy parties. I’ve looked over things carefully.” Darley Champers broke the silence at once.

“Who draws the line between the worthy and the unworthy, Mr. Champers?” Virginia asked. “I am told the relief supply is not exhausted.”

“Oh, the distributin’s in my hands in a way, but that don’t change matters,” Champers said.

“I read the rulings in the postoffice,” Virginia began.

“Yes, I had ’em put there. It saves a lot of misunderstandin’,” the guardian of supplies declared. “But it don’t change anything here.”

Virginia knew that her case was lost and she rose to leave the room. She had instinctively distrusted Darley Champers from their first meeting. She had disliked him as an ill-bred, blustering sort of man, but she had not thought him vindictive until now. Now she saw in him a stubborn, unforgiving man, small enough to work out of petty spite to the complete downfall of any who dared oppose his plans.

“Sit down, Mrs. Aydelot. As I said this mornin’, it’s too bad you can’t go back East now,” Champers said seriously.

“We can.” Virginia could not keep back the words.

Champers and Smith exchanged glances.

“No, mom, you can’t, Mrs. Aydelot. Let me show you why.”

He opened the drawer of his rickety desk and out of a mass of papers he fished up a copy of the Cincinnati Enquirer, six weeks old. “Look at this,” and he thrust it into Virginia’s hand.

The head-lines were large, but the story was brief. The 115 failure of the Cloverdale bank, the disappearance of the trusted cashier, the loss of deposits—a story too common to need detail. Virginia Aydelot never knew until that moment how much that reserve fund had really meant to her. She had need of the inherited pride of the Thaines now.

“The papers are not always accurate,” she said quietly.

“No, mom. But Mr. Smith here has interests in Cloverdale. He’s just come from there, and he says it’s even worse than this states it.”

Virginia looked toward Mr. Smith, who nodded assent.

“The failure is complete. Fortunately, I lost but little,” he said.

“Why hasn’t Mr. Aydelot been notified?” she demanded.

“It does seem queer he wasn’t,” Thomas Smith assented.

Something in his face made Virginia distrust him more than she distrusted Darley Champers.

“Now, Mrs. Aydelot, seein’ your last bridge is burned, I’m humane enough to help you. You said this mornin’ you wanted to get away. Mr. Smith and I control some funds together, and he’s willing to take Shirley’s place and I’ll give you a reasonable figger, not quite so good as I could ’a done previous to this calamity—but I’ll take the Aydelot place off your hands.” Champers smiled triumphantly.

“The Aydelot place is not for sale. Good afternoon.” And Virginia left the office without more words.

When she was gone Champers turned to Smith with a growl.

“It’s danged hard to turn agin a woman like her. What made you so bitter?”

Smith half grinned and half snarled in reply: 116

“Oh, her neighbor, Shirley, you know.”

Hopeless and crushed, Virginia sat down on the bench before the Wyker House to wait for Juno to be brought to her from the stables. The afternoon sun was beginning to creep under the roof shading the doorway. Before her the dusty street ran into the dusty trail leading out to the colorless west. It was the saddest moment she had known in the conflict with the wilderness.

“Thy shoes shall be iron and brass,” ran the blessing of Asher through her mind. “It must be true today as in the desert long ago. And Asher lives by the memory of his mother’s blessing.” The drooping shoulders lifted. The dark eyes brightened.

“I won’t give up. I’m glad the money’s gone,” she declared to herself. “We did depend on it so long as we knew we had it.”

“What luck, Mrs. Aydelot?” It was John Jacobs who spoke as he sat down beside her.

“All bad luck, but we are not discouraged,” she replied bravely, and Jacobs read the whole story in the words.

A silence fell. Virginia sat looking at the vacant street, while the young man studied her face. Then Juno was brought to the door and Virginia rose to mount her.

“Mrs. Aydelot,” John Jacob’s sharp eyes seemed to pierce to her very soul as he said slowly, “I believe you are not discouraged. You believe in this country, you, and your neighbors. I believe in it, and I believe in you. Stewart and I had to dissolve partnership when Carey’s Crossing dissolved. He took a claim. It was all he could do. I went back to Cincinnati, but only for a time. I’m ready to start again. I will organize a company of town 117 builders, not brewery builders. You must not look for favors in a whisky-ridden place like this. There’ll be no saloon to rule our town.”

Virginia listened interestedly but not understandingly.

“What of this?” Jacobs continued. “I have some means. I’m waiting for more. I’ll invest them in Grass River. Go back and tell your homesteaders that I’ll make a small five-year loan to every man in the settlement according to his extreme needs. I’ll take each man’s note with five per cent interest and the privilege of renewing for two years if crops fail at the end of the term. I am selfish, I’ll admit,” he declared, as Virginia looked at him incredulously, “and I want dollar for dollar—always—sometimes more. My people are popularly known as Shylocks. But you note that my rate of usury is small, the time long, and that I want these settlers to stay. I am not trying to get rid of them in order to speculate on their land in coming days of prosperity—the days when you will be landlords over broad acres and I a merchant prince. I say again, I believe in the West and in you farmer people who must turn the West from a wilderness to a land of plenty. I’m willing to risk something on your venture.”

“Oh, Mr. Jacobs,” was all Virginia could say, and, womanlike, the tears filled her eyes and ran down her cheeks.

“Tell the men to send a committee up here with their needs listed,” Jacobs said hastily, “or better, I’ll go out there myself the day after tomorrow. I want to see what kind of a claim Carey has preempted. Good-by, now, good-by.” 118

He hurried Virginia to her horse and watched her ride away.

Down at the ford of Wolf Creek the willow brush fringed the main trail thinly for a little distance and half hid the creek trail, winding up a long canyon-like hollow, until a low place in the bank and a steep climb brought it up to the open prairie. It was the same trail that Dr. Carey had spoken of as belonging to an ugly little creek running into Big Wolf, the trail he had wanted to avoid on the day he had heard Virginia singing when she was lost on the prairie one cold day.

Virginia paused in this semblance of shade to let Juno drink. She pushed back her sunbonnet and sat waiting. Her brown face grew radiant as she thought of the good news she was bearing to the waiting home-makers of the Grass River Valley. A song came to her lips, and as she sang a soft little measure she remembered how somewhere down a tributary to this very creek she had sung for help in pleading tones one cold hopeless day three years before. So intent was she on the triumph of the hour she did not even look up the willow-shadowed creek trail.

Dr. Horace Carey, coming in from a distant claim, had dropped into this trail for the bits of shade here and there and was letting his pony take its way leisurely along the side of the creek bed. There were only a few shallow pools now where the fall rains would soon put a running stream, and as the doctor’s way lay along the moist places the pony’s feet fell noiselessly on the soft ground. As he rounded a bend in the stream he caught sight of Virginia, her face outlined against the background of willow sprays, making a picture worth a journey to see, it was such a 119 hopeful, happy face at that moment. Dr. Carey involuntarily checked his pony at the sight. His own countenance was too pale for a Kansas plainsman, and he sat so still that the low strain of Virginia’s song reached his ears.

Presently Juno lifted her head and Virginia rode away out on the Sunflower Trail, bordered now only by dead pest-ridden stalks. Suddenly lifting her eyes she saw far across a stretch of burned prairie a landscape of exquisite beauty. In a foreground lay a little lake surrounded by grassy banks and behind it, on a slight elevation, stood a mansion house of the old Colonial style with white pillared portico, and green vines and forest trees casting cool shade. Beyond it, wrapped in mist, rose a mountain height with a road winding picturesquely in and out along its side. Virginia caught her breath as a great sob rose in her throat. This was all so like the old Thaine mansion house of her childhood years.

“It’s only the mirage,” she said aloud. “But it was so like—what?” She held Juno back as she looked afar at the receding painting of the plains. “It’s like the house we’ll have some day on that slope beyond the Sunflower Inn. The mountains are misty. They are only the mountains of memory. But the home and the woods and the water—all may be real.”

Then she thought of Asher and of the dull prairie everywhere.

“I wonder if he would want to go back if he could see this as I see it,” she questioned. “But I know he has seen it daily. I can tell by that look in his gray eyes.”

It was long after moonrise when Asher Aydelot, watching by the corral, heard the sound of hoof-beats and saw 120 the faint outline of a horse and rider swinging in from the northward as once before he had watched the same horse and rider swinging over the same trail before the cool north wind that beat back the September prairie fire.

“I have supper all ready. See what grew just for you!” Asher said as he and his wife entered the house.

A bunch of forlorn little sunflowers in a brown pitcher graced the table. They could scarcely be called flowers, but to Virginia, who had hardly seen a blossom through the days of drouth, the joy they brought was keener than the joy that the roses and orchids gave in the days of a later prosperity.

“I found them in the draw where the wild plums grow,” Asher said. “How they ever escaped the hoppers is a miracle.”

“We will christen our claim ’The Sunflower Ranch’ tonight, and these are our decorations for the ceremony. It is all we have now. But it is ours,” Virginia declared.

And then she told the story of the bank failure at Cloverdale.

“The last bridge is burned surely,” Asher commented as he looked across the table at Virginia. “This is the only property we have except youth and health and hope—and—each other.”

“And the old Aydelot heritage to stand for principle, and your mother’s belief in the West and in you, and the Thaine stubbornness about giving up what they want to keep,” Virginia declared.

“As our days so shall our strength be,” Asher added, as he saw his wife’s face bright with hope and determination, and remembered the sweet face of his mother as it 121 had looked that night on the veranda of the old farmhouse by the National pike road.

For a long time down by the willows thinly shadowing Wolf Creek a white-faced man sat looking out toward the west, where a horse and rider had vanished into the mellow tones of distance.