  “The lean years have passed, and I approve of these fat ones.” “Be careful, old man. That way lies bad work.” —The Light That Failed. |
John Jacobs little realized how true was his estimate of the firm of “Champers & Co.” Nor did he suspect that at this very minute the firm was in council in the small room beyond the partition wall—the “blind tiger” of the Wyker eating-house.
“I tell you it’s our chance,” Darley Champers was declaring emphatically. “You mustn’t hold back your capital now. This firm isn’t organized to promote health nor Sunday Schools nor some other fellow’s fortune. We are together for yours truly, every one of us. If you two have some other games back of your own pocketbooks, they don’t cut any against this common purpose. I’m for business for Darley Champers. That’s why I’m here. I’ve got no love for Doc Carey, ruling men’s minds like they was all putty, and him a putty knife to shape ’em finer yet. And another fellow I’d like to put down so hard he’ll never get over it is that straight-up-and-down farmer, Asher Aydelot of the Sunflower Ranch, who walks like a military captain, and works like a hired man, and is so danged independent he don’t give a damn for no man’s opinion of him. If it hadn’t been for him we’d a had the whole Grass River Valley now to speculate on. I’m something of a danged fool, but I knowed this boom was comin’. I felt it in my craw.”
“So you always said, Champers,” Thomas Smith broke in, “but it’s been a century coming. And look at the capital I’ve sunk. If you’d worked that deal through, time of the drouth in seventy-four, we’d be in clover and no Careyville and no Aydelots in the way. I could have saved Asher’s little bank stock then, too.”
“You could?” Darley Champers stared at the speaker.
“Yes, if he’d given up right that first trip of yours down there. When he refused I knew his breed too well. He’s as set and slow and stubborn as his old dad ever was. That’s what ailed those two, they were too near alike; and you’ll never catch Asher Aydelot bending to our plans now. I warn you.”
“Well, but about this bank account?” Champers queried.
“Oh, the fates played the devil with everything in two weeks. Doc Carey got in with Miss Jane Aydelot down at Philadelphia, and she came straight to Cloverdale, and, womanlike, made things so hot there I had to let loose of everything at once or lose everything I had saved for myself. Serves her right, for Asher’s pile went into the dump, although there’s naturally no love lost between the two. But this Miss Jane is Aydelot clear through. She’s so honest and darned set you can’t budge her. But she’s a timid woman and so she’s safe if you keep out of her range. She won’t chase you far, but she’s got fourteen rattles and a button.”
“Well, well, let her rattle, and get to pusiness,” Hans Wyker demanded. “Here’s Champers says he’s here yust for pusiness and he wants to get Aydelot and Carey, too.”
“Gentlemen!” Champers struck the table with his fist. “Let’s play fair now, so’s not to spoil each other’s games.
Hans Wyker’s little eyes were red with pent-up anger and malice as he burst out:
“Shentlemen, you know my hart luck. You see where I be today. I not repeat no tiresome history here. Kansas yust boomin’! Wykerton dead! Yon Yacob own all der groun’ right oop to der corporation line on tree side, an’ he not sell one inch for attitions to dis town. He say dere notings to keep town goin’ in two, tree year. What we care? We be rich by den an’ let it go to der devil. But he not sell. Den I go mit you and we organize town company. We mark townsite, we make Grass River sell to us. We boom! boom! boom! We knock Careyville from de prairie alretty, mak’ Yon Yacob go back to Cincinnati where he belong mit his Chews. He damned queer Chew, but he Chew all de same all right, all right. I want to down Yon Yacob, an’ I do it if it take tree hundred fifty years. I’ll kill him if he get in my way. I hate him. He run me off my saloon in ol’ Carey Crossin’; my prewery goin’ smash mit der damned prohibittery law; he growin’ rich in Careyville, an’ me!”
His voice rose to a shriek and he stamped his foot in rage.
“Hold your noise, Wyker!” Champers growled. “Don’t you know who’s on the other side of that partition?”
“I built that partition mineself. It’s von dead noise-breaker,” Wyker began. But Champers broke in:
“It’s your turn, Smith.”
Dr. Carey had described Smith once as rather small, with close-set dark eyes and a stiff, half-paralyzed right arm and wrist, a man who wrote in a cramped left-handed style. There was a crooked little scar cutting across his forehead now above the left eye that promised to stay there for life. He had a way of evading a direct gaze, suggesting timidity. And when Hans Wyker had threatened to kill John Jacobs he shivered a little, and for the instant a gray pallor crept across his face, unnoted by his companions.
“We propose to start a town in the Grass River country that will kill Careyville. We two put up the capital. You do the buying and selling. We’ll handle real estate lively for a few months. We’ll advertise till we fill the place with buyers, and we’ll make our pile right there and then—and it’s all to be done by Darley Champers & Co. We two are not to be in the open in the game at all.”
Thomas Smith spoke deliberately. There seemed to be none of Champers’ bluster nor Wyker’s malice in the third part of the company, or else he was better schooled in self-control.
“You have it exactly,” Champers declared. “The first thing is to take in fellows like Jim Shirley and Cyrus Bennington and Todd Stewart, and Aydelot, if we can.”
“Yes, if we can, but we can’t,” Thomas Smith insisted.
“And having got the land, with or without their knowing why, we boom her to destruction. But to be fair, now, why do you want to keep yourself in hiding, and who’s the fellow you want to kill?” Darley Champers said with a laugh.
“I may as well let you know now why I can’t be known
“Wyker is pitted against Jacobs. You are after Asher Aydelot’s scalp, if you can get it. I must get Jim Shirley, fair or foul.”
Smith’s low voice was full of menace, boding more trouble to his man than the bluster and threat of the other two could compass.
“I paid you well, Darley Champers, for all information concerning Jim when I came here fifteen years ago. I was acting under orders, and as Jim would have known me then I had to keep out of sight a little.”
“Vell, and vot has Shirley ever done mit you that you so down on him?” Hans Wyker asked.
The smooth mask did not drop from Smith’s face, save that the small dark eyes burned with an intense glow.
“I tell you I was acting under orders from Shirley’s brother Tank in Cloverdale, Ohio. And if Dr. Carey hadn’t been so blamed quick I’d have gotten a letter Mrs. Tank Shirley had written to Jim the very day I got to Carey’s Crossing. No brother ever endured more from the hands of a relative than Tank Shirley endured from Jim. In every way Jim tried to defraud him of his rights; tried to prejudice their own father against him; tried to rob him of the girl, a rich girl, too, that he married in spite Of Jim—and at last contrived to prejudice his wife against him, and with Jane Aydelot interfering all the time, like the old maid that she is, managed to get Tank Shirley’s
“We unterstant, an’ we stay py you to der ent,” Hans Wyker exclaimed enthusiastically. But Darley Champers had a different mind.
“I’ll watch you, my man, and I’ll do business with you accordin’,” he said to himself. “Devil knows whether you are Thomas Smith workin’ for Tank Shirley, or Tank Shirley workin’ for hisself under a assoomed name. Long as I get your capital to push my business I don’t care who you are.” Aloud he remarked:
“So that’s how Jim Shirley got that little girl. She’s a comely youngun, anyhow. But Smith, since you are only an agent and nobody knows it but us, why keep yourself so secret? Where’s the harm in letting Shirley lay eyes on you? Why not come out into the open? How’ll Shirley know you from the Mayor of Wilmington, Delaware, anyhow?”
Thomas Smith’s face was ashy and his voice was hoarse with anger as he replied:
“Because I’m not now from Wilmington, Delaware, any more than I ever was. I’m from Cloverdale, Ohio. You know, Wyker, how I lost money in your brewery, investing in machinery and starting the thing, only to go to smash on us.”
He turned on Hans fiercely.
“And you know how I lost by you in this town and the land around it. It was my money took up all this ground to help build up Wykerton and you, as my agent, sold every acre of it to Jacobs.”
This as fiercely as Darley Champers.
Both men nodded and Darley broke in:
“I was honest. I thought Jacobs was gettin’ it to boom Wykerton with, or I’d never sold. And him bein’ right here was a danged sight easier’n havin’ some man in Wilmington, Delaware, to write to. That’s why I let him in on three sides, appealin’ to his pride.”
But Thomas Smith stopped him abruptly.
“Hold on! You need money to push your schemes now. And I’m the one who does the financing for you.”
Both men agreed.
“Then it’s death to either of you if you ever tell a word of this. You understand that? I’m not to be known here because I’m a dead man. I’m the cashier that was mixed up in the Cloverdale bank affair. And, as I say, if Jane Aydelot had let things alone Tank Shirley and I could have pulled out honorably, but, womanlike, because she had a lot of bank stock and was the biggest loser of anybody, in her own mind, she pushed things where a man would not have noticed or kept still, and she kept pushing year after year. Damn a woman, anyhow! All I could do at last was to commit suicide. Tank planned it. It saved me and helped Tank. You see, Miss Jane had a line around his neck, too. She was the only one who really saw me go down and she spread the report that I’d committed suicide on account of the bank failure. So, gentlemen, I’m really drowned in Clover Creek right above where
Darley Champers wondered why Thomas Smith was so particular in his description.
“I’ve known Jim Shirley all my life. He was as bad a boy as ever left Cloverdale, Ohio, under a cloud. Got into trouble over some girl, I believe, finally. But you can see why I’m out of this game when it comes to the open. And maybe you could understand, if you knew the brothers as well as I do, why Tank keeps me after him. And I’ll get him yet.”
The vengeance of the last words was venomous.
“Well, now we understand each other we’ll not be tramping on anybody’s corns,” Darley Champers urged, anxious to get away from the subject.
With all of his shortcomings he was a man of different mould from the other men. Eagerness to represent and invest large capital and to make by far the best of a bargain by any means just inside the law were his besetments. But he had not the unremitting hatred that enslaved Thomas Smith and Hans Wyker.
Champers’ store of energy seemed exhaustless. Following this council he fell upon the Grass River Valley and threshed it to his profit.
One mid-June evening the Grass River schoolhouse was lighted early, while up from the prairie ranches came the work-worn farmers.
This year the crop outlook was bad, yet somehow an expectant spirit lifted sagging shoulders and looked out through hopeful eyes.
While the men exchanged neighborly greetings, a group
“Here comes Thaine,” they shouted as Asher Aydelot and his boy came down the trail.
“Come on, Thaine,” Leigh Shirley said, reaching for his hand. “We are going to play drop the handkerchief.”
“Thaine’s going to stand by me,” pretty Jo Bennington declared, pushing Leigh boisterously aside.
Josephine, the week-old baby Mrs. Aydelot had gone to see one day nine years ago, had grown into a big, black-eyed, rosy-cheeked girl who lorded it over every other child in the neighborhood. And every other child submitted except Leigh Shirley, who had a quiet habit of going straight ahead about her affairs in a way that vexed the pretty Jo not a little. From the first coming of Leigh among the children Jo had resented her independence. But, young as they all were, she objected most to Thaine Aydelot’s claiming Leigh as his playmate. Thaine was Jo’s idol from earliest memory.
“What’s the row here?” Todd Stewart, Junior, broke in. “You mustn’t fuss or you’ll all have to go in and listen to Darley Champers and I’ll play out here by myself.”
Todd was a young-hearted, half-grown boy now, able to work all day in the hayfield or to romp like a child with younger children in the evening. He was half a dozen years older than Thaine and Jo, a difference that would tend to disappear by the end of a decade.
“We’ll be good, Toddie, if you’ll let us stay and you’ll play with us,” the children entreated, and the game began, with Thaine between Leigh and Jo.
When Asher Aydelot joined the group inside Darley Champers rapped on the desk and called the men to order.
“Gentlemen, let’s have a businesslike proceeding,” he said. “Who shall preside at the meeting?”
“I move Jim Shirley be made chairman. He’s the best looking man here,” Todd Stewart said, half seriously.
The motion carried and Jim, looking big and handsome and kindly as always, took the chair.
“I’ll ask Mr. Champers to state the purpose of the meeting,” he said.
“Gentlemen,” Champers began with tremendous dignity, “I represent the firm of the Champers Town Company, just chartered, with half a million dollars’ capital. Gentlemen, you have the finest valley in Kansas.”
The same was said of every other valley in Kansas in the fat years of the boom. But to do Darley justice, he had never made a finer effort in his life of many efforts than he was bent on making tonight.
“And this site is the garden spot of it all,” he continued. “The elevation, the water power at the deep bend of Grass River (where at that moment only a trace of water marked the river’s grassy right of way), the fine farming land—everything ready for a sudden leap into prosperity. And, gentlemen, the A. and T. (Arctic and Tropic) North and South Railroad will begin grading down this very stream inside of thirty days. A town here this year will be a city next year, a danged sight bigger city than Careyville will ever be. Why, that town’s got its growth and is beginning to decay right now. The A. and T. will miss it comin’ south, by ten mile.”
He paused and looked at the men before him. They
“You all know crops was poor last year and only moderately promisin’ this year,” Champers continued. “But this is temporary and you are stayers, as I can testify. The Champers Town Company is ready to locate a townsite and start a town right here at the deep bend of Grass River. We propose to plat the prairie into town lots with a public square for the courthouse and sites for the railroad station and grain elevators, a big hotel, an opera house, and factories and foundries that’s bound to come.”
The speaker paused a moment. Then the inspiration of the evening came to him.
“When you first came here, Aydelot, there wasn’t nothing but imagination to make this a farming community. And it looked lots more impossible then than this looks to me now. What’s to prevent a metropolis risin’ right here where a decade and a half ago there wasn’t nothing but bare prairie?”
The appeal was forceful, and the very men who had stood like heroes against hardships and had fought poverty with a grim, unyielding will-power, the same men fell now before Darley Champers’ smooth advances.
“Our company’s chartered with no end of stock for sale now that in six months will be out of sight above par and can’t be bought for no price. It’s your time to invest now. You can easy mortgage your farms to raise the money, seein’ you can knock the mortgage off so quick and have abundance left over, if you use your heads ’stead of your tired legs to make money out of your land.”
Cyrus Bennington and Todd Stewart and Jim Shirley, with others, were sitting upright with alert faces now. Booms were making men rich all over Kansas. Why should prosperity not come to this valley as well? It was not impossible, surely. Only the unpleasant memory of Champers’ holding back the supplies in the days when the grasshopper was a burden would intrude on the minds of the company tonight. Champers was shrewd to remember also, and he played his game daringly as well as cautiously.
“Maybe some of you fellows haven’t felt right toward me sometimes,” he said. “I hate to tell it now, but justice is justice. The truth is, it was a friend of yours who advised me not to let any supplies come your way, time of the grasshopper raid. I listened to him then and didn’t know no better’n to be run by him till I see his scheme to kill Wykerton an’ build a town for hisself. He’ll deny it now, declare he never done it, and he’ll not do a thing for your town down here. See if he does. But it’s Gawd’s truth, he held me back so’s he could run you his way. It’s your turn to listen to me now and believe me, too.”
And well they listened, especially the men who still owed John Jacobs for the loan of 1874.
“You can have a boom right here that’ll make you all rich men inside of a year. Why not turn capitalists
“You’re right there,” a farmer sitting beside Asher Aydelot called out. “We all know how Careyville got her start. It’s kept some of us poor doing it. I’ll invest in Town Company stock right now.”
Asher Aydelot turned toward the speaker in surprise.
“Jacobs helped you out as well as the rest of us in the drouth and grasshopper time of seventy-four,” he said. “What’s your grievance against him now?”
“Yes, and hung onto me like a leech of a Jew ever since,” the man muttered.
“Because you never paid either interest or principal. And Jacobs has carried you along and waited your time,” Asher asserted frankly.
But the farmer plunged into the discussion again, not realizing that his grudge against Careyville was the outgrowth of his own shortcomings.
“Take this site right here in the middle of your neighborhood where you’ve already got your church and your schoolhouse, and your graveyard,” Champers declared. “Aydelot here gave part of it and Pryor Gaines the rest. Gaines don’t farm it any more himself, it’s most too big a job for a man of brains like him. And that quarter across the river that used to be all sand, you own that now,
“I think I’ll set it in alfalfa this fall,” Asher replied.
“Yes, yes, now these two make the very site we want. You are lucky, for you are ready right now to start things. How much stock do you want, Aydelot, and how will you sell?”
As Asher listened he seemed to see the whole scheme of the town builder bare itself before him, and he wondered at the credulity of his neighbors.
“Gentlemen,” he said, standing before them, “it is a hard thing to put yourself against neighborhood sentiment and not seem to be selfish. But as I was the first man in this valley and have known every man who settled here since, I ought to be well enough known to you to need no certificate of good moral character here. I offer no criticism on the proposition before you. You are as capable of judging as I am. The end may show you more capable, but I decline to buy stock, or to donate, or sell any land for a townsite at the deep bend of Grass River. A man’s freehold is his own.”
Asher’s influence had led in Grass River affairs for years. But Darley Champers had the crowd in the hollow of his paw tonight.
“How about Gaines?” he demanded. “You join him on the south. You ought to know some of his notions.”
“Gaines has no land to consider,” Asher said frankly. “He sold it more than a year ago.”
“You mean the Jew foreclosed on the preacher, don’t you?” someone said sarcastically.
“You’ll have to ask the preacher,” Asher replied
“Good night, I must go with papa,” Thaine Aydelot said, springing up from his play outside.
“No, you’ve got to stay here. Hold him, Leigh,” Jo Bennington commanded, clutching at Thaine’s arm.
Leigh sat calmly disobedient.
“He’s his papa’s boy, I guess, and he ought to go,” she asserted.
“You meany, meany,” Jo whispered, “I don’t like you.”
But Leigh paid little heed to her opinion.
As Asher passed out of the room there was an ugly look in Darley Champers’ eyes.
“No more ambition than a cat. One of them quiet, good-natured fellers that are as stubborn as the devil once they take a stand. Just a danged clod-hopper farmer, but he don’t leave no enemies behind him. That’s enough to make any man hate him. He’s balked twice when I tried to drive. I’ll not be fooled by him always.”
So Champers thought as he watched Asher Aydelot walk out of the room. And in the silence that followed his going the company heard him through the open window whistling some old patriotic air as he strode away in the June moonlight with little Thaine trotting beside him.
“Shirley, where is Pryor tonight?” Cyrus Bennington broke the silence with the query.
“Then Jacobs got him at last. Fine friend to you fellers, that man Jacobs. Easy to see what he wants. He ain’t boomin’ no place but Careyville,” Champers snarled. “But the deep bend ain’t the only bend in Grass River. Or do you want to shove prosperity away when it comes right to your door?”
Nobody wants to do that. Least of all did the Kansas settlers of the boom days turn away from the promise of a fortune.
So the boom came to the Grass River Valley as other disasters had come before it. Where a decade and a half ago Asher and Virginia Aydelot had lived alone with each other and God, in the heart of the wide solitary wilderness, the town of Cloverdale was staked out now over the prairie.
Stock in the new venture sold rapidly, and nobody ever knew how much clear profit came to Champers & Co. from this venture. A big slice of the Cloverdale ranch went into the staking of the new city, and prosperity seemed wedded to Jim Shirley. He ceased farming and became a speculator with dreams of millions in his brain. Other settlers followed his example until the fever had infected every man in the community except Asher Aydelot, who would not give up to it, and Pryor Gaines, who had nothing to give up.
Everything fell out as advertised. The railroad grade swelled up like a great welt across the land, seemingly in a day. Suburban additions radiated for miles in every direction. Bonds were voted for light and water and public buildings and improvements. Speculators rushed to invest
Also, the Cloverdale Farmers’ Company, made up mostly of the members of the Grass River Farmers’ Company, built the Cloverdale Hotel, and the Cloverdale State Bank, and the Cloverdale Office Block. And the sad part of it all was that mortgaged and doubly mortgaged farms and not the price of crops had furnished the capital for the boom building.
It is an old story now, and none too interesting—the story of a boom town, founded on prairie breezes and built out of fortune seekers’ dreams.
Meanwhile, Asher Aydelot, watching the sudden easy prosperity of his neighbors, fought down the temptation to join them and resolutely strove with the soil for its best yield. The drouth and hot winds had not forgotten all their old tricks, and even the interest on his mortgage could not be met promptly sometimes. Yet with the same old Aydelot tenacity with which his father had held Cloverdale in Ohio away from the old farm beside the National pike road, the son of this father held the boundary of the Sunflower Ranch intact, nor yielded up one acre to be platted into a suburban addition to the new Cloverdale in the Grass River Valley in Kansas. And all the while the Aydelot windbreaks strengthened; the Aydelot grove struck
For two brief years Cloverdale, in the Grass River Valley in Kansas, had a name, even in the Eastern money markets. Speculation became madness; and riotous commercialism had its little hour of strut and rave.
Then the bubble burst, and all that the boom had promised fell to nothingness. Many farms were mortgaged, poor crops worked tribulation, taxes began to eat up acres of weed-grown vacant town lots, Eastern money was withdrawn to other markets, speculators departed, the strange enthusiasm burned itself out, and the Wilderness came again to the Grass River Valley. Not the old Wilderness of loneliness, and drouth, and grasshoppers, and prairie fires that had dared the pioneer to conquest; but the Prairie, waiting again the kingly hand on the plow handle, gave no quarter to him whom the gilded boom had lured to shipwreck.
PART TWO
THE SON
