The minutes dragged by like hours to Virginia, trying vainly to decide on what to do next. The fury of a Plains blizzard would have quickly overcome her, but this was a lingering fight against cold and a pathless solitude. Suddenly the memory of one lonely Sabbath day came to her, and how Asher, always resourceful, had said:

"When you are afraid, pray; but when you are lonely, sing."

She had prayed, and comfort had come with the prayer. She could sing for comfort, if for nothing else. Somebody might hear. And so she sang. The song heard sometimes in the little prayer meeting in some country church; sometimes by sick beds when the end of days is drawing near; sometimes in hours of shipwreck, above the roar of billows on wide, stormy seas; and sometimes on battlefields when mangled forms lie waiting the burial trench and the mournful drumbeat of the last Dead March—the same song rose now on the lonely prairie winds sweeping out across the hidden trails and bleak open plains.

Nearer, my God, to thee, Nearer to thee, E'en though it be a cross That raiseth me. Still all my song shall be Nearer, my God, to thee, Nearer to thee.



CHAPTER V

A PLAINSMAN OF THE OLD SCHOOL

I have eaten your bread and salt, I have drunk your water and wine; The deaths ye died I have watched beside, And the lives ye led were mine. —Kipling.

The little postoffice at Carey's Crossing in Wolf County was full of men waiting for the mail due at noon. Mail came thrice a week now, and business on the frontier was looking brighter. The postoffice was only one feature of the room it occupied. Drugs, hardware, horse-feed, groceries, and notions each had claims of their own, while beside the United States Mail Department was an inksplashed desk holding a hotel register, likewise inksplashed. Beyond the storeroom was a long, narrow dining room on one side and a few little cell-like rooms on the other with a crack of a hall between them leading back to the kitchen, the whole structure, only one story high, having more vertical boards than horizontal in its making. But the lettering over the front door bore the brave information that this was the Post Office, the General Merchandise Store, and the Jacobs House, all in one.

The rain of the night had shifted to a light snow that whiffed about in little white pellets, adding nothing to the land in the way of moisture, or beauty, or protection from cold. Just a chill fraying out of the rain's end that matched the bitterness of the wind's long sweep from out of the vast northwest. A gray sky was clamped down over all, so dull and monotonous, it seemed that no rainbow tint could ever again brighten the world.

"The stage is late again," observed one of the men.

"Always is when you want her particular." This from a large man who held the door open long enough to stare up the open street for the sign of the coming stage and to let in a surge of cold air at the same time.

"Well, shut the door, Champers. The stage doesn't come inside. It stops at Hans Wyker's saloon first, anyhow," one of the men behind a counter declared.

"If you'd open a bar here you'd do some business and run that Wyker fellow out. Steward, you and Jacobs are too danged satisfied with yourselves. We need some business spirit in this town if we want to get the county seat here," Champers declared.

"That may help your real estate, but it's not my kind of business, and no bar is going into this tavern," Jacobs replied, leaning his elbow against the back of Stewart, who was bending over the desk.

Stewart and Jacobs were young men, the former a finely built, fair-haired Scotchman from whom good nature, good health, and good morals fairly radiated; not the kind of man to become a leader, but rather to belong to the substantial following of a leader.

Jacobs was short, and slender, and dark—unmistakably of Jewish blood—with a keen black eye, quick motions, and the general air of a shrewd business man, letting no dollar escape him. He had also the air of a gentleman. Nobody in Carey's Crossing had ever heard him swear—the language of the frontier always—nor seen him drink, nor had taken a parcel from his store that had been tied up with soiled fingers.

The Jacobs House register might be splashed with ink, but the ledger records of the business concern were a joy to the eye.

At Stewart's words Champers shut the door with a slam and blustered toward the stove, crowding smaller men out of their places before it.

"I am glad I don't have to run other men's affairs—"he began, when the rear door flew open and a slender young Negro hurried in with the announcement:

"De stage done sighted approachin' from de east, gen'lemen. Hit's done comin' into town right now."

"All right, Bo Peep; take care of the team," Stewart responded, and a general re-swarming of the crowd followed.

Just before the stage—a covered wagon drawn by two Indian ponies—reached the Jacobs House a young man crossed the street and entered the door. Some men are born with a presence that other men must recognize everywhere. To this man's quiet, "Hello, gentlemen," the crowd responded, almost to a man:

"Good morning, Doctor."

"Hello, Carey."

"Hello, Doc."

Each man felt the wish to be recognized by such greeting, and a place was given him at once. Only Champers, the big man, turned away with a scowl.

"Always gets the best of everything, even to the first chance to get his mail," he muttered under his breath.

But the mail was soon of secondary interest to the dealer in real estate. Letters were of less importance to him than strangers, and a stranger had registered at the desk and was waiting while Stewart called out the mail in the postoffice department. Champers leaned over the shoulders of shorter men to read the entry in a cramped little hand, the plain name, "Thomas Smith, Wilmington, Delaware." Then he looked at the man and drew his own conclusions.

Dr. Carey was standing beside the letter counter when Todd Stewart read out, "'Mr. James Shirley,'" and, with a little scrutiny—"'Southwest of Carey's Crossing.' Anybody here know Mr. James Shirley?"

The stranger made a hasty step forward, but Dr. Carey had already taken the letter.

"I'll take care of that for you, Stewart," he said quietly. And turning, he looked into the eyes of the stranger.

It was but a glance, and the latter stepped aside.

Men formed quick judgments on the frontier. As Carey passed the register he read the latest entry there, and like Champers he too drew his own conclusions. At the door he turned and said to Jacobs.

"Tell Bo Peep to have your best horse ready by one o'clock for a long ride."

"All right, Doctor," Jacobs responded.

Half an hour later the Jacobs House dining room was crowded for the midday meal. By natural selection men fell into their places. Stewart and Jacobs, with Dr. Carey and Pryor Gaines, the young minister school teacher, had a table to themselves. The other patrons sat at the long board, while the little side table for two was filled today with Champers, the real estate man, and the latest arrival, Mr. Thomas Smith, of Wilmington, Delaware.

"Who's the man with the dark mustache up there?" Thomas Smith asked.

"Doc Carey," Champers replied with a scowl.

"You don't seem to need him?" There was a double meaning in the query, and Champers caught both.

"No ways," he responded.

"Has some influence here?" the stranger asserted rather than questioned.

"A lot. Has the whole town under hoodoo. It's named for him. He has all the doctoring he can do and won't half charge, so's no other doctor'll come here. That's no way to build up a town. He'd get up at one o'clock in the morning to doctor a widder's cow. Now, sure he would, when he knows even a dead cow'd make business for the butcher to render up into grease and the cattle dealer to sell another cow."

"Not your style of a man then?" the stranger observed.

"Oh, pshaw, no, but, as I say, he's got the whole country hoodoo'd. Notice how everybody give him right of way to get his mail first? Why him? And hear him order the best horse? I'll bet a tree claim in hades right now that he's off somewhere to doctor some son of a gun out of cussed good will."

"Who is this James Shirley whose mail he seems to look after?"

There was a half-tone lowering of the voice as Smith pronounced the name, which was not lost on Champers, whose business was to catch men at all corners.

"Jim Shirley lives out in one of the rich valleys west. Him and a fellow named Aydelot have some big notions of things out there. I don't know the doc's claim to control his mail, but nobody here would deny Carey any danged thing he wanted." Champers twisted his face in disgust.

"You are in the real estate business here?" Thomas Smith asked after a pause, as if the subject fell into entirely new lines.

"Yes," Champers answered absently with eyes alert on the opposite wall.

"I'd like to see you later, Mr.—"

"Champers—Darley Champers," and the dealer in land shoved a soiled card across the table. "Come in any time. This cold snap will soon be over and I can show you no end of land worth a gold mine any time you are ready. But make it soon. Land's goin' faster here'n you Delaware fellers think, and"—in a lower voice—"Doc Carey's drivin' over it all the time, and that Jew of a Jacobs ain't in business here on account of no lung trouble, and his hatred of saloons is somethin' pisen."

They finished their meal in silence, for they had come to an understanding. The afternoon was too short and cold for real estate business to be brisk, and nobody in Carey's Crossing noted that the front window of Darley Champer's little office was covered with a newspaper blind all the rest of that day, nor did anybody pay attention to the whereabouts of the stranger—Mr. Thomas Smith, of Wilmington, Delaware—during this same time. Nobody, except John Jacobs, of the Jacobs House, who gained his knowledge mostly by instinct; never, at least, by rude inquiry. He had been up on the roof helping Bo Peep to fasten the sign over the door which the wind had torn loose. From this place he could see above the newspaper screen of the window across the street that Champers and Smith were in a tremendously earnest consultation. He would have thought nothing of it had not Champers chanced to sight him on the roof and immediately readjusted the newspaper blind to prevent observation.

"I'll offer to sell Darley a window shade cheap tomorrow and see how he bites," and the little Jewish merchant smiled shrewdly at the thought.

* * * * *

Out on the trail that day the snow lay deeper to the westward, hiding the wagon ruts. The dead sunflower stalks made only a faint black edging along the white monotony of the way and sometimes on bleak swells there were no markings at all. Some distance from Carey's Crossing a much heavier snowfall, covering a wide swath, under which the trails were entirely lost, had wandered in zigzag lines down from the northwest.

In the early afternoon Dr. Horace Carey had started west on the surest horse in the Stewart-Jacobs livery stable, taking his old-fashioned saddle-bags with him through force of habit, and by mid-afternoon was floundering in the edge of this deeper snowfall.

Nature must have meant Horace Carey for the plains. He was of medium height, compactly built, without an ounce of unnecessary weight. The well-rounded form took away all hint of spareness, while it did not destroy the promise of endurance. His heavy, dark hair and dark gray eyes, his straight nose and firm mouth under a dark mustache, and his well-set chin made up an attractive but not handsome face. The magnetism of his personality was not in manly beauty. It was an inborn gift and would have characterized him in any condition in life. There was about him a genial dignity that made men look up to him and a willingness to serve that made selfishness seem mean. He could not have been thirty, although he had been on the plains for five years. The West was people by young men. It's need for daring spirits found less response in men of maturer life. But the West had most need for humane men. The bully, the dare-devil, the brutal, and the selfish were refuse before the force that swept the frontier onward; but they were never elements in real state building. Before such men as Carey they lost power.

The doctor rode away toward the west, bowing his head before the strong wind that he knew too well to fear, yet wondering as he rode if he had done wisely to dare the deepening snow of the buried trail.

"I might have waited a day, anyhow," he thought. "It's a devil of a ride over to Jim Shirley's, and we got only the tag ends of that storm down at the Crossing from the looks of this. However, I may as well keep at it now."

He surged on for a few miles without any signs of an open trail appearing. Then he dropped to a slow canter.

"I'd better get this worry straightened and my mind untangled if I am to have any comfort on this ride," he said aloud, as was his wont to do when out in the open alone. "Everything happens to a man who gives too much leeway to that indefinite inside guide saying, 'Do this! Let that alone!' And yet that guide hasn't failed me when I've listened to it."

He let the pony have the rein as he looked ahead with unseeing eyes.

"What made me take this day? First, everybody is well enough to be left for two or three days, good time for a vacation, and Stewart can take care of emergencies always. Second, I promised Jim I'd see that his letters got to him straightway. Third, yes, third, something said, 'Go now!' But here's the other side. Why go on the heels of a snowstorm? Why not keep Jim's letter a day or two? It's in my hands. And why mistrust a man who calls himself innocent 'Thomas Smith?' That's it. He's too innocent. There's no place on these wide Kansas prairies for that man Thomas Smith. He'd better get back to his home and his real name at once."

The doctor smiled at the thought, then he frowned at the cold wind and the shifting snows above the trail.

"You are a fool—a stack of fools, Dr. Horace Carey, to beat out of town miles on miles on a fool's errand over a lost trail, trusting your instinct that never lost you a direction yet, and all because of an inward call to an unrevealed duty. Some other day will do as well. And here's where I may as well cut off these notions of being led by inside signals. What should make me sight danger in a man I never saw before, and who will probably go out on the stage tomorrow morning? Oh, well, the Lord made us as we are. He knows why."

He wheeled the pony about and began to trot toward Carey's Crossing. Suddenly he halted.

"Let me see. I'm not twenty miles along, though I've come at a good rate. I believe I'll cut across northwest and hit some of the settlers up on Big Wolf Creek for the night. Lucky I've no wife to worry about me."

A wave of sadness swept over the man's face—just a sweep of sorrow that left no mark. He turned abruptly from the trail and struck in a definite direction across the snow-covered prairie. Presently his path veered to the north, then to northwest.

"I know an ugly little creek running into Big Wolf that's the dickens to cross. I'll run clear round it, even if it takes longer. After all, I'm doing just what I said I wouldn't do. I don't know why I didn't go on, nor why I am tacking off up here. Something tells me to do it, and I'll do it."

But however changeable of mind he seemed to himself, Dr. Carey was a man who formed his judgments so quickly and acted upon them so promptly that he seemed most stable to other men. He rode forward now to a land wave that dropped on one side to a creek, a quarter of a mile away, where black shrubbery marked the water line. A long swell of wind swung down the valley, whirling the snow in eddies before it. As the doctor's eye followed them, he suddenly noted a red scarf lift above the tallest clumps of bushes and flutter out to its full length, then drop again as the wind swell passed.

"There's nobody in fifteen miles of here. I reckon that scarf blew there and caught some time this fall when somebody was going out on the trail. Mighty human looking thing, though. It seemed waving a signal to me. But I must hurry on."

He hastened at a gallop up the ridge away from the creek, his mind still on that red scarf flung about by the winter wind.

"It was a strange thing," he thought, "but every human token is startling out here. What's that now?"

The doctor had a plainsman's ear as well as a plainsman's eye. As he listened, through the wail of the wind borne along the distance, he caught the words of a song, low and pleading like a plaintive cry for help:

Though, like the wanderer, The sun gone down, Darkness be over me, My rest a stone— Yet in my dreams I'd be Nearer, my God, to thee, Nearer to thee.

It was a woman's voice and Carey faced about to listen. He knew it came from the bushes below the red scarf. So he changed his course and hurried around a bend in the stream to the other side of the brush where Virginia Aydelot stood beside Juno.

"I'm afraid there isn't even a stone to rest on here, Madam. Can I be of any service to you?" he said, lifting his hand toward his cap in semi-military salute.

Virginia stood looking at the stranger with a half-comprehending gaze. She had been less than an hour beside the bushes, but it had seemed to her like many hours. And the terrifying certainty of a night alone on the prairie made the sudden presence of a human being unreal to her.

"I beg your pardon; I am Dr. Carey, of Carey's Crossing, and I was striking across the prairie to the Big Wolf settlement when I saw your scarf and heard your singing. I took them both to be distress signals and came over to see if you needed me."

One had only to listen to Dr. Carey's voice to understand why Darley Champers should accuse him of laying a charm on the whole settlement.

Virginia recovered herself quickly, saying with a wan smile:

"You came just in time, Doctor. I am lost and need help. I was going to you, anyhow."

Each one's face was so muffled against the wind that the eyes and lips and a bit of the cheeks alone were visible.

"Not a bad-looking woman for all the Kansas tan," the doctor thought. "She has a voice like a true Virginian and fine eyes and teeth. But any woman who bundles up for a horseback ride across the plains on a day like this isn't out for a beauty show contest. I've seen eyes like that before, though, and as to her voice—"

"I am Mrs. Asher Aydelot from the Grass River Valley," Virginia went on. "There are only three settlers out there now, Mr. Shirley and my husband and myself. Mr. Shirley is very sick with pneumonia, and Mr. Aydelot could not leave him, so I started to Carey's Crossing to see if you could come to him. I missed the trail somewhere. I was trying to help, but I failed, you see."

The doctor was looking at her with a puzzled expression which she thought was born of his sympathy. To the mention of her failing he responded quickly:

"No, Mrs. Aydelot, you succeeded. I had started to Shirley's myself on personal business, and I was letting some whim turn me aside. If you had kept the trail we should have missed each other, for I was on my way to Big Wolf Creek, a good distance away, and your leaving the trail and wandering down here was providential for Shirley. Shall I show you on to the Crossing?"

"Oh, no, Doctor, if you will only come back with me. I don't want to go on," Virginia insisted.

"You are a regular westerner, Mrs. Aydelot," Carey declared. "But you haven't been out here long. I heard of your passing through our town late last summer. I was up on Big Wolf then and failed to see you. I know something of your husband, but I have never met him."

He helped her to mount her horse and together they sought the trail and followed it westward in the face of the wind.

* * * * *

Near midnight down in Jim Shirley's cabin Asher Aydelot turned from a lull in the sick man's ravings to see Dr. Horace Carey entering the door with a pair of saddle bags in his hand.

"Hello, sir! Aydelot? I'm Carey, the doctor."

Then as his quick eye took in the haggard face of the man before him, he said cheerily:

"Everything fit as a fiddle up your way. I left your cabin snug and warm as a prairie dog's hole, and your wife is sound asleep by this time, with a big dog on guard. Yes, I understand," he added, as Asher silently gripped his hand. "You've died a thousand deaths today. Forget it, and give me a hand here. My own are too stiff, and I must get these wet boots off. I always go at my work dry shod."

He had pulled a pair of heavy shoes from the saddle bags, and was removing his outer coat and sundry scarfs, warming his hands between whiles and seemingly unconscious of the sick man's presence.

"You are wet to the knees. You dared the short trail and the strange fords of rivers on a night so dark as this," Asher declared as he helped Carey to put off his wrappings.

"It's a doctor's business to forget himself when he sees a distress signal." Then Carey added quietly: "Tell me about Shirley. What have you been doing for him?"

He was beside Jim's bunk now and his presence seemed to fill the whole cabin with its subtle strength.

"You know your business, doctor; I'm a farmer," Asher said, as he watched this frontier physician moving deftly about his work.

"Well, if you mean to farm so far from pill bags you have done well to follow my trade a little, as you seem to have done with Shirley," Carey asserted, as he noted the evidences of careful nursing.

"Oh, Virginia—Mrs. Aydelot—helped me," Asher assured him. "She's a nurse by instinct."

"What did you call your wife?" the doctor inquired.

"Virginia—from her own state. Pretty sick man here." Asher said this as Dr. Carey suddenly bent over Shirley with stern eyes and tightening lips. But the eyes grew tender when Jim looked up into his face.

"You're all right, Shirley. You must go to sleep now."

And Shirley, who in his delirium had fought his neighbor all day, became as obedient as a child, as a very sick child, that night under Horace Carey's hand.

The next morning Virginia Aydelot was not able to rise from her bed, and for many days she could do nothing more than to sit in the rocking chair by the windows and absorb sunshine.

On the fourth day after Carey had reached Shirley's Asher went down the river in the early afternoon to find how Jim's case was progressing, leaving his wife comfortably tucked up in the rocking chair by the west window. The snow was gone and the early December day was as crisp and beautiful as an Indian summer day in a colder climate. Virginia sat watching the shadows of the clouds flow along the ground and the prairie hues changing with the angle of the afternoon sunlight. Suddenly a sound of ponies' feet outside was followed by a loud rap on the door.

"Come in!" Virginia called. "Lie down, Pilot!"

Pilot did not obey, but sat up alert before his mistress as Darley Champers' bulk filled the doorway.

"Excuse me, Madam," the real estate dealer said, lifting his hat, "Me and my friend, Mr. Smith out there, are looking up a claim for a friend of ours somewhere out in the Grass River settlement. Can you tell me who owns the last claim taken up down the river, and how far it is from here?"

"Mr. Shirley's claim is a few miles down the river, if you go by the short trail and ford at the bends, but much longer if you go around by the long trail," Virginia explained.

"Is it occupied?" Champers put the question in a careless tone.

Pilot's bristles, that had fallen at the sound of Virginia's voice, rose again with the query. It is well to be wary of one whom a dog distrusts. But the woman's instinct in Virginia responded little to the dog's uneasiness, and she replied courteously:

"Yes, Mr. Shirley is there, very sick."

"Um, who have I the honor of addressing now?" Champers asked awkwardly, as if to change the subject.

"Mrs. Asher Aydelot."

"Well, now, I've heard of Aydelot. Where is your man today? I'd like to meet him, Mrs. A."

It was the man's way of being friendly, but even a duller-fibred man than Champers would have understood Mrs. Aydelot's tone as she said:

"You will find him at Shirley's, or on the way. Only the long trail winds around some bluffs, and you might pass each other without knowing it."

"How many men in this settlement now?" Champers asked.

"Only two," Virginia replied, patting Pilot's head involuntarily.

"Only two! That's sixteen more'n'll ever make it go here," Darley Champers declared. "Excuse me for saying it, Mrs. Aydelot, but I've been pretty much over Kansas, and this is the poorest show for settlement the Lord ever left out of doors. I've always heard this valley was full of claims you simply couldn't give away, but my friend, who has no end of money and influence fur developin' the country, wanted me to look over the ground along the Grass River, It's dead desolation, that's all; no show on earth in fifty year out here, and in fifty year we won't none of us care for more'n six feet of ground anywhere. I'm sorry for you, Madam. You must be awfully lonely here, but you'll be gettin' away soon, I hope. I must be off. Thank you, Madam, for the information. Good day," and he left the cabin abruptly.

The sunshine grew pallid and the prairies lay dull and endless. The loneliness of solitude hung with a dead heaviness and hope beat at the lowest ebb for Virginia Aydelot, trying bravely to deny his charge against the future of the land she had struggled so to dream into fruitfulness. She was only a woman, strong to love and brave to endure, but neither by nature nor heritage shrewd to read the tricks of selfish trade. And she believed that while Asher and Jim Shirley were hopeful dreamers like herself, here was an ill-mannered but unprejudiced man who saw the situation as they could not see it.

"That woman and her fool dog were half afraid of me at first. They don't know that women aren't in my line. I'd never harm a one of 'em."

"They're in my line always. Was she good looking? I never pass a pretty woman," Thomas Smith said smoothly.

"Don't be a danged fool, Smith. I might cut a man's throat to some extent, if it would help my business any, but I'd cut it more'n some if he forgets his manners round a woman. We're a coarse, grasping lot out here fur as property goes, and we ain't got drawing-room manners, but it takes your smug little easterners to be the real dirty devils. Come on."

And Thomas Smith knew that the big, coarse-grained man was sincere.

"Yonder's Aydelot now. Want to see him?" Darley Champers declared, sighting Asher down the short trail beyond the deep bend.

"I've no business with him, and he's the man I don't want to see," Thomas Smith said hastily. "I'll ride on out of sight round this bend and wait for you. It's a good place when you don't want to be seen."

"Depends on how much of a plainsman Aydelot is. He ought to have sighted both of us half a mile back," Champers declared.

But Smith hurried away and was soon behind the low bluff at the deep bend. Asher Aydelot had seen the two before they saw him, and he saw them part company and only one come on to meet him.

"You're Aydelot from the claim up the river, I s'pose. I'm just out lookin' at the country. Not much to it but looks," Champers declared as the two met at the deep bend.

"Yes, sir; my name is Aydelot," Asher replied, deciding at once that this stranger was not to be accepted on sight, a judgment based not on a woman's instinct but on a man's experience.

"Any of these claims ever been entered?" Champers asked.

"Yes, sir; most of them," Asher responded.

"I see. Couldn't make it out here. I s'pose you'll get out next. Hard place to take root. Most too far away, and land's a little thin, I see," the real estate dealer remarked carelessly.

"Yes, it's pretty well out," Asher assented.

"The river ever get low here?" was the next query.

"Not often, in the winter," Asher replied.

"Most too uncertain for water power, though, and the railroad ain't comin' this way at all. I must be gettin' on. One man's too few to be travelin' so fur from civilization."

"Come up to the cabin for the night," Asher said, with a plainsman's courtesy.

"Thank you, no. Hope to see you again nearer to the Lord's ground; losin' game here. Good-by."

Asher did not look like a disappointed man when he reached the Sunflower Inn.

"Best news in the world," he declared when Virginia related what had happened in the cabin that afternoon. "A man who goes prospecting around the Kansas prairies doesn't discourage the poor cuss he pities; he tries to encourage the wretch to hold on to land he wouldn't have himself. Listen to me, Virgie. That man has his eye on Grass River right now. I know his breed."

Meanwhile the early dusk found Champers and Smith approaching Shirley's premises.

"I don't know about Aydelot," Champers declared as they lariated their ponies beyond the corral. "He's one of the clear-eyed fellows who sees a good thing about as soon as you sight it yourself, and then he turns clam and leach and you won't move him nor get nothin' out of him, and that's all there is to it."

"Yes, I know that. I mean, you say he does?" Smith seemed too preoccupied to follow his own words, but Champers followed Smith shrewdly enough.

They made a hasty but careful examination of the premises, keeping wide of the cabin where the sick man lay.

"He's got three horses in there. He's well fixed," Champers declared, peering into the stable, where it was too dark to discover that the third horse was Dr. Carey's. "Let's hike off for some deserted shack for the night and get an early start for the Crossing in the morning. Easy trick, this, gettin' in and out of here unseen. And it's one of the best claims on Grass River."

"Couldn't we slip into the cabin?" Smith asked in a half whisper. "If he's too sick"—Something in the man's face made it look diabolical in the fading twilight, and he seemed about to start toward the house.

"Now, see here, Mr. Smith," Champers said with slow sternness. "What'd I say back there about women? Neither we ain't man-slaughterers out here, though your Police Gazette and your dime novels paint us that way. There's more murderers per capiter to a single street in New York than in the whole state of Kansas, right now. If it's land and money, we're after it, tooth an' toenail, but forget the thing in your mind this minute or you an' me parts company right here, an' you can hoof it back to Carey's Crossing or Wilmington, Delaware."

Smith made no reply and they mounted their ponies and galloped away.

And all the while Dr. Horace Carey, inside the unlighted cabin, had watched their movements with grim curiosity, even to the hesitating, half-expressed intention of entering the dwelling.

"Champers would pull up another man's stakes and drive them into his own ground if he wanted them, but that Thomas Smith would drive them through the other fellow's body if nobody else was around," was the doctor's mental comment as he went outside and watched the course of the two men till the twilight gathered them in.

* * * * *

When the turning point came to the sick man, the up-climb was marvelous, as his powers of recoil asserted themselves.

"It is just a matter of self-control and good spirits now, Shirley, and you have both," Dr. Carey said, as he sat by his patient on the ninth day.

"You staid the game out, Carey," Shirley said with an undertone of hopelessness behind his smile. "What possessed you to happen in, anyhow?"

"I was possessed not to come and turned back after I'd started. If I hadn't met Mrs. Aydelot coming after me I'd have rampsed off up on Big Wolf Creek for a week, maybe, and missed your case entirely."

"And likewise my big fee," Jim interrupted. "Some men are born lucky. And so Mrs. Aydelot went after you. Asher's a fortunate man to have a wife like Virginia, although he had to give up an inheritance for her."

"How was that?" Carey asked, glad to see the hopeless look leaving Jim's eyes.

"Oh, it's a pretty long story for a sick man. The mere facts are that Asher Aydelot was to have bank stock, a good paying hotel, and a splendid big farm if he'd promise never to marry any descendant of Jerome Thaine, of Virginia. Asher hiked out West and enlisted in the cavalry and did United States scout duty for two years, hoping to forget Virginia Thaine, who is a descendant of this Jerome Thaine. But it wasn't any use. Distance don't count, you know, in cases like that."

"Yes, I know."

Shirley was too sick to notice Dr. Carey's face, and he did not remember afterward how low and hard those three words sounded.

"It seems Virginia had pulled Asher through a fever in a Rebel hospital, and we all love our nurses." Jim patted the doctor's knee as he said this. "And when the father's will was read out against ever, ever, ever his son marrying a Thaine, Asher promptly said that the whole inheritance, bank stock, hotel, and farm, might go where—the old man Aydelot had already gone—maybe. Anyhow, he married Virginia Thaine and she was game to come out here and pioneer on a Grass River claim. Strange what a woman will do for love, isn't it? And to go on a forty-mile ride to save a worthless pup's life! That's me. Think of the daughter of one of those old Virginia homes up to a trick like that?"

"You've talked enough now."

Shirley looked up in surprise at this stern command, but Dr. Carey had gone to the other side of the cabin and sat staring out at the river running bank-full at the base of the little slope.

When he turned to his patient again, the old tender look was in his eyes. Men loved Jim Shirley if they cared for him at all. And now the pathetic hopelessness of Jim's face cut deep as Carey studied it.

"I say, Shirley, did you ever know a man back East named Thomas Smith?" he asked.

"No. Strange name, that! Where'd you run onto it? Smith! Smith! How do you spell it?" Jim replied indifferently.

"With a spoonful of quinine in epsom salts, taken raw, if you don't pay attention. Now listen to me." The doctor's tone was as cheery as ever.

"Well, don't make it necessary for me to tell you when you've talked enough."

In spite of the joking words, there was a listless hopelessness in Shirley's voice, matching the dull, listless eyes. And Horace Carey rose to the situation at once.

"A stranger named Thomas Smith came to the Crossing the day I came down here. Rather a small man, with close-set, dark eyes; signed his name in a cramped, left-handed writing. I noticed his right hand seemed a little stiff, sort of paralyzed at the wrist. But here's the funny thing. He made me uneasy, and he made me think of you. Could you identify him? He looked as much like you as I look like that young darkey, Bo Peep, up at the Jacobs House."

"None of my belongings. You are a delicate plant to be so sensitive to strangers." Jim sighed from mental weariness more than from physical weakness.

"I was sensitive, and when I heard Stewart call out your name in the mail and saw this man step up as if to take the letter, I took it. And if you'll take a brace and decide it's worth while you can have it. It's addressed in a woman's handwriting, not a Thomas Smith style of pinching letters out of a penholder and squeezing them off the pen point. Lie down there, man!"

For Jim was sitting up, listening intently. With trembling fingers he took the letter and read it eagerly. Then he looked at Carey with eyes in which listlessness had given place to determination.

"Doctor, I was ready to throw up the game five minutes ago. Now I'll do anything to get back to strength and work."

"You don't seem very joyous, however," the doctor responded.

"Joy don't belong to me. We parted company some years ago. But life is mine."

"And duty?"

"Yes, and duty. Say, Doctor, if you'd ever cared all there was in you to care for one woman, and then had to give her up, you'd know how I feel. And if, then, a sort of service opened up before you, you'd know how I welcome this."

Jim's face, white from his illness, was wonderfully handsome now, and he looked at his friend with that eager longing for sympathy men of his mould need deeply. Horace Carey stood up beside the bed and, looking down with a face where intense feeling and self-control were manifest, said in a low voice:

"I have cared. I have had to give up, and I know what service means."



CHAPTER VI

WHEN THE GRASSHOPPER WAS A BURDEN

Although the figtree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines, the labor of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls:

Yet I will rejoice in the Lord. —HABAKKUK.

While Jim Shirley was getting back to health, he and his physician had many long talks regarding the West and its future; its products and its people. There was only one topic in which Horace Carey was but intermittently interested, namely, Jim's neighbors—the Aydelots. At least, it seemed so to Jim, who had loved Asher from boyhood, and had taken Virginia on sight and paid homage to her for all the years that followed. Jim accepted the doctor's manner at first as a mere personal trait, but, having nothing to do except to lie and think, he grew curiously annoyed over it.

"I wish you'd tell me what ails you?" he blurted out one evening, as the two sat together in the twilight.

"About what?" the doctor inquired. "If I knew, I might even risk my own medicine to get over it."

"Don't joke, Horace Carey, not with a frail invalid. I've tried all day to talk to you about my neighbors and you turn the subject away as if it was of no consequence, and now, tonight, you settle down and say, 'Tell me about the Aydelots.' Why do you want to hear in the dark what you won't listen to in the daylight?"

"Oh, you are a sick man, Jim, or you wouldn't be so silly," the doctor replied, "but to please you, I'll tell you the truth. I'm homesick."

"Yes?"

"And this Mrs. Aydelot was a Virginia woman."

"Yes?"

"Well, I'm a true son of Virginia, and I thought it might make me happy to hear about somebody from—"

"You are a magnificent liar," Jim broke in.

"Evidently it's better to have you talk about your neighbors than your medical advisor tonight," Carey retorted.

"Oh, I won't say a word more," Jim declared.

"More Ananias magnificence! Do you suppose the Aydelots will be down before we go away?" the doctor asked.

"We?"

"Yes, I am going to take you with me, or give you a quieting powder when I leave here. On your own declaration you'd do anything to get back to strength and work. Now, the only way to get well, with or without a physician, is to get well. And you'll never do that by using up a little more strength every day than you store up the night before. Men haven't sense enough to be invalids. Nothing else is such a menace to human life as the will of the man who owns that life. You'll obey my will for a month or two."

"You are a—doctor, Carey. No, the Aydelots won't be down before we go away, because Virginia has been sick ever since that awful trip to Carey's Crossing," Jim said sadly.

"Why haven't you told me?" Carey's voice was hardly audible.

"Because Asher just told me today, and because you took no interest in them."

"Sickness is a doctor's interest, always," Carey replied in a stern voice. And then the two sat in silence while the night shadows darkened the little cabin.

* * * * *

As soon as Shirley was able to ride, he went up to Carey's Crossing for a two months' stay, and the Aydelots were left far away from the edge of civilization. A heavy snowfall buried all the trails and the world, the happy, busy world, forgot these two holding their claim on the grim wilderness frontier.

In after years they often talked of the old pioneer days, but of this one winter they spoke but rarely.

"We lived alone with each other and God," Virginia said once. "He walked beside us on the prairie and made our little sod house His sanctuary. Those were consecrated days to Asher and me, like the stormy days of our first love in the old war times, and the first hours of our baby's life. We were young and full of hope and belief in the future, and we loved each other. But we had need to have shoes of iron and brass, as Moses promised Asher of old. It was a hard, hard way, but it was His way. I am glad we walked through it all. It made the soil of Kansas sacred to us two forevermore."

One March day spring came up the Grass River Valley with a glory all its own, and sky and headland and low level prairie were baptized with a new life. A month later a half-dozen prairie schooners moved out on the old sunflower-bordered trail. Then following down the Grass River trail, the schooner folk saw that the land, which Darley Champers had denounced, was very good. And for Asher and Virginia Aydelot, the days of lonely solitude were ended.

But the prairie had no gifts to bestow. It yielded slowly to its possessors only after they had paid out time and energy and hope and undying faith in its possibilities. The little sum of money per acre turned over to the Government represented the very least of the cost. There were no forests to lay waste here, nor marshes to be drained. Instead, forests must be grown and waters conserved. What Francis Aydelot with the Clover Valley community had struggled to overcome on the Ohio frontier, his son, Asher, with other settlers now strove to develop in Kansas. But these were young men, many of them graduates, either in the North or the South, from a four years' course in the University of the Civil War. No hardship of the plains could be worse than the things they had already endured. These men who held the plow handles were State builders and they knew it. Into the State must be builded schools and churches, roads and bridges, growing timber and perpetual water reservoirs; while fields of grain and orchard fruitage, and the product of flock and herd must be multiplied as the sinews of life and larger opportunity. For all these things the Kansas plains offered to Asher Aydelot and his little company of neighbors only land below, crossed by a grass-choked river, and sky overhead, crossed but rarely by blessed rain-dropping clouds. And yet the less the wilderness voluntarily gave up, the more these farmer folk were determined to win from it. Truly, they had need not only for large endurance in the present, but for large vision of a future victory, and they had both.

The weight of pioneer hardship, however, fell heaviest on the women of whom Virginia Aydelot was a type. Into the crucible out of which a state is moulded, she cast her youth and strength and beauty; her love of luxury, her need for common comforts, her joy in the cultured appointments of society. She had a genius for music, trained in the best schools of the East. And sometimes in the lonely days, she marked her only table with a bit of charcoal to the likeness of a keyboard. Then she set her music against her clean dishpan and dumbly fingered the melodies she had loved, hoping her hands might not lose all their cunning in these years of home-making on the plains.

The spring of the memorable year of 1874 opened auspiciously. The peach trees on the Aydelot and Shirley claims bloomed for the first time; more sod had been turned for wheat and corn; gardens and truck patches were planted; cattle were grazing beyond the sand dunes across the river, while the young cottonwood and catalpa groves, less than three feet high it is true, began to make great splotches of darker green on the prairie, promising cool forest shade in coming years. Mail went west on the main trail three times a week. The world was coming nearer to the Grass River settlement which, in spite of his doleful view once, Darley Champers was helping to fill up to the profit of the real estate business.

Carey's Crossing, having given up all hope of becoming a county seat, had faded from the face of the earth. The new county seat of Wolf County was confidently expected to be pitched at Wykerton, up in the Big Wolf Creek settlement, where one Hans Wyker, former saloon-keeper of Carey's Crossing, was building up a brewery for the downfall of the community. Dr. Carey was taking an extended medical course in the East, whither Bo Peep had followed him. Darley Champers was hovering like a hawk between Wykerton and the Grass River settlement. Todd Stewart had taken a claim, while John Jacobs, temporarily in the East, was busy planting the seeds for a new town which no Wyker brewery should despoil.

All lovely was this springtime of 1874. Midsummer had another story to tell. A story of a wrathful sun in a rainless sky above a parched land, swept for days together by the searing south winds. In all the prairie there was no spot of vivid green, no oasis in the desert of tawny grasses and stunted brown cornstalks, and bare, hot stubble wherefrom even the poor crop of straw had been chaffless and mean.

On a Sabbath morning in late July, the little Grass River schoolhouse was crowded, for Sabbath school was the event of the week. It did not take a multitude to crowd the sod-built temple of learning. Even with the infant class out of doors in the shade, the class inside filled the space. The minister school-teacher, Pryor Gaines, called it the "old folks' class," although there was not a person over thirty-five years of age in the whole settlement.

Asher Aydelot was the superintendent, and Virginia took care of the infant class. Jim Shirley led the singing, and Pryor Gaines taught the "old folks." He was the same minister school-teacher who had sat at the table with Dr. Carey and Todd Stewart and John Jacobs on the day that Thomas Smith ate his first meal at the Jacobs House. With the passing of Carey's Crossing, he had taken a homestead claim on Grass River.

This morning the lesson was short, and the children, finding the heat of the shade outside unbearable, were sitting on the earth floor beside their parents. Nobody seemed ready to go home.

"Times are getting worse every day," one man observed. "No rain since the tenth of May, and the prettiest stand of wheat I ever saw, burned to a half-yield or less before cutting time. I'd counted on wheat for my living this year."

"It's the same if you'd had corn, Bennington," Jim Shirley observed. "I was polishing my crown for a Corn King Festival this fall. I don't believe I'll harvest fifteen bushels to the acre."

"Fifteen bushels!" another neighbor exclaimed. "Fifteen ears to the row a section long would encourage me, Darley Champers told me when I took up my claim, if I'd plant a grove or two, that in three years the trees would be so big that rainfall would be abundant. You all know my catalpa woods is a wonder," he added with a wink.

Darley Champers himself had just come down the trail and was entering the door.

"Well, come over our way if you are on the hunt for prosperity," Todd Stewart interposed. "Grass River isn't living up to its name any better than our creek; isn't any fuller of weeds than our brook is of—shale. I did lose the trail in your river this morning, though. The weeds are nearly up to the pony's flanks. Think of the fertility of a river bed that will grow weeds three feet high and two shades more yellow green than the dead grass on the bank. If there's a drop of water in our creek for twenty miles, I'd go get it and have Brother Gaines analyze it to make sure it wasn't resin."

"You do well to see the humor of the situation, Stewart," Pryor Gaines began, with the cheery tone of a man who believes in hope.

"I don't see that that helps any," Bennington, the first speaker, broke in dolefully. "Joking isn't going to give us food and clothes and fuel till crop time comes again—if it ever does."

"I'm not suffering for extra clothes. What I wear now is a burden," Todd Stewart declared.

"Well, gentlemen." Darley Champers took the floor. "What are you going to do? That's what brought me here today. I knowed I'd find you all here. When I sent some of you fellows into this blasted Sahara, I was honest. I thought Grass River was a real stream, not a weed patch and a stone outcrop. I'd seen water in it, as I can prove by Aydelot. Remember, when we met down by the bend here, one winter day?"

"Yes, I remember," Asher replied.

"Well, I just come by there and there ain't a drop of water in that deep bend, no more'n in my hat." Champers plumped his hat down on the floor with the words. "And the creek, on Stewart's testimony, is a blasted fissure in the earth."

"I always said when that bend went dry, I'd leave the country, but I can't," Jim Shirley said doggedly.

"Why not?" Champers inquired.

"Because I can't throw away the only property I have in the world, and I haven't the means to get away, let alone start up anywhere else."

"We're all in the same boat," Bennington declared.

"Same boat, every fellow rocking it, too, and no water to drown in if we fall out. We're in the queerest streak of luck yet developed," Todd Stewart observed.

"Let's take a vote, then, and see how many of us really have no visible means of support and couldn't walk out of here at all. Let's have a show of hands," Jim Shirley proposed.

"How did you decide?" Champers asked, as the hands dropped.

His eyes were on Asher Aydelot, who had not voted.

"Didn't you see? Everybody, except Asher there, is nailed fast to the gumbo," Stewart declared.

Darley Champers looked Asher Aydelot straight in the eyes, and nobody could have said that pity or dislike or surprise controlled the man's mind, for something of all three were in that look. Then he said:

"Gentlemen, I know your condition just as well as you do. You're in a losing game, and it's stay and starve, or—but they ain't no 'or.' Now, I'll advance money tomorrow on every claim held here and take it and assume the mortgage. Not that they are worth it. Oh, Lord, no. I'll be land-logged, and it's out of kindness to you that I'm willin' to stretch them fellers I represent in the East. But I'll take chances. I'll help each feller of you to get away for a reasonable price on your claim. It's a humanitarian move, but I may be able to lump it off for range land in a few years for about what it costs to pay taxes. But, gents, I got some of you in and I'm no scallawag when it comes to helpin' you out. Think it over, and I'll be down this way in two weeks. I've got to go now. It's too infernal hot to keep alive here. I know where there's two sunflower stalks up on the trail that's fully two feet tall. I've got to have shade. Goodday." And Champers was gone.

"What do you say?" The question seemed to come from all at once.

"Let Pryor Gaines speak first. He's our preacher," Asher said with a smile.

Pryor Gaines was a small, fair-faced man, a scholar, a dreamer, too, maybe. By birth or accident, he had suffered from a deformity. He limped when he walked, and his left hand had less than normal efficiency. On his face the pathos of the large will and the limited power was written over by the ready smile, the mark of abundant good will toward men.

"I am out of the race," he said calmly. "I'm as poor as any of you, of course, and I must stay here anyhow, Dr. Carey tells me. I came West on account of heart action and some pulmonary necessities. I cannot choose where I shall go, even if I had the means to carry out my choice. But my necessities need not influence anyone," he added with a smile. "I can live without you, if I have to."

"How about you?" Stewart said, turning to Asher. "You take no risk at all in leaving, so you'll go first, I suppose?"

All this time the settlers' wives sat listening to the considerations that meant so much to them. They wore calico dresses, and not one of them had on a hat. But their sun-bonnets were clean and stiffly starched, and, while they were humbly clad, there was not a stupid face among them; neither was their conversation stupid. Their homes and home devices for improvement, the last reading in the all too few papers that came their way, the memories of books and lectures and college life of other days, and the hope of the future, were among the things of which they spoke.

Virginia Aydelot was no longer the pretty pink and white girl-bride who had come to the West three years before. Her face and arms were brown as a gypsy's, but her hair, rumpled by the white sunbonnet she had worn, was abundant, and her dark eyes and the outlines of her face had not changed. She would always be handsome without regard to age or locality. Nor had the harshness of the wilderness made harsh the soft Southern tongue that was her heritage.

At Stewart's words, Asher glanced at his wife, and he knew from her eyes what her choice would be.

"When I was a boy on the old farm back at Cloverdale, Ohio, my mother's advice was as useful to me as my father's." Swift through Asher's mind ran the memory of that moonlit April night on his father's veranda five years before. "Out here it is our wives who bear the heaviest burdens. Let us have their thoughts on the situation."

"That's right," Jim Shirley exclaimed. "Mrs. Aydelot, you are first in point of time in this settlement. What do you say?"

"It's a big responsibility, Mrs. Aydelot," Bennington, who had not smiled hitherto, said with a twinkle in his eye.

"As goes Asher Aydelot, so goes Grass River," Todd Stewart declared. "You speak for him, Mrs. Aydelot, and tell us what to do."

"I cannot tell you what to do. I can speak only for the Aydelots," Virginia said. "When we came West Asher told me he had left one bridge not burned. He had put aside enough money to take us back to Ohio and to start a new life, on small dimensions, of course, back East, whenever we found the prairies too hostile. They've often been rough, never worse than now, but"—her eyes were bright with the unconquerable will to do as she pleased, true heritage of the Thaines of old—"but I'm not ready to go yet."

Jim Shirley clapped his hands, but Pryor Gaines spoke earnestly. "There is no failure in a land where the women will to win. By them the hearthstones stand or crumble to dust. The Plains are master now. They must be servant some day."

"Amen!" responded Asher Aydelot, and the Sabbath service ended.

Two weeks later Darley Champers came again to the barren valley and met the settlers in the sod schoolhouse. Not a cloud had yet scarred the heavens, not a dewdrop had glistened in the morning sunlight. Clearly, August was outranking July as king of a season of glaring light and withering heat. The settlers drooped listlessly on the backless seats, and the barefoot children did not even try to recite the golden text.

"I'd like to speak to you, Aydelot," Champers said at the door, as the school service ended.

The two men sought the shady side of the cabin and dropped on the ground.

"I'm goin' to be plain, now, and you mustn't misunderstand me for a minute," Champers declared. The blusterer is rarely tactful.

"All right."

Champers seemed to take the cheery tone as a personal matter.

"Two weeks ago, I understand you and Mrs. Aydelot headed off these poor devils from their one chance of escape. Now, you know danged well you don't intend to stay here a minute longer'n it'll take to kite out of this in the fall. And you are sacrificing human lives by persuadin' these folks to hold onto this land they just can't keep, nor make a livin' on, under five years and pay the interest till their mortgages expire. And I've just this to say:" Champers spoke persuasively. "I'm not a shark. I'm humane. If you'll help me to get these poor settlers out of Grass River Valley, I'm willing to pay you a good commission on every single claim and take no commission at all on yours. It will help you a lot toward makin' a bigger start back East. Don't listen to your woman now; listen to me, for I'm givin' you the chance of your life, robbin' myself to do it, too. But"—his tone changed abruptly—"if you figger you can take your danged rainy-day bank account out'n the Cloverdale bank and grab onto this land, you leave yourself, and hold onto it while you stay East a few years, and then sneak back here and get rich off their loss, I tell you now, you can't do it. And if you don't use your influence right now to get 'em to sell out to my company, you're going to regret it. Don't ask how I know. I know. I warn you once for all. You go in there and help the men decide right now—I'll buy at a reasonable figger, you understand—and you're goin' to help make 'em sell to save their fool skins from starvation and their wives and their little ones, or you're going to rue the day you drove into Kansas. What do you say? What are you goin' to do?"

The man's voice was full of menace, and he looked at Asher Aydelot with the determination of one who will not be thwarted.

Asher looked back at him with clear gray eyes that saw deeper than the threatening words. A half smile hovered about his lips as he replied.

"So that's your game, Darley Champers. If I'll help you to get hold of this land, you'll pay the settlers more than the claims are worth and you'll pay me more than they are worth. A pretty good price for worthless ground."

"Well, look at the landscape and tell me what you see." Darley Champers flung his hand out toward the sweep of brown prairie with the dry river bed and the brazen sands beyond it. Lean cattle stood disconsolately in the shadeless open, while the cultivated fields were a mass of yellow clods about the starveling crops.

Asher did not heed the interruption.

"You declare that I'll leave here as soon as I can get away, and that I'm brutal to use my influence to keep the settlers here; that I am working a trick you have worked out already for me, to get the land myself because it is valuable; you, in your humane love for your fellowmen, you threaten me with all unknown calamities if I refuse your demand. And then you ask me what I have to say, what I am going to do, and, with fine gestures, what I see?"

"Well?" Champers queried urgently.

The plains life made men patient and deliberate of speech, and Asher did not hasten his words for all the bluster.

"I say I am not using my influence to keep any man here or push him out of here. I speak only for the family at the Sunflower Inn. I know 'danged well' I am not going to leave the Grass River country this fall. Further, I know your hand before you play it, and I know that if you can play it against Todd Stewart and Jim Shirley and Cyrus Bennington and the rest of them, I haven't taken their measure right. I know, again, that I am not afraid of you, nor can any threat you make have an influence on my action. And, lastly, as to what I see."

Asher turned toward the west where the hot air quivered between the iron earth and a sky of brass.

"I see a land fair as the garden of Eden, with grazing herds on broad meadows, and fields on fields of wheat, and groves and little lakes and rivers, a land of comfortable homes and schools and churches—and no saloons nor breweries."

"I see a danged fool," Darley Champers cried, springing up.

"Come down here in twenty-five years and make a hunt for me, then," Asher said with a smile, but Champers had already plunged inside the schoolhouse.

The council following was a brief one. Three or four Grass River settlers agreed to give up the equity on their claims of one hundred and sixty acres for enough money to transport themselves and their families to their former homes east of the Mississippi River. This decision left only one child of all the little ones there, Todd Stewart, a stubby little fellow, as much of a Scotchman as his fair-haired father, who wound one arm about his father's neck, and whispered:

"They can't budge us, can they, dad?"

When the matter was concluded, Darley Champers rose to his feet.

"I want to say one thing," he began doggedly. "I give you the chance. Don't never blame me because you are too green to know what's good for you. You are the only green things here, though. And don't forget, there ain't a man of you can get out of here on your own income or on your own savin's. Not a one. You're all locked into this valley an' the key's in purgatory. An' I'd see you all with the key before I'd ever lift a finger to help one of you, and not a one of you can help yourselves."

With these words Champers left the company and rode away up the trail toward civilization and safety.

In the silence that followed, Pryor Gaines said:

"Friends, let us not forget that this is the Sabbath day on the prairie as in the crowded city. Let us not leave until we ask for His blessing in whose sight no sparrow falls unnoticed."

And together the little band of resolute men and women offered prayer to Him whose is the earth and the fulness, or the emptiness, thereof.

Four days and nights went by. On the fifth morning at daybreak the cool breeze that sweeps the prairies in the early dawn flowed caressingly along the Grass River valley. The settlers rose early. This was the best part of the day, and they made use of it.

"You poor Juno!" Virginia Aydelot said, as she leaned against the corral post in the morning twilight, and patted the mare gently.

"You and I are 'plains-broke' for certain. We don't care for hot winds, nor cold winds, nor prairie fire, nor even a hailstorm, if it would only come. Never mind, old Juno, Asher has the greenest fields of all the valley because he hasn't stopped plowing. That's why you must keep on working. Maybe it will rain today, and you'll get to rest. Rain and rest!"

She looked toward the shadowy purple west, and then away to the east, decked in the barbaric magnificence of a plains sunrise.

"It may rain today, but it won't rain rain. It will be hot air and trouble. The sod shack is cool, anyhow, Juno. Not so cool, though, as that little glen in the mountains where the clear spring bubbles and babbles all day long." She brushed her hair back from her forehead and, squeezing Juno's mane, she added, "We don't want to go back yet, though. Not yet, do we, Juno, even if it rains trouble instead of rain? Inherited pride and the will to do as we please make us defy the plains, still."

The day was exceedingly hot, but by noon a cloud seemed rising in the northwest; not a glorious, black thunder-cloud that means cool wind and sharp lightning and a shower of longed-for rain. A yellow-gray cloud with no deeper nor shallower tints to it, rising steadily, moving swiftly, shut off the noonday glare. The shadows deepened below this strange un-cloud-like cloud, not dark, but dense. The few chickens in the settlement mistook the clock and went to roost. At every settler's house, wondering eyes watched the unheard-of phenomenon, so like, yet utterly unlike, the sun's eclipse.

"Listen, Asher," Virginia exclaimed, as the two stood on the low swell behind the house. "Listen to the roar, but there's no wind nor thunder."

"Hear that rasping edge to the rumble. It isn't like anything I ever knew," Asher said, watching the coming cloud intently.

From their height they could see it sweeping far across the land, not high in the air, but beclouding the prairie like a fog. Only this thing was dry and carried no cool breath with it. Nearer it came, and the sun above looked wanly through it, as surging, whipping, shimmering with silver splinters of light, roaring with the whir of grating wings, countless millions of grasshoppers filled the earth below and the air above.

"The plague of Egypt," Asher cried, and he and Virginia retreated hastily before its force.

But they were not swift enough. The mosquito netting across the open windows was eaten through and the hopping, wriggling, flying pest surged inside. They smeared greasily on the floor; they gnawed ravenously at every bit of linen or cotton fabric; they fell into every open vessel.

Truly, life may be made miserable in many ways, but in the Kansas homes in that memorable grasshopper year of 1874 life was wretchedly uncomfortable. Out of doors the cloud was a disaster. Nor flood, nor raging wind nor prairie fire, nor unbroken drouth could claim greater measure of havoc in its wake than this billion-footed, billion-winged creature, an appetite grown measureless, a hunger vitalized, and individualized, and endowed with power of motion. No living shred of grass, or weed, or stalk of corn, or straw of stubble or tiniest garden growth; no leaf or bit of tender bark of tree, or shrub, escaped this many-mouthed monster.

In the little peach orchard where there were a few half-ripe peaches, the very first fruits of the orchards in this untamed land, the hard peach stones, from which the meat was eaten away, hung on their stems among the leafless branches. The weed-grown bed of Grass River was swept as by a prairie fire. And for the labor of the fields, nothing remained. The cottonwood trees and wild plum bushes belonged to a mid-winter landscape, and of the many young catalpa groves, only stubby sticks stood up, making a darker spot on the face of the bare plains.

For three days the Saint Bartholomew of vegetation continued. Then the pest, still hungry, rose and passed to the southeast, leaving behind it only a honey-combed soil where eggs were deposited for future hatching, and a famine-breeding desolation.

In days of great calamity or sorrow, sometimes little things annoy strangely, and it is not until after the grief has passed that the memory recalls and the mind wonders why trifles should have had such power amid such vastly important things. While the grasshopper was a burden, one loss wore heavily on Virginia Aydelot's mind. She had given up hope for vines and daintier flowers in the early summer, but one clump of coarse sunflowers she had tended and watered and loved.

"It is our flower," she said to Asher, who laughed at her care. "I won't give them up. I can get along without the other blooms this year, but my sunflowers are my treasure here—the only gold till the wheat turns yellow for us."

"You are a sentimental sister," Asher declared. But he patiently carried water from the dwindling well supply to keep the drouth from searing them. When they fell before the ravenous grasshoppers, foolish as it was, Virginia mourned their loss above the loss of crops—so scanty were the joys of these women state builders.

The day after the pests left was the Sabbath. When Asher Aydelot read the morning lesson in the Sunday school, his voice was deep and unfaltering. He had chosen the eighth chapter of Deuteronomy, with its sublime promises to a wilderness-locked people.

Then Pryor Gaines offered prayer.

"Although the figtree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines"—the old, old chant of Habakkuk on Mount Shigionoth—"the labor of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation. The Lord God is my strength, and He will make my feet like hind's feet, and He will make me to walk upon mine high places."

So the scholarly man, crippled and held to the land, prayed; and comfort came with his words.

Then Jim Shirley stood up to sing.

"I'm no preacher," he said, holding the song book open a moment, "but I do believe the Lord loves the fellow who can laugh at his own hard luck. We weren't so green as Darley Champers tried to have us believe, because the hoppers didn't bite at us when they took every other green and growing thing, and we have life enough in us to keep on growing. Furthermore, we aren't the only people that have been pest-ridden. It's even worse up on Big Wolf Creek, where Wyker's short on corn to feed his brewery this fall. I'm going to ask everyone who is still glad he's in the Grass River settlement in Kansas to stand up and sing just like he meant it. It's the old Portuguese hymn. Asher and I learned it back on Clover Creek in Ohio.

How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord, Is laid for your faith—in His excellent word!"

Every man and woman rose at once.

"The 'ayes' have it," Jim declared.

Then strong and sweet the song floated out across the desolate drouth-ridden, pest-despoiled prairie. The same song was sung that day, no doubt, where many worshipers were met together. The same song, sung in country chapel and city church; in mining villages, and in lonely lumber camps; on vessels far out at sea, and in the missionary service of distant heathen lands; by sick beds in humble homes, and beneath the groined arches of the Old World cathedrals.

But nowhere above the good green sod of Christendom did it rise in braver, truer worship from trustful and unconquered hearts than it rose that day in the little sod schoolhouse on the Kansas prairie, pouring its melody down the wide spaces of the Grass River Valley.



CHAPTER VII

THE LAST BRIDGE BURNED

...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 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.

"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 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 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.

"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 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 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.

"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.

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.

"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 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 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:

"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 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."