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WINNING THE WILDERNESS
In all the story of the world of man,
Who blazed the way to greater, better things?
Who stopped the long migration of wild men,
And set the noble task of building human homes?
The learned recluse? The forum teacher?
The poet-singer? The soldier, voyager,
Or ruler? 'T was none of this proud line.
The man who digged the ground foretold the destiny
Of men. 'T was he made anchor for the heart;
Gave meaning to the hearthstone, and the birthplace,
And planted vine and figtree at the door.
He made e'en nations possible. Aye, when
With his stone axe he made a hoe, he carved,
Unwittingly, the scepter of the world.
The steps by which the multitudes have climbed
Were all rough-hewn by this base implement.
In its rude path have followed all the minor
Arts of men. Hark back along the centuries,
And hear its march across the continents.
From zone to zone, all 'round the bounteous world,
The man whose skill makes rich the barren field
And causes grass to grow, and flowers to blow,
And fruits to ripen, and grain turn to gold--
That man is King! Long live the King!
--Mrs. J. K. Hudson.
[Illustration: They sought the trail and followed it westward
in the face of the wind]
WINNING THE WILDERNESS
By
MARGARET HILL McCARTER
Author of "The Price of the Prairie," "A Wall of Men,"
"The Peace of the Solomon Valley," "A Master's Degree," etc.
Illustrations By
J. N. MARCHAND
Chicago
A. C. McCLURG & CO.
1914
Copyright
A. C. McClurg & Co.
1914
Published September, 1914
Copyrighted in Great Britain
W. F. HALL PRINTING COMPANY, CHICAGO
To
THAT FARMER FATHER AND MOTHER
WITH THEIR HANDS ON TODAY
BUT WITH THEIR EYES ON TOMORROW
WHO THROUGH LABOR AND LONELINESS AND
HOPES LONG DEFERRED
HAVE WON A DESERT TO FRUITFULNESS
A WILDERNESS TO BEAUTY
FOREWORD
A reach of level prairie bounded only by the edge of the world--misty
ravelings of heliotrope and amber, covered only by the arch of
heaven--blue, beautiful and pitiless in its far fathomless spaces. To the
southwest a triple fold of deeper purple on the horizon line--mere hint of
commanding headlands thitherward. Across the face of the prairie streams
wandering through shallow clefts, aimlessly, somewhere toward the
southeast; their course secured by gentle swells breaking into sheer low
bluffs on the side next to the water, or by groups of cottonwood trees and
wild plum bushes along their right of way. And farther off the brown
indefinite shadowings of half-tamed sand dunes. Aside from these things, a
featureless landscape--just grassy ground down here and blue
cloud-splashed sky up there.
The last Indian trail had disappeared. The hoofprints of cavalry horses
had faded away. The price had been paid for the prairie--the costly
measure of death and daring. But the prairie itself, in its loneliness and
loveliness, was still unsubdued. Through the fury of the winter's
blizzard, the glory of the springtime, the brown wastes of burning
midsummer, the long autumn, with its soft sweet air, its opal skies, and
the land a dream of splendor which the far mirage reflects and the wide
horizon frames in a curtain of exquisite amethyst--through none of these
was the prairie subdued. Only to the coming of that king whose scepter is
the hoe, did soul of the soil awake to life and promise. To him the
wilderness gave up everything except its beauty and the sweep of the
freedom-breathing winds that still inspire it.
CONTENTS
PART I
CHAPTER PAGE
I The Blessing of Asher 1
II The Sign of the Sunflower 16
III The Will of the Wind 30
IV Distress Signals 45
V A Plainsman of the Old School 58
VI When the Grasshopper Was a Burden 82
VII The Last Bridge Burned 103
VIII Anchored Hearthstones 122
IX The Beginning of Service 136
X The Coming of Love 155
XI Lights and Shadows 175
XII The Fat Years 187
PART II
XIII The Rollcall 207
XIV The Second Generation 224
XV The Coburn Book 238
XVI The Humaneness of Champers 263
XVII The Purple Notches 274
XVIII Remembering the _Maine_ 289
XIX The "Fighting Twentieth" 311
XX The Crooked Trail 330
XXI Jane Aydelot's Will 354
XXII The Farther Wilderness 362
XXIII The End of the Wilderness 379
XXIV The Call of the Sunflower 393
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
They sought the trail and followed it westward
in the face of the wind 1
"Read these," she said, "then promise me that
in the hour when Leigh needs my help you will
let me help her" 166
"It's a friendly act on somebody's part." he said grimly 180
Leigh turned to see Thaine Aydelot looking down at
her as he leaned over the high back of the rustic seat 274
PART ONE
THE FATHER
The old Antaean fable of strength renewed from the ground
Was a human truth for the ages; since the hour of the
Eden-birth.
That man among men was strongest who stood with his feet on
the earth!
--Sharlot M. Hall.
WINNING THE WILDERNESS
CHAPTER I
THE BLESSING OF ASHER
Unless there be in the background a mother,
no portrait of a man is complete.
--Winston Churchill
The old Aydelot farm reached quite down to the little village of
Cloverdale, from which it was separated by Clover Creek. But the Aydelot
farmhouse stood a good half-mile away up the National pike road toward the
Virginia state line. The farm consisted of two long narrow strips of
ground, bordering the road on either side and walled about by forests
hiding stagnant marshes in their black-shadowed depths. Francis Aydelot
had taken up the land from the government before the townsite was thought
of. Farming was not to his liking and his house had been an inn, doing a
thriving business with travelers going out along that great National
highway in ante-railway days. But when the village took root and grew into
a little town, the village tavern absorbed the revenue from the traveling
public, and Francis Aydelot had, perforce, to put his own hands to the
plow and earn a living from the land. It was never a labor of love with
him, however, and although he grew well-to-do in the tilling, he resented
the touch of the soil as something degrading.
Cloverdale did not grow toward him, because, out of prejudice at its
being, he would not sell one foot of his ground for town lot purposes.
Nevertheless, since he was upright in all his dealings, the villagers grew
proud of him, deferred to his judgment, quoted his opinions, and rated him
generally the biggest asset of the community, with one exception. That
exception was young Asher Aydelot, a pink-cheeked, gray-eyed boy, only son
of the House of Aydelot and heir to all the long narrow acres from the
wooded crest on the east to the clear waters of Clover Creek on the west.
He was heir to more than these, however, if the heritage of ancestry
counts for anything.
Jean Aydelot, the first of the name in America, driven from France by his
family on account of his Huguenot beliefs, had settled in Virginia. He had
quickly grasped the American ideals of freedom, the while he affiliated
easily with the exclusive English Cavaliers. Something of the wanderlust
in his blood, however, kept him from rooting too firmly at once. It
happened that when a band of Quaker exiles had sought refuge in Virginia
and was about to be driven out by the autocratic Cavaliers, young Aydelot,
out of love for a Quaker girl, had championed their cause vehemently. And
he was so influential in the settlement that he might have succeeded, but
for one family--the wealthy and aristocratic Thaines. Through the son of
this family the final expulsion of these Quakers was accomplished. The
woman in the case was Mercy Pennington, a pretty Quakeress with whom young
Jerome Thaine fell in love, promising protection to all her people in
return for her hand. When she refused his offer, the Thaines carried the
day, and the Quakers again became exiles. Jean Aydelot followed them to
Pennsylvania and married Mercy Pennington, who was promptly disowned by
the Quaker Church for this marriage to one outside its membership.
In spite of all this heresy, however, the Aydelots became one of the
leading families in the development of the colonies. Their descendants
fell heir to the traits of their French-English forbears: freedom of
belief, courage to follow a cause, a touch of the wanderlust, the
mercurial French mind, and the steady poise of the followers of the Inward
Light. A trace of bitterness had come down the years, however, with the
family history; a feud-like resentment against the family of Jerome Thaine
of Virginia.
Francis Aydelot had crossed the Alleghanies and settled in Ohio in
frontier days. Here his life, like his narrow, woods-bound farm, was clean
and open but narrowed by surroundings and lack of opportunity. What had
made for freedom and reform in his ancestors, in him became prejudice and
stubborn will. Mrs. Aydelot was a broad-minded woman. Something of vision
was in her clear gray eyes. Love of beauty, respect for learning, and an
almost statesman-like grasp of civic duty and the trend of national
progress were hers, too.
From such ancestry came Asher Aydelot, the healthiest, happiest country
boy that ever waked the echoes of the old Ohio woodlands, or dared the
currents of her mad little rivers, or whistled fearlessly as he scampered
down the dusty pike road in the soft black summer nights.
Asher was just fifteen when the Civil War swept the nation off its feet.
The Quaker spirit of Mercy Pennington made fighting repulsive to his
father, but in Asher the old Huguenot courage of Jean Aydelot blazed
forth, together with the rash partisanship of a young hot-blood whose life
has been hemmed in too narrowly by forest walls. Almost before Cloverdale
knew there was a war, the Third Ohio Regiment was on its way to the front.
Among its bearded men was one beardless youth, a round-faced drummer boy
of fifteen, the only child of the big farmhouse beside the National road.
In company with him was his boyhood chum, Jim Shirley, son of the
Cloverdale tavern keeper.
* * * * *
An April sun was slipping behind the treetops, and the twilight mists were
already rising above the creek. Francis Aydelot and his wife sat on the
veranda watching Asher in the glory of a military suit and brass buttons
coming up the pike with springing step.
"How strong he is! I'm glad he is at home again," the mother was saying.
"Yes, he's here to stay at last. I have his plans all settled," Francis
Aydelot declared.
"But, Francis, a man must make some plans for himself. Asher may not
agree," Mrs. Aydelot spoke earnestly.
"How can our boy know as well as his father does what is best for him? He
must agree, that's all. We have gone over this matter often enough
together. I won't have any Jim Shirley in my family. He's gone away and
nobody knows where he is, just when his father needs him to take the care
of the tavern off his hands."
"What made Jim go away from Cloverdale?" Mrs. Aydelot asked.
"Nobody seems to know exactly. He left just before his brother, Tank,
married that Leigh girl up the Clover valley somewhere. But everything's
settled for Asher. He will be marrying one of the Cloverdale girls pretty
soon and stay right here in town. We'll take it up with him now. There's
no use waiting."
"And yet I wish we might wait till he speaks of it himself. Remember, he's
been doing his own thinking in the time he's been away," the mother
insisted.
Just then, Asher reached the corner of the door yard. Catching sight of
the two, he put his hands on the top of the paling fence, leaped lightly
over it, and came across to the veranda, where he sat down on the top
step.
"Just getting in from town? The place hasn't changed much, has it?" the
father declared.
"No, not much," Asher replied absently, looking out with unseeing eyes at
the lengthening woodland shadows, "a church or two more, some brick
sidewalk, and a few stores and homes--just added on, not improved. I miss
Jim Shirley everywhere. The older folks seem the same, but some of the
girls are pushing baby-carriages and the boys are getting round-shouldered
and droopy-jawed."
He drew himself up with military steadiness as he spoke.
"Well, you are glad to settle down anyhow," his father responded. "The old
French spirit of roving and adventure has had its day with you, and now
you will begin your life work."
"Yes, I'm done with fighting." Asher's lips tightened. "But what do you
call my life work, father?"
It was the eighth April after the opening of the Civil War. Asher had just
come home from two years of army service on the western plains. Few
changes had come to the little community; but to the young man, who eight
springtimes ago had gone out as a pink-cheeked drummer boy, the years had
been full of changes. He was now twenty-three, straight as an Indian, lean
and muscular as a veteran soldier. The fair, round cheeks of boyhood were
brown and tinged with red-blooded health. There was something resolute and
patient in the clear gray eyes, as if the mother's own far vision had
crept into them. But the ready smile that had made the Cloverdale
community love the boy broke as quickly now on the man's face, giving
promise that his saving sense of humor and his good nature would be
factors to reckon with in every combat.
Asher had staid in the ranks till the end of the war, had been wounded,
captured, and imprisoned; had fought through a hospital fever and narrowly
escaped death in the front of many battle lines. But he did not ask for a
furlough, nor account his duty done till the war was ended. Just before
that time, when he was sick in a Southern prison, a rebel girl had walked
into his life to stay forever. With his chum, Jim Shirley, he had chafed
through two years in a little eastern college, the while bigger things
seemed calling him to action. At the end of the second year, he broke
away, and joining the regular army, began the hazardous life of a Plains
scout.
Two years of fighting a foe from every way the winds blow, cold and
hunger, storms and floods and desert heat, poisonous reptiles, poisoned
arrows of Indians, and the deadly Asiatic cholera; sometimes with brave
comrades, sometimes with brutal cowards, sometimes on scout duty, utterly
and awfully alone; over miles on endless miles of grassy level prairies,
among cruel canyons, in dreary sand lands where men die of thirst,
monotonous and maddening in their barren, eternal sameness; and
sometimes, between sunrises of superb grandeur, and sunsets of sublime
glory, over a land of exquisite virgin loveliness--it is small wonder that
the ruddy cheeks were bronze as an Indian's, that the roundness of boyhood
had given place to the muscular strength of manhood, that the gray eyes
should hold something of patience and endurance and of a vision larger
than the Cloverdale neighborhood might understand.
When Asher had asked, "What do you call my life work, Father?" something
impenetrable was in his direct gaze.
Francis Aydelot deliberated before replying. Then the decisive tone and
firm set of the mouth told what resistance to his will might cost.
"It may not seem quite homelike at first, but you will soon find a wife
and that always settles a man. I can trust you to pick the best there is
here. As to your work, it must be something fit for a gentleman, and
that's not grubbing in the ground. Of course, this is Aydelot soil. It
couldn't belong to anybody else. I never would sell a foot of it to
Cloverdale to let the town build this way. I'd as soon sell to a Thaine
from Virginia as I'd sell to that town."
He waved a hand toward the fields shut in by heavy woodlands, where the
shadows were already black. After a moment he continued:
"Everything is settled for you, Asher. I've been pretty careful and lucky,
too, in some ways. The men who didn't go to war had the big chances at
money making, you know. While you were off fighting, I was improving the
time here. I've done it fairly, though. I never dodged a law in my life,
nor met a man into whose eyes I couldn't look squarely."
As he spoke, the blood left Asher's cheeks and his face grew gray under
the tan.
"Father, do you think a man who fights for his country is to be accounted
below the man who stays at home and makes money?"
"Well, he certainly can do more for his children than some of those who
went to this war can do for their fathers," Francis Aydelot declared.
"Suppose I was helpless and poor now, what could you do for me?"
There was no attempt at reply, and the father went on: "I have prepared
your work for you. You must begin it at once. Years ago Cloverdale set up
a hotel, a poor enough tavern even for those days, but it robbed me of the
patronage this house had before that time, and I had to go to farming.
Every kind of drudgery I've had to do here. Cutting down forests, and
draining swamps is a back-breaking business. I never could forgive the
founders for stopping by Clover Creek, when they might have gone twenty
miles further on where a town was needed and left me here. But that's all
past now. I've improved the time. I have a good share of stock in the bank
and I own the only hotel in Cloverdale. I closed with Shirley as soon as I
heard you were coming home. Shirley's getting old, and since Jim has gone
there's no one to help him and take his place later, so he sold at a very
good figure. He had to sell for some reason, I believe. The Shirleys are
having some family trouble that I don't understand nor care about. You've
always been a sort of idol in the town anyhow. Now that you are to go into
the Shirley House as proprietor I suppose Cloverdale will take it as a
dispensation of Providence in their favor, and you can live like a
gentleman."
"But, father, I've always liked the country best. Don't you remember how
Jim Shirley was always out here instead of my going down town when we were
boys?"
"You are only a boy, now, Asher, and this is all I'll hear to your doing.
You ought to be thankful for having such a chance open to you. I have
leased the farm for five years and you don't want to be a hired man at
twenty dollars a month, I reckon. Of course, the farm will be yours some
day, unless you take a notion to run off to Virginia and marry a Thaine."
The last words were said jokingly, but Asher's mother saw a sudden
hardening of the lines of his face as he sat looking out at the darkening
landscape.
There was only a faint glow in the west now. The fields toward Cloverdale
were wrapped in twilight shadows. Behind the eastern treetops the red disk
of the rising moon was half revealed. Asher Aydelot waited long before he
spoke. At length, he turned toward his father with a certain stiffening of
his form, and each felt a space widening gulf-wise between them.
"You stayed at home and grew rich, Father."
"Well?"
The father's voice cut like a steel edge. He saw only opposition to his
will here, but the mother forecasted the end from that moment.
"Father, war gives us to see bigger things than hatred between two
sections of the country. There is education in it, too. That is a part of
the compensation. Once, when our regiment was captured and starving, the
Fifty-fourth Virginia boys saved our lives by feeding us the best supper I
ever tasted. And a Rebel girl--" he broke off suddenly.
"Well, what of all this? What are you trying to say?" queried the older
man.
"I'm trying to show you that I cannot sit down here in the Shirley House
and play mine host any more than I could--" hesitatingly--"marry a
Cloverdale girl on demand. No Cloverdale girl would have me so. I've seen
too much of the country for such a position, Father. Let the men who staid
at home do the little jobs."
He had not meant to say all this, but the stretch of boundless green
prairies was before his eyes, the memory of heroic action where men
utterly forget themselves was in his mind, making life in that little Ohio
settlement seem only a boy's pastime, to be put away with other childish
things. While night and day, in the battle clamor, in the little college
class room, on boundless prairie billows, among lonely sand
dunes--everywhere, he carried the memory of the gentle touch of the hand
of a rebel girl, who had visited him when he was sick and in prison. And
withal, he resented dictation, as all the Aydelots and Penningtons before
him had done.
"What do you propose to do?" his father asked.
"I don't know yet what I can do. I only know what I cannot do."
"And that is--?"
"Just what I have said. I cannot be a tavern keeper here the rest of my
days with nothing to do half of the time except to watch the men pitch
horseshoes behind the blacksmith shop, and listen to the flies buzz in the
windows on summer afternoons; and everything else so quiet and dead you
don't know whether you are on the street or in the graveyard. If you'd
ever crossed the Mississippi River you'd understand why."
"Well, I haven't, and I don't understand. But the only way to stop this
roving is to make a home of your own. Will you tell me how you expect to
support a Cloverdale girl when you marry one?"
"I don't expect to marry one." The smile was winning, but the son's voice
sounded dangerously like the father's.
"Why not?"
"Because when I marry it will be to a southern girl--" Asher hesitated a
moment. When he went on, his voice was not as son to father, but as man to
man.
"It all happened down in Virginia, when I was wounded and in prison. This
little girl took care of me. Only a soldier really knows what a woman's
hand means in sickness. But she did more. She risked everything, even her
life, to get letters through the lines to you and to get me exchanged. I
shiver yet when I think of her, disguised as a man in soldier's clothes,
taking the chance she did for me. And, well, I left my heart down there.
That's all."
"Why haven't you ever told us this before, Asher?" his father asked.
Asher stood up where the white moonlight fell full on his face. Somehow
the old Huguenot defiance and the old Quaker endurance of his ancestors
seemed all expressed in him.
"I wasn't twenty-one, then, and I have nothing yet to offer a girl by way
of support," he said.
"Why, Asher!" Mrs. Aydelot exclaimed, "you have everything here."
"Not yet, mother," he replied. "And I haven't told you because her name is
Virginia Thaine, and she is a descendant of Jerome Thaine. Are the
Aydelots big enough to bury old hates?"
Francis Aydelot sat moveless as a statue. When at length he spoke, there
was no misunderstanding his meaning.
"You have no means by which to earn a living. You will go down to town and
take charge of the Shirley House at once, or go to work as a hired hand
here. But remember this: from the day you marry a Thaine of Virginia you
are no longer my son. Family ties, family honor, respect for your
forefathers forbid it."
He rose without more words, and went into the house.
Then came the mother's part.
"Sit down, Asher," she said, and Asher dropped to his place on the step.
"We don't seem to see life through the same spectacles," he said calmly.
"Am I wrong, mother? Nobody can choose my life for me, nor my wife,
either. Didn't old grandfather, Jean Aydelot, leave his home in France,
and didn't grandmother, Mercy Pennington, marry to suit her own choice?"
Even in the shadow, his mother noted the patient expression of the gray
eyes looking up at her.
"Asher, it is Aydelot tradition to be determined and self-willed, and the
bitterness against Jerome Thaine and his descendants has never left the
blood--till now."
She stroked his hair lovingwise, as mothers will ever do.
"Do you suppose father will ever change?"
"I don't believe he will. We have talked of this many times, and he will
listen to nothing else. He grows more set in his notions as we all do with
years, unless--"
"Well, you don't, mother. Unless what?" Asher asked.
"Unless we think broadly as the years broaden out toward old age. But,
Asher, what are your plans?"
"I'm afraid I have none yet. You know I was a farmer boy until I was
fifteen, a soldier boy till I was nineteen, a college student for two
years, and a Plains scout for two years more. Tell me, mother, what does
all this fit me for? Not for a tavern in a town of less than a thousand
people."
He sat waiting, his elbow resting on his knee, his chin supported by his
closed hand.
"Asher, when you left school and went out West, I foresaw what has
happened tonight," Mrs. Aydelot began. "I tried to prepare your father for
it, but he would not listen, would not understand. He doesn't yet. He
never will. But I do. You will not stay in Ohio always, because you do not
fit in here now. Newer states keep calling you westward, westward. This
was frontier when we came here in the thirties; we belong here. But,
sooner or later, you will put your life into the building of the West.
Something--the War or the Plains, or may be this Virginia Thaine, has left
you too big for prejudice. You will go sometime where there is room to
think and live as you believe."
"Mother, may I go? I dream of it night and day. I'm so cramped here. The
woods are in my way. I can't see a mile. I want to see to the edge of the
world, as I can on the prairies. A man can win a kingdom out there."
He was facing her now, his whole countenance aglow with bright
anticipation.
"There is only one way to win that kingdom," Mrs. Aydelot declared. "The
man who takes hold of the plow-handles is the man who will really conquer
the prairies. His scepter is not the rifle, but the hoe."
For all his life, Asher Aydelot never forgot his mother's face, nor the
sound of her low prophetic words on that moonlit night on the shadowy
veranda of his childhood home.
"You are right, mother. I don't want to fight any more. It must be the
soil that is calling me back to the West, the big, big West! And I mean to
go when the time comes. I hope it will come soon, and I know you will give
me your blessing then."
His mother's hands were pressed lovingly upon his forehead, as he leaned
against her knee.
"My blessing, and more than mine. The blessing of Moses to Asher of old,
as well. 'Thy shoes shall be iron and brass; and as thy days, so shall thy
strength be. The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the
everlasting arms.'"
She bent over her boy, and pushing back the hair from his forehead, she
kissed it reverently, nor dreamed in how many a bitter strife would the
memory of this sacred hour come back to him, with the blessed note of
victory.
The next morning Asher put on his working clothes and began the life of a
hired man on his father's farm. The summer was long and hot, and in the
late August the dread typhoid malaria swept up from the woods marshes. It
was of virulent form and soon had its way with Asher's father and mother.
When the will of Francis Aydelot was read in court, the inexorable will of
a stubborn man, it declared that the Cloverdale Hotel, the bank stock, and
the farm with all the appurtenances thereunto pertaining, should descend
to Asher Aydelot, provided he should remain a resident of Ohio and should
never be united in marriage to any descendant of Jerome Thaine of the
State of Virginia. Failing in this, all the property, except a few hundred
dollars in cash, should descend to one Jane Aydelot, of Philadelphia, and
her heirs and assigns forever; provided these heirs were not the children
of Virginia Thaine of the state of Virginia.
On the same day, Asher wrote to one Jane Aydelot, of Philadelphia, to come
to Ohio and take possession of her property. Then he carefully sodded the
two mounds in the graveyard, and planted old-fashioned sweet pinks upon
them, and bidding good-by to the home of his boyhood, he turned his face
hopefully to the West.