THE SIGN OF THE SUNFLOWER
Little they knew what wealth untold
Lay hid where the desolate prairies rolled:
Who would have dared, with brush or pen,
As this land is now, to paint it then?
--Allerton.
The trail had left the woodland far to the eastward, and wound its way
over broad prairie billows, past bluffy-banked streams, along crests of
low watersheds, until at last it slid down into an open endlessness of the
Lord's earth--just a vasty bigness of landstuff seemingly left over when
geography-making was done. It was untamed stuff, too, whereon one man's
marking was like to the track of foam in the wake of one ship in
mid-ocean. Upon its face lay the trail, broad and barren of growth as the
dusty old National pike road making its way across uplands and valleys of
Ohio. But this was the only likeness. The pike was a gravel-built,
upgraded highway, bordered by little rail-fenced fields and deep forests
hiding malarial marshes in the lower places.
This trail, flat along the ungraded ground, tended in the direction of
least resistance, generally toward the southwest. It was bounded by
absence of landmarks, boulder or tree or cliff. Along either side of it
was a fringe of spindling sunflower stalks, with their blooms of gold
marking two gleaming threads across the plains far toward the misty
nothingness of the western horizon.
The mid-September day had been intensely hot, but the light air was
beginning to flow a bit refreshingly out of the sky. A gray cloud-wave,
creeping tide-like up from the southwest, was tempering the afternoon
glare. In all the landscape the only object to hold the eye was a prairie
schooner drawn by a team of hard-mouthed little Indian ponies, and
followed by a free-limbed black mare of the Kentucky blue blood.
Asher Aydelot sat on the wagon seat holding the reins. Beside him was his
wife, a young, girlish-looking woman with large dark eyes, abundant dark
hair, a straight, aristocratic nose, and well-formed mouth and chin.
The two, coming in from the East on the evening before, had reached the
end of the stage line, where Asher's team and wagon was waiting for them.
The outfit moved slowly. It had left Carey's Crossing at early dawn and
had put twenty-five miles between itself and that last outpost of
civilization.
"Why don't you let the horses trot down this hill slope, Asher?" The
woman's voice had the soft accent of the South.
"Are you tired, Virgie?" Asher Aydelot looked earnestly down at his wife.
"Not a bit!" The bright smile and vigorous lift of the shoulders were
assuring.
"Then we won't hurry. We have several miles to go yet. It is a long day's
run from Carey's to our claim. Wolf County is almost like a state. The
Crossing hopes to become the county seat."
"Why do they call that place Carey's Crossing?" Mrs. Aydelot asked.
"It was a trading post once where the north and south trail crossed the
main trail. Later it was a rallying place for cavalry. Now it's our
postoffice," Asher explained.
"I mean, why call it Carey? I knew Careys back in Virginia."
"It is named for a young doctor, the only one in ten thousand miles, so
far as I know."
"And his family?" Virginia asked.
"He's a bachelor, I believe. By the way, we aren't going down hill. We are
on level ground."
Mrs. Aydelot leaned out beyond the wagon bows to take in the trail behind
them.
"Why, we are right in a big saucer. All the land slopes to the center down
there before us. Can't you see it?"
"No, I've seen it too often. It is just a trick of the plains--one of the
many tricks for the eye out here. Look at the sunflowers, Virgie. Don't
you love them?"
Virginia Aydelot nestled close to her husband's side and put one hand on
his. It was a little hand, white and soft, the hand of a lady born of
generations of gentility. The hand it rested on was big and hard and brown
and very strong looking.
"I've always loved them since the day you sent me the little one in a
letter," she said in a low voice, as if some one might overhear. "I
thought you had forgotten me and the old war days. I wasn't very happy
then." There was a quiver of the lip that hinted at the memory of intense
sorrow. "I had gone up to the spring in that cool little glen in the
mountain behind our home, you know, when a neighbor's servant boy, Bo
Peep, Boanerges Peeperville, he named himself, came grinning round a big
rock ledge with your letter. Just a crushed little sunflower and a sticky
old card, the deuce of hearts. I knew it was from you, and I loved the
sunflower for telling me so. Were you near here then? This land looks so
peaceful and beautiful to me, and homelike somehow, as if we should find
some neighbors just over the hill that you say isn't there."
"Neither the hill nor the neighbors, yet, although settlers will be coming
soon. We won't be lonesome very long, I'm sure."
Asher shifted the reins to his other hand and held the little white
fingers close.
"It wasn't anywhere near here. It was away off in the southwest corner
of--nowhere. I was going to say a shorter word, for that's where we were.
I took that card out of an old deck from the man nearest me. The Comanches
had fixed him, so he didn't need it in his game any more. There were only
two of us left, a big half-breed Cheyenne scout and myself. I picked the
sunflower from the only stalk within a hundred miles of there. I guess it
grew so far from everything just for me that day. Weak as I was, I'll
never forget how hopefully it seemed to look at me. The envelope was one
mother had sent me, you remember. I told the Cheyenne how to start it to
you from the fort. He left me there, wounded and alone--'twas all he could
do--while he went for help about a thousand miles away it must have
seemed, even to an Indian. I thought it was my last message to you,
dearie, for I never expected to be found alive; but I was, and when you
wrote back, sending your letter to 'The Sign of the Sunflower,' Oh, little
girl, the old trail blossom was glorified for me forever."
He broke off so suddenly that his wife looked up inquiringly.
"I was thinking of the cool spring and the rocks, and that shady glen, and
the mountains, and the trees, and the well-kept mansion houses, and
servants like Bo Peep to fetch and carry--and here--Virginia, why did you
let me persuade you away from them? Everything was made ready for you
there. The Lord didn't do anything for this country but go off and leave
it to us."
"Yes, to us. Here is the sunflower and the new home in the new West and
Asher Aydelot. And underfoot is the prairie sod that is ours, and overhead
is heaven that kept watch over you for me, and over both of us for this.
And I persuaded you to bring me here because I wanted to be with you
always."
"You can face it all for me?" he asked.
"With you, you mean. Yes, for we'll stop at 'The Sign of the Sunflower' so
long as we both shall live. How beautiful they are, these endless bands of
gold, drawing us on and on across the plains. Asher, you forget that
Virginia is not as it was before the war. But we did keep inherited pride
in the Thaine family, and the will to do as we pleased. You see what has
pleased me."
"And it shall please me to make such a fortune out of this ground, and
build such a home for you that by and by you will forget you ever were
without the comforts you are giving up now," Asher declared, looking equal
to the task. "Virgie," he added presently, "on the night my mother told me
to come out West she gave me her blessing, and the blessing of the old
Bible Asher also--'Thy shoes shall be iron and brass; and as thy days, so
shall thy strength be.' I believe the blessing will stay with us; that
the Eternal God will be our refuge in this new West and new
home-building."
They rode awhile in silence. Then Asher said:
"Look yonder, Virginia, south of the trail. Just a faint yellow line."
"Is it another trail, or are you lost and beginning to see things?"
"No, I'm found," Asher replied. "We scattered those seeds ourselves; did
it on Sundays when I was living on my claim, waiting till I could go back
and bring you here. We blazed the way, marked it with gold, I'd better
say; a line clear to Grass River. It leaves the real Sunflower Trail right
here."
"Who were _we_ in this planting?" Virginia asked.
"Oh, me and my first wife, Jim Shirley, and his shepherd dog, Pilot. Jim
and I have done several things together besides that. We were boys
together back in Cloverdale. We went to the war together to fight you
obstreperous Rebels." There was a twinkle in Asher's eyes now.
"Yes, but in the end who really won?" Virginia asked demurely.
"You did, of course--in my case. Jim went back to Cloverdale for awhile.
Then he came out here. He's a fine fellow. Plants a few more seeds by the
wayside than is good for him, maybe, but a friend to the last rollcall. He
was quite a ladies' man once, and nobody knows but himself how much he
would have loved a home. He has something of a story back of his coming
West, but we never speak of that. He's our only neighbor now."
It was twilight when Asher and his wife slipped down over a low swell and
reached their home. The afterglow of sunset was gorgeous in the west. The
gray cloud-tide, now a purple sea, was rifted by billows of flame. Level
mist-folds of pale violet lay along the prairie distances. In the
southwest the horizon line was broken by a triple fold of deepest
blue-black tones, the mark of headlands somewhere. Across the landscape a
grassy outline marked the course of a stream that wandered dimly toward
the darkening night shadows. The subdued tones of evening held all the
scene, save where a group of tall sunflowers stood up to catch the last
light of day full on their golden shields.
"We are here at last, Mrs. Aydelot. Welcome to our neighborhood!" Asher
said bravely as the team halted.
Virginia sat still on the wagon seat, taking in the view of sunset sky and
twilight prairie.
"This is our home," she murmured. "I'm glad we are here."
"I'm glad you are glad. I hope I haven't misrepresented it to you," her
husband responded, turning away that he might not see her face just then.
It was a strange place to call home, especially to one whose years had
been spent mainly in the pretty mountain-walled Virginia valleys where
cool brooks babbled over pebbly beds or splashed down in crystal
waterfalls; whose childhood home had been an old colonial house with
driveways, and pillared verandas, and jessamine-wreathed windows; with
soft carpets and cushioned chairs, and candelabra whose glittering
pendants reflected the light in prismatic tintings; and everywhere the
lazy ease of idle servants and unhurried lives.
The little sod house, nestled among sheltering sunflowers, stood on a
slight rise of ground. It contained one room with two windows, one looking
to the east and the other to the west, and a single door opening on the
south. Above this door was a smooth pine board bearing the inscription,
"Sunflower Inn," stained in rather artistic lettering. A low roof
extending over the doorway gave semblance to a porch which some scorched
vines had vainly tried to decorate. There was a rude seat made of a goods
box beside the doorway. Behind the house rose the low crest of a prairie
billow, hardly discernible on the level plains. Before it lay the endless
prairie across which ran the now half-dry, grass-choked stream. A few
stunted cottonwood trees followed its windings, and one little clump of
wild plum bushes bristled in a draw leading down to the shallow place of
the dry watercourse. All else was distance and vastness void of life and
utter loneliness.
Virginia Aydelot looked at the scene before her. Then she turned to her
husband with a smile on her young face, saying again,
"I am glad I am here."
There is one chord that every woman's voice touches some time, no matter
what her words may be. As Virginia spoke, Asher saw again the moonlight on
the white pillars of the south veranda of the old Aydelot farmhouse, and
his mother sitting in the shadows; and again he caught the tone of her
voice saying,
"Thy shoes shall be iron and brass; and as thy days, so shall thy strength
be."
He leaped from the wagon seat and put up his arms to help his wife to the
ground.
"This is the end of the trail," he said gaily. "We have reached the inn
with 'The Sign of the Sunflower.' See the signboard Jim has put up for
us."
At that moment a big shepherd dog came bounding out of the weeds by the
river and leaped toward them with joyous yelps; a light shone through the
doorway, and a voice at once deep and pleasant to the ear, called out:
"Well, here you are, just as supper is ready. Present me to the bride,
Asher, and then I'll take the stock off your hands."
"Mrs. Aydelot, this is Mr. James Shirley, at present the leading artistic
house decorator as well as corn king of the Southwest. Allow me, Jim, to
present my wife. You two ought to like each other if each of you can stand
me."
They shook hands cordially, and each took the other's measure at a glance.
What Shirley saw was a small, well-dressed woman whose charm was a
positive force. It was not merely that she was well-bred and genial of
manner, nor that for many reasons she was pretty and would always be
pretty, even with gray hair and wrinkles. There was something back of all
this; something definite to build on; a self-reliance and unbreakable
determination without the spirit that antagonizes.
"A thoroughbred," was Shirley's mental comment. "The manners of a lady and
the will of a winner."
What Virginia saw was a big, broad-shouldered man, tanned to the very
limit of brownness, painfully clean shaven, and grotesquely clean in
dress; a white shirt, innocent of bluing in its laundry, a glistening
celluloid collar, a black necktie (the last two features evidently just
added to the toilet, and neither as yet set to their service), dark
pantaloons and freshly blacked shoes. But it was Shirley's face that
caught Virginia's eyes, for even with the tan it was a handsome face, with
regular features, and blue eyes seeing life deeply rather than broadly.
Just a hint of the artistic, however, took away from rather than added to
the otherwise manly expression. Clearly, Jim Shirley was a man that men
and women, too, must love if they cared for him at all.. And they couldn't
help caring for him. He had too much of the quality of eternal interest.
"I'm glad to meet you, and I bid you welcome to your new home, Mrs.
Aydelot. The house is in order and supper is ready. I congratulate you,
Asher," he said, as he turned away to take the ponies.
"You will come in and eat with us," Virginia said cordially.
"Not tonight. I must put this stock away and hurry home."
Asher opened his lips to repeat his wife's invitation, but something in
Jim's face held the words, so he merely nodded a good-by as he led his
wife into the sod cabin.
Two decades in Kansas saw hundreds of such cabins on the plains. The walls
of this one were nearly two feet thick and smoothly plastered inside with
a gypsum product, giving an ivory-yellow finish, smooth and hard as bone.
There was no floor but the bare earth into which a nail could scarcely
have been driven. The furniture was meager and plain. There was only one
picture on the wall, the sweet face of Asher's mother. A bookshelf held a
Bible with two or three other volumes, some newspapers and a magazine.
Sundry surprising little devices showed the inventive skill of the
home-builder, but it was all home-made and unpainted. It must have been
the eyes of love that made this place seem homelike to these young people
whose early environment had been so vastly different in everything!
Jim Shirley had a supper of fried ham, stewed wild plums, baked sweet
potatoes, and hot coffee, with canned peaches and some hard little
cookies. Surely the Lord meant men to be the cooks. Society started wrong
in the kitchen, for the average man prepares a better meal with less of
effort and worry than the average or super-average woman will ever do. It
was not the long ride alone, it was this appetizing food that made that
first meal in the sod mansion one that these two remembered in days of
different fortune. They remembered, too, the bunch of sunflowers that
adorned the table that night. The vase was the empty peach can wrapped
round with a piece of newspaper.
As they lingered at their meal, Asher glanced through the little west
window and saw Jim Shirley sitting by the clump of tall sunflowers not far
away watching them with the eager face of a lonely man. A big
white-throated Scotch collie lay beside him, waiting patiently for his
master to start for home.
"I am glad Jim has Pilot," Asher thought. "A dog is better than no company
at all. I wish he had a wife. Poor lonely fellow!"
Half an hour later the two came outside to the seat by the doorway. The
moon was filling the sky with its radiance. A chorus of crickets sang
joyously in the short brown grass about the sunflowers. The cottonwoods
along the river course gleamed like alabaster in the white night-splendor,
and the prairie breeze sang its low crooning song of evening as it flowed
gently over the land. "How beautiful the world is," Virginia said, as she
caught the full radiance of the light on the prairie.
"Is this beautiful to you, Virgie?" Asher asked, as he drew her close to
him. "I've seen these plains when they seemed just plain hell to me, full
of every kind of danger: cholera, poison, cold, hunger, heat, hostile
Indian, and awful loneliness. And yet, the very fascination of the thing
called me back and hardened me to it all. But why? What is there here on
these Kansas prairies to hold me here and make me want to bring you here,
too? Not a feature of this land is like the home country in Virginia. When
the Lord gave Adam and Eve a tryout in the Garden of Eden, He gave them
everything with which to start the world off right. Out here we doubt
sometimes if there is any God west of the Missouri River. He didn't leave
any timber for shelter, nor wood, nor coal for fuel, nor fruit, nor nuts,
nor roots, nor water for the dry land. All there is of this piece of the
Lord's leftovers is just the prairie down here, and the sky over it. And
it's so big I wonder sometimes that there is even enough skystuff to cover
it. And yet, it is beautiful and maddening in its hold, once it gets you.
Why?"
"Maybe it is the very unconquerableness that cries out to the love of
power in you. Maybe the Lord, who knew how easily Adam let Eden slip
through his fingers, decided that on the other side of the world He would
give a younger race of men, a fire-tried race in battle, the chance to
make their own Eden. So He left the stuff here for such as you and me to
picture out our own plan and then work to the pattern. It is the real land
of promise. Everything waiting to be done here."
"And there's only one way to do it. I am sure of that," Asher replied.
"Armies don't win, they terrorize and destroy. We whipped back the Indians
out here; they'd come again, if they dared--but they never will," he added
quickly, as he saw his wife's face whiten in the moonlight. "It's a
struggle to win the soil, with loneliness and distance and a few thousand
other things to fight, beside. But I told you all this before I asked you
to come out here."
"I wish I could have brought some property to you to help you, Asher, but
you know how the Thaine estate was reduced."
"Yes, I helped the family to that," Asher replied.
"Well, I seem to have helped you to lose the Aydelot inheritance. We are
starting neck and neck out here," Virginia cried, "and we'll win. I can
see our plantation--ranch, you call it--now, with groves and a little lake
and a big ranch house, and just acres of wheat and meadows, and red clover
and fine stock and big barns, and you and me, the peers of a proud
countryside when we have really conquered. 'Instead of the thorn shall
come up the fir tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle
tree.' Isn't that the promise?"
"Oh, Virgie, any man could win a kingdom with a wife like you," Asher said
tenderly. "Back in Ohio, when I grubbed the fence corners, I saw this
country night and day, waiting for us here, and I wondered why the folks
were willing to let the marshes down in the deep woods stagnate and breed
malaria, and then fight the fever with calomel and quinine every summer,
instead of opening the woodland and draining the swamps. Nevertheless,
I've left enough money in the Cloverdale bank to take you back East and
start up some little sort of a living there, if you find you cannot stay
here. I couldn't bring you here and burn all the bridges. All you have to
do is to say you want to go back, and you can go."
"You are very good, Asher." His wife's voice was low and soft. "But I
don't want to go back. Not until we have failed here. And we shall not
fail."
And together that night on the far unconquered plains of Kansas, with the
moon shining down upon them, these two, so full of hope and courage,
planned their future. In the cottonwood trees by the river sands a night
bird twittered sleepily to its mate; the chirp of many crickets in the
short grass below the sunflowers had dwindled to a mere note at intervals.
The soft breeze caressed the two young faces, then wandered far and far
across the lonely land, and in its long low-breathed call to the night
there was a sigh of sadness.