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.