Read Ebook: Winning the Wilderness by McCarter Margaret Hill Marchand J N Illustrator

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Ebook has 2429 lines and 110500 words, and 49 pages

"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.

THE WILL OF THE WIND

Naught but the endless hills, dim and far and blue, And sighing wind, and sailing cloud, and nobody here but you. --James W. Steele.

The next day, and for many days following, the wind blew; fiercely and unceasingly it blew, carrying every movable thing before it. Whatever was tending in its direction, it helped over the ground amazingly. Whatever tried to move in the face of it had to fight for every inch of the way. It whipped all the gold from the sunflowers and threshed them mercilessly about. It snapped the slender stems of the big, bulgy-headed tumble-weeds and sent them tumbling over and over, mile after mile, until they were caught at last in some draw, like helpless living things, to swell the heap for some prairie fire to feed upon. It lifted the sand from the river bed and swept it in a prairie simoon up the slope, wrapping the little cabin in a cloud of gritty dust. The cottonwoods along the waterway moaned as if in pain and flung up their white arms in feeble protest. The wild plum bushes in the draw were almost buried by the wind-borne drift smothering the narrow crevice, while out on the plains the long lashing waves of bended grass made the eyes burn with weariness. And the sun watched it all with unpitying stare, and the September heat was maddening. But it was cool inside the cabin. Sod houses shut out the summer warmth as they shed off the winter's cold.

Virginia Aydelot stood at the west window watching her husband trying to carry two full pails of water which the wind seemed bent on blowing broadcast along his path. He had been plowing a double fireguard around the premises that morning and his face and clothes were gray with dust. These days of unceasing winds seemed to Virginia to sap the last atom of her energy. But she was young and full of determination.

"Why did you put the well so far away, Asher?" she asked, as he came inside.

The open door gave the wind a new crevice to fill, and it slapped wrathfully at the buckets, splashing the contents on the floor.

"We have to put wells close to the water in this country. I put this one in before I built here. And if we have a well, we are so glad we don't try to move it. The wind might find it out and fill it up with sand while we were doing it. It's a jealous wind, this." Asher's smile lit up his dust-grimed face.

"I've tried all day to keep the dust off the table. I meant to do a washing this morning, but how could any garment stay on the line out there and not be whipped to shreds?"

"Virginia, did you ever do a washing before the war?" Asher asked through the towel. He was trying to scrub his face clean with the least possible amount of water.

"Oh, that's ancient history. No, nor did I do anything else. I was too young. Did you ever try to till a whole section of land back in Ohio before the war?" Virginia asked laughingly.

Asher took the towel from his head to look at her.

"You are older than when I first knew you--the little lady of the old Jerome Thaine mansion home. But you haven't lost any of that girl's charms and you have gained some new ones with the years."

"Stop staring at me and tell me why you didn't put the house down by the well, then," Virginia demanded.

"I did pitch my tent there at first, but it is too near the river, and several things happened, beside," he replied.

"Is that a river, really?" she inquired. "It looks like a weed trail."

"Yes, it is very real when it elects to be. They call it Grass River because there's no grass in it--only sand and weeds--and they call it a river because there is seldom any water in it. But I've seen such lazy sand-foundered streams a mile wide and swift as sin. So I take no risk with precious property, even if I have to tote barrels of water and slop the parlor rug on windy days."

"Then, why didn't you put another door in the kitchen end of the house?" Virginia questioned.

"Two reasons, dearie. First, can you keep one door shut on days like this, even when there is no draught straight through the house?" he inquired.

"Yes, when I put a chair against it, and the table against the chair, and the bed against the table, and the cookstove to back up the bed. I see. Shortage of furniture."

"No, the effect on this cabin if the wind had a sweep through two weak places in the wall. I built this thing to stay till I get ready to go away from it, not for it to go off and leave me sitting here under the sky some stormy day. Of course, the real home, the old Colonial style of house, will stand higher up after awhile, embowered in trees, and the wind may play about its vine-covered verandas, and its stately front columns, but that comes later."

"All right, but what was the second reason for the one doorway? You said you had two?" Virginia broke in.

"Oh, did I? Well, the other reason is insignificant, but effective in its way. I had only one door and no lumber within three hundred miles to make another, and no money to buy lumber, anyhow."

"You should have married a fortune," his wife said demurely.

"I did." The smile on the lips did not match the look in the gray eyes. "My anxiety is that I shall not squander my possession, now I have it."

"You are squandering your dooryard by plowing out there in front of the house. Isn't there ground enough if the wind will be merciful, not to use up our lawn?" Virginia would not be serious.

"I have plowed a double fireguard, and I've burned off the grass between the two to put a wide band of protection about us. I take no chances. Everything is master in the wilderness except man. When he has tamed all these things--prairie fire, storm and drouth, winds and lonely distances, why, there isn't any more wilderness. But it's tough work getting acclimated to these September breezes, I know."

Virginia did not reply at once. All day the scream of the wind had whipped upon her nerves until she wanted to scream herself. But it was not in the blood of the breed to give up easily. Something of the stubborn determination that had made the oldtime Thaines drive the Quakers from Virginia shone now in the dark eyes of this daughter of a well-bred house.

"It's all a matter of getting one's system and this September wind system to play the same tune," she said.

"Virginia, you look just as you did that day when you said you were going through the Rebel ranks in a man's dress to take a message for me to the Union officer of my command, although you ran the risk of being shot for a spy on either side of the lines. When I begged you not to do it, you only laughed at me. I thought then you were the bravest girl I ever saw. Now I know it."

"Well, I'll try not to get hysterical over the wind out here. It is a matter of time and adjustment. Let's adjust ourselves to dinner now."

Beyond her lightly spoken words Asher caught the undertone of courage, and he knew that a battle for supremacy was on, a struggle between physical outcry and mental poise.

After the meal, he said, "I must take my plow down to Shirley's this afternoon. His is broken and I can mend it while he puts in his fireguard with mine. I don't mind the wind, but I won't ask you to face it clear down to Shirley's claim. I don't like to leave you here, either."

"I think I would rather stay indoors. What is there to be afraid of, anyhow?" Virginia asked.

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