Margaret McCarter - Winning the Wilderness

“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.

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