Margaret Hill McCarter

“ There were others in the Grass River settlement who would have envied the mythical Prince Quippi also. For even at six years of age Leigh had the same quality that marked her uncle. People must love her if they cared for her at all; and they couldn’t help caring for her. She fitted into the life of the prairie, too, as naturally as Thaine Aydelot did, who was born to it. The baby gold was soon lost from her hair for the brown-gold like the shimmering sunlight on the brown prairie. The baby blue eyes deepened to the deep violet-blue of overhead skies in June. ”

“ Fifteen years on a plains claim, with all the daily grind of sowing and reaping and care of stock and garden, had not taken quite all the military bearing from him. He was thirty-eight years old now, vigorous and wholesome and hopeful. The tanning Kansas sunshine had not hidden the old expression of patience and endurance, nor had the sight of many hardships driven the vision from the clear, far-seeing gray eyes.
“Look at the sunflowers, Papa,” Thaine cried as a curve of the trail brought a long golden line to view.
“You like the sunflowers, don’t you?” Carey asked. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He thought of Leigh Shirley and her childish dream of Prince Quippi in China—the China just beyond the purple notches. He thought of his mother as she had looked that spring morning when he talked of enlisting for the Spanish War. He thought of his father, who had never known fear in his life. Of his last words:
“As thy days so shall thy strength be.”
And keenly he remembered Dr. Carey, somewhere among the troops behind him. The fine head crowned with white hair, caressed by the moonbeams, as he had seen it in the Manila garden, and his earnest words:
“You must learn to be a Christian. ”

“ The sunflowers were just beginning to blossom along the old Grass River Trail. The line of timber following every 397 stream was in the full leafage of May. The wheat lay like a yellow-green sea over all the wide prairies. The breeze came singing down the valley, a morning song of gladness.
Leigh Shirley had come up early to the Sunflower Ranch to spend the day and night with Virginia Aydelot, while Asher and her uncle Jim took a two days’ business trip to Big Wolf with Darley Champers. ”

“ The loneliness of solitude hung with a dead heaviness and hope beat at the lowest ebb for Virginia Aydelot, trying bravely to deny his charge against the future of the land she had struggled so to dream into fruitfulness. She was only a woman, strong to love and brave to endure, but neither by nature nor heritage shrewd to read the tricks of selfish trade. And she believed that while Asher and Jim Shirley were hopeful dreamers like herself, here was an ill-mannered but unprejudiced man who saw the situation as they could not see it. ”

“ There was a defiant little curve on her red lips and the brave hopefulness of her face was inspiring.
“Go and do your work, Thaine. Fight your battles, push back your frontier line, win your wilderness, and make a world-wide name for yourself. But when all is done don’t forget that the fight your father and mother made here, and are making today, is honorable, wonderful; and that the winning of a Kansas farm, the kingdom of 287 golden wheat, bordered round by golden sunflowers, is a real kingdom. Its sinews of strength uphold the nation.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ I’ll never feel that I have conquered until my boy proves himself in civil life as well as on the 335 battlefield. If I can bring him back when he is through with the Orient, then, Darley Champers, I will have done something beside subdue the soil. Through him, I’ll keep the wilderness from ever getting hold again. If we live so narrowly that our children hate the lines we follow and will not go on and do still bigger things than we have done, do we really make a success of life? ”

“ The breezes sweeping down the Grass River Valley carried a vigor in their caress. The Aydelot grove, just budding into leaf, was full of wild birds’ song. All the sights and sounds and odors of springtime made the April day entrancing on the Kansas prairies.
Leigh Shirley had risen at dawn and come up to the grove in the early morning. She tethered her pony to graze by the roadside, and with her drawing board on a slender easel she stood on the driveway across the lakelet, busy for awhile with her paints and pencil. ”

“ 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 100 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 ”

“ The West was people by young men. It’s need for daring spirits found less response in men of maturer life. But the West had most need for humane men. The bully, the dare-devil, the brutal, and the selfish were refuse before the force that swept the frontier onward; but they were never elements in real state building. Before such men as Carey they lost power.
The doctor rode away toward the west, bowing his head before the strong wind that he knew too well to fear, yet wondering as he rode if he had done wisely to dare the deepening snow of the buried trail. ”

“ As Thaine fell into his place he thought of the Aydelot wheatfields and of the alfalfa that Leigh Shirley’s patient judgment had helped to spread over the Cloverdale Ranch. And even in the face of such big things as he was on his way to meet the conquest of the prairie soil seemed wonderful.
Big things were waiting him now, and his heart throbbed with their bigness as his regiment took its place. It was a wonderful company that fell into line and swung up the Peiho river that August afternoon. The world never saw its like before, and may never see it again. ”

“ Thaine hadn’t kissed any woman except his mother since the evening when he and Leigh Shirley had lingered on the Purple Notches in a sad-sweet moment of separation. It lifted the pressure crushing round his heart when he saw Goodrich, with shining eyes, bending to let a poor little missionary stroke his grimy cheek.
The Boxers retired by degrees before the superior force, entrenching themselves inside the Imperial City. Never in its history, centuries on centuries old, had this Imperial City’s sacred precincts been defiled by foreign feet. Here the Boxer felt himself secure. ”

“ The homestead on the Purple Notches looks out on a level land stretching away in an unbroken line to the far westward horizon. Broad fields of wheat grow golden in the summer sunshine, and acres of dark alfalfa perfume the air above them. With a clearer vision of what reward farm life may bring for him who goes forth and earns that reward, the man whom the Tondo road made a soldier, Caloocan a patriot, and Yang-Tsun a Christian, has found in the conquest of the soil a life of usefulness and power. ”

“ See the wagons crawling out of the grove and the civilians in citizens’ clothes following in carriages,” Thaine said as he watched the picnic party pushing out toward the eastward. “I’m so glad we aren’t with them.”
Leigh sat leaning forward, looking at the majestic distances lost in purple haze, overshadowed by purple clouds with gold-broidered edges of sunlight.
“The world is all ours for once. We see all there is of it and yet we are alone in it up here on the purple notches I used to dream about,” she said softly. ”

“ 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. ”

“ First, that wars do not last forever. They jar the frontier line back by leaps, but 298 after war is over the good old prairie soil is waiting still for you—acres and acres yet unredeemed. And secondly, while you are a soldier don’t waste energy with memories. Fight when you wear a uniform, and dream and remember when the guns are cold. You have my blessing, Thaine, only remember the blessing of Moses to Asher of old, ‘As your day so will your strength be.’ But you must have your mother’s approval too. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Asher’s eyes followed the waving young wheat and the blossoming orchards, the grove, full of birds’ songs, and the line of Grass River running deeper year by year. Then he looked at his hard, brown hands and thought of the toil and faith and hope that had gone into the conquest.
“Yes, I’m still among the middle-aged,” he said, straightening with his habitual military dignity of bearing. “But I don’t know about this everlasting conquest of the prairies. There’s still some of it waiting over beyond those headlands in the open range where John Jacobs has a big holding. ”

“ 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 all the old family pride of the Thaines of Virginia, all the old sense of control and daring was in her tone as she answered:
“You have come to a man’s estate. You must choose for yourself. But big as the world is, it is too little for mothers to be lost in. You cannot find a frontier so far that a mother’s love has not outrun you to it. Go out and win.”
“You are a Trojan, mother. I hope I’ll always be worthy of your love, wherever I am,” her son murmured.
Two hours later, when Dr. Carey stopped for Thaine, Virginia Aydelot came down to his buggy. ”

“ It is Nature’s little one waiting to be led on and disciplined to mature uses. Asher and Virginia had already peopled the valley with imaginary settlers, each one of a certain type, and they adapted their pastime to the particular neighbors whom they chose to invite for the evening. How little the helpless folk in the city, bored with their own dullness, and dependent on others for amusement—how little could such as these cope with the loneliness of the home on the plains, or comprehend the resourcefulness of the home-makers there! ”

“ The kiss of the same October breezes was on the Kansas prairie with the hazy horizon and the infinite beauty of wide, level landscapes, overhung by the infinite beauty of blue, tender skies. Boanerges Peeperville, established as cook in the Sunflower Inn, was at home in his cosy little quarter beside the grape arbor of the rear dooryard.
“Tell me, Bo Peep, why Dr. Carey should enter the army again and go to the Philippines?” Virginia Aydelot asked on the day the news reached the Sunflower Ranch. ”

“ Hold him, Leigh,” Jo Bennington commanded, clutching at Thaine’s arm.
Leigh sat calmly disobedient.
“He’s his papa’s boy, I guess, and he ought to go,” she asserted.
“You meany, meany,” Jo whispered, “I don’t like you.”
But Leigh paid little heed to her opinion.
As Asher passed out of the room there was an ugly look in Darley Champers’ eyes.
“No more ambition than a cat. One of them quiet, good-natured fellers that are as stubborn as the devil once they take a stand. Just a danged clod-hopper farmer, but he don’t leave no enemies behind him. That’s enough to make any man hate him. ”