Kitabı oku: «Winning the Wilderness», sayfa 15
“He will get over it, I’m sure,” Jo insisted. “Why should the first generation here weight us all down here, too? I hope you’ll not give up to your father. I wouldn’t,” Jo said defiantly.
“Did you ever give up to him?” Thaine asked.
“No, he gives up to me.” The words were too sweetly said to seem harsh.
“I don’t blame him,” Thaine added.
“I don’t believe any of our crowd will stay here like the old folks have done, except Todd Stewart and, of course, Leigh,” Jo declared.
“Say, Jo, my folks don’t look old to me. Mummie is younger and good-lookinger than anybody, except – ”
“Leigh Shirley,” Jo broke in.
Thaine looked at his watch without replying.
“Is it late? You must take me home, now,” Jo said. “You’ll be over tonight, won’t you? We will have some company from Careyville who want to meet you.”
“I’m sorry, but I promised Leigh up here at church that I’d go over to Cloverdale for a little while tonight.”
Thaine could not tell Jo of Leigh’s affairs, and he felt that the Shirleys’ intimacy with his father’s family and his own expressed admiration and attention to Jo were sufficient to protect him from jealousy. Jo stiffened visibly.
“Thaine Aydelot, what’s the reason for your actions – Oh, I don’t care. Go to Shirley’s, by all means. Everybody to his likes,” she cried angrily.
“Well, that’s my rathers for tonight, and I can’t help it,” Thaine answered hotly.
“Of course you can’t. Let’s go home quick so you can get off early,” Jo said in an angered tone.
“I’ll go as slowly as I can. You can’t get rid of me so.” Thaine was getting control of himself again.
“Say, Thaine, tell me why you go away from our company tonight,” Jo pleaded softly, putting her hand on her companion’s arm. “Don’t you care to come to our house any more?”
They were in the buggy now on the driveway across the lake. Thaine recalled the moonlight hour when he sat with Leigh, of how little Leigh seemed to be thinking of herself, of how he had admired her because she demanded no admiration from him. Was there an obligation demanded here today? And had he given grounds for such obligation? Past question, he had.
“Jo, you must take me just as I am,” he said. “All the boys are ready to crowd into any place I vacate around Cyrus Bennington’s premises. You won’t miss one from your company tonight. I may get desperate – and kill off a few of them sometime to make you really miss me.”
He knew he was talking foolishly. He had felt himself superior to the other young men who obeyed every wish of Jo’s. He had been flattered always by her evident preference for his company, and had not thought of himself as being controlled by her before. He had been too willing to do her bidding. Today, for the first time, her rule was irksome. In spite of his efforts to be agreeable, the drive homeward was not a happy one.
It was twilight when Thaine reached the Cloverdale Ranch and found Leigh waiting for him on the wide porch. All the way down the river he had been calling himself names and letting his conscience stab him unmercifully. And once when something spoke within him, saying, “You never told Jo you were fond of her. You have not done her any wrong,” he stifled back the pleasing voice and despised himself for trying to find such excuse. He was only nineteen and had not had the stern discipline of war that Asher Aydelot had known at the same age.
Jo had offered no further complaint at his refusing her invitation. She played the vastly more effective part of being grieved but not angry, and her quiet good-by was so unlike pretty imperious Jo Bennington that Thaine was tempted to go back and spend the evening in her company. Yet, strangely enough, he did not blame Leigh for being the cause of his discomfort, as he should have done. As he neared her home, his conscience grew less and less noisy, and when he sat at last in Jim Shirley’s easy porch chair with Leigh in a low rocker facing him, while the long summer Sabbath twilight was falling on the peaceful landscape about him, he had almost forgotten Jo’s claim on him.
“Doctor Carey came down to see me,” Leigh was saying, “just as you were kind enough to ask him to do. He told me he had no money of his own to loan, but he knew of a fund he might control in a few days. He had to leave Kansas yesterday on a business trip, but he will see me as soon as he comes back.”
“Better than gold! Your plans just fall together and fit in, don’t they?” Thaine exclaimed. “Will he be back in time, though?”
“Yes. But really, Thaine,” Leigh’s eyes were beautiful in the twilight, “I never should have thought of Doctor Carey if it hadn’t been for you.”
“I am of some use to the community after all,” Thaine said with serious face.
“You are a great deal of use to me,” Leigh assured him.
“Oh, anybody else could do all I do for you,” he retorted.
“But I wouldn’t ask anybody else,” the girl replied.
“Not even my mother? She thinks there is no girl like you this side of heaven, or Virginia, anyhow, and she’d have taken it up with father,” Thaine declared.
“I thought of her,” Leigh answered, “but in things like this, it is impossible. You said yourself that no man on Grass River would think it a wise plan. Your father won his fight out here, even his fight against the boom. We have a different wilderness to overcome, I guess. Mine is reclaiming that Cloverdale ranch from the Champers Company and the weeds. I don’t know where your battlefield lies, but you’ll have it, and it’s because you haven’t won yet that I can come to you. You have helped me and you always will.”
“I’m glad you came to me, anyhow,” Thaine assured her.
They sat awhile looking out at the prairies and the line of the river glistening in the gloaming. A faint pink tone edged some gray cloud flakes in the southwest sky and all the scene was restful in the soft evening light.
At last Thaine said thoughtfully: “I haven’t heard the bugle trumpet for my call to battle yet. Maybe I’ll find out down at the University and make everybody proud of me some day as I am proud of you in your fight for a weed-covered quarter of prairie soil. Jo Bennington is always ridiculing country life, and yet she’s pretty fond of Todd Stewart, who is more of a farmer every day.”
A little smile curved the corners of Leigh’s mouth, and Thaine knew her thoughts.
“You are not a bit alike, you two girls,” he exclaimed.
“Does it make any difference? There’s only one of a kind of anything in this world, flower or fruit or leaf or life,” Leigh added. “I found that out in painting. There’s only one Jo, and one Pryor Gaines, and one Jane Aydelot as I remember her back in Ohio; one anything or anybody.”
“And only one Leigh in all the world.”
It was not the usual bantering tone now, and there was something in the expression of Thaine’s handsome face; something looking out from his dark eyes that Leigh did not see, because she was looking out at the lights and shadows of evening.
The sunset’s afterglow had thrown a splendor far up the sky. In its reflected light, softened by twilight shadows, Leigh made a picture herself that an artist might love to paint.
She turned away at his words, and a quiver of pain swept her face as Thaine leaned toward her eagerly.
“Oh, Leigh, I wasn’t joking. You are so unlike anybody else.” He broke off suddenly. But Leigh was herself again and, smiling frankly, she added, “Let’s count our blessings, then, and be thankful it’s no worse.”
Thaine rose at once.
“I must be going. It is after eight and I ought to be at Bennington’s now. I am so glad, I am so honored, to have your confidence. Won’t you keep telling me your plans, and if I can help you, will you let me do it?”
He had taken Leigh’s hand in good-by and held it as he put the question.
“I’ll be so glad to have your help, for we will see things alike, not as the older people see for us. It is only at our age that we dare take risks. Your father and Uncle Jim wouldn’t come to Kansas now if it were now like it was when they were twenty-one.”
Thaine did not release her hand.
“I’m glad there is only one Leigh,” he said softly.
The light of his eyes and the sympathetic tone seemed all unlike the heir of the Sunflower Ranch, yet very much like the spirit of the father who had wrested it from the wilderness, and the mother who had courageously shared his every need.
“I don’t know tonight where my wilderness lies. But I hope, little girl, I hope I’ll fight as good a battle on my frontier as my father has done – as you are doing. Good-night.”
He hurried away and, falling into the gay company at Bennington’s, was welcomed by Jo as a penitent, and abundantly forgiven.
While down at Cloverdale, Leigh Shirley sat long alone, looking with unseeing eyes at the twilight into which he had vanished.
CHAPTER XVI
The Humaneness of Champers
What is the use of trying to make things worse?
Let’s find things to do, and forget things.
– The Light That Failed.
On the third day after Darley Champers had closed with Leigh Shirley, Horace Carey walked into his office.
“Hello, Champers, how’s business?” he asked, with the cheerful way that drew even his enemies to him.
“Danged bad!” Champers replied. “Rotten world is full of danged fools who want money and ain’t satisfied when you get it for ’em.”
“Have you made such a sale lately?” Carey inquired.
“Yes; day before yesterday,” Champers replied.
“Was it the old Jim Shirley quarter, the Cloverdale Ranch?” the doctor asked.
“The very place, and I’m in a devil of a fix, too,” Darley Champers declared. “The trouble is I’m dead sure I’ll not get the other fourteen hundred.”
Thomas Smith had been paid the two hundred dollars and had fully released the land to Champers to finish the sale. Unfortunately for Champers, Smith still hung about Wykerton, annoying his agent so much that in a fit of anger, Champers revealed the fact that Leigh Shirley was the buyer of the Cloverdale Ranch. Smith’s rage was the greater because he did not believe the price money could be paid by a girl without resources, and against this girl he was not now ready to move. The burden of the whole matter now was that Darley Champers had taken his life in his own hands by the deal. The bulldog in Champers was roused now, and, while he was a good many things evil, he was not a coward.
But for his anger this morning, he would hardly have been so free in answering Doctor Carey’s query. Carey was a living rebuke to him, and no man loves that force anywhere.
“I tell you, I’m in a devil of a fix,” he repeated.
“Well, be wise and go to a doctor in time,” Doctor Carey said, only half in jest. “Champers, we haven’t always worked together out here, but I guess we know each other pretty well. I’m willing to trust you. Are you afraid to trust me?”
Darley Champers leaned back in his office chair and stared at the questioner.
Horace Carey’s heavy hair was very white now, although he was hardly fifty-five years old. The decades of consecrated service to his profession had told only in this one feature. His face was the face of a vigorous man, and something in his life, maybe the meaning of giving up and the meaning of the service, he once told Jim Shirley, he had known, had left upon his countenance their mark of strength. As Darley Champers looked at this face, he realized, as he had never done before, the freedom and joy of an unsullied reputation and honest dealing.
“Lord, no, I’d trust you in hell, Doc,” he exclaimed bluntly.
“I won’t put it to the proof,” the doctor assured him. “Nor will I trouble you nor myself with any matter not concerning us two. Tell me frankly all the trouble about this sale.”
Briefly, Champers explained Smith’s hatred of Jim Shirley, and his anger at the present sale.
“All I ask is that you will not break your word to Miss Shirley,” Horace Carey said. “I happen to know that the money will be ready for you. This Smith is the same man who came to old Carey’s Crossing years ago, of course?”
“Why, do you remember him?” Darley Champers asked in surprise.
“I’ve crossed his trail a hundred times since then, and it’s always an ill-smelling trail. Some day I may follow it a bit myself. You’ll do well to break with him,” the doctor assured him.
“If Doc Carey ever starts on that hyena’s trail, I’d like to be in at the end of the chase,” Champers declared with a grin.
“Why not help a bit yourself? I’m going East for a week. When I come back, I’ll see you. Maybe I can help you a little to get his claws unhooked from your throat,” Carey suggested, and the two men shook hands and separated.
Champers stood up and breathed deeply. The influence of an upright man’s presence is inspiring. Horace Carey did not dream that his confidence and good will that day were turning the balances for Darley Champers for the remainder of his life. Champers was by nature a ferret, and Carey’s parting words took root and grew in his mind.
The May rains that had flooded Grass River and its tributaries did worse for Clover Creek in Ohio a few days later. The lower part of the town of Cloverdale was uncomfortably submerged until the high railroad grade across the creek on the Aydelot farm broke and let the back water have broader outlet.
Doctor Carey had not startled the same old loafers who kept watch over the railway station when he suddenly dropped into the town again. They were too busy watching the capers of Clover Creek to attend to their regular post of duty. And since he had been a guest of Miss Jane Aydelot as much as a half dozen times in two decades, they knew about what to expect of him now.
They were more interested in a big bluff stranger who dropped into town off the early morning train, ate a plentiful meal at the depot restaurant, and then strolled down to the creek. He loitered all day about the spot where the grade broke, nor did he leave the place when the crowd was called away late in the afternoon to a little stream on the other side of town that had suddenly risen to be a river for the first time in the memory of man.
To Doctor Carey, Jane Aydelot looked scarce a day older for the dozen years gone by. Her days were serene and full of good works. Such women do not lose the charm of youth until late in life.
“I have come for help, as you told me to do when I took Leigh away,” Doctor Carey said as they sat on the south veranda in the pleasant light of the May evening.
Jane Aydelot’s face was expectant. Nobody except Doctor Carey knew how a little hungry longing in her eyes disappeared when he made his brief visits and crept back again when he said good-by.
“I am waiting always to help you,” she replied.
“I need fourteen hundred dollars to loan to Leigh, and I must have that sum at once.”
Miss Jane looked thoughtfully at the deep woodland, hiding the marshes as of old.
“I can arrange it,” she said presently. “Tell me about it.”
And Horace Carey told her all of Leigh’s plans.
“It is a wonderful undertaking for a girl, but she has faith in herself, and if she fails, the land is abundantly worth the mortgage with nothing but weeds on it,” the doctor explained. “She is a charming girl. She seems to have inherited all of her mother’s sweetness and artistic gifts, without her mother’s submissiveness to others; and from her father, she has keen business qualities, but fails to inherit his love of gain and traits of trickery. Her executive mind with her uncle’s good heart make a winning team. By the way, my affection for Jim Shirley is leading me to make some quiet investigation of an agent of Tank’s who is hounding Jim and will, I suppose, turn against Leigh. Can you help me at all?”
Doctor Carey had always felt that Miss Jane knew much more than she cared to tell of the Shirley family’s affairs.
She rose without replying and went into the house. In a few minutes she returned and gave a large sealed envelope into Doctor Carey’s hands.
“Do not use that until it is needed to protect someone from Tank Shirley’s violence. It is legally drawn and witnessed. You will find it effective if it is needed at all.”
“I have one more duty, Miss Aydelot,” Doctor Carey said. “My time is brief. I have an intuition, too, that I may never come East again.”
Jane Aydelot’s face whitened, and her hands closed involuntarily on one another as she waited.
“I must have you and Asher Aydelot reconciled. What can I tell him of you?”
The pink flush returned to the pale cheeks.
“Let him read my will. I copied it when I had your telegram two days ago. I cannot give him my property; Uncle Francis’ will forbids it. But – take the copy with you. I hope my wishes will be realized.”
Doctor Carey held her hand long when he bade her good-by. In her clear gray eyes he read a story that gave him infinite sorrow. Stooping down, he put his arm gently about her shoulders and, drawing her to him, kissed her once on her forehead, and once – just once – on her lips, and was gone.
They never met again. But those who knew her best in Cloverdale remember yet that from the Maytime of that year, Miss Jane’s face was glorified with a light never there before.
Down at the creek, Doctor Carey saw a large man intently studying the bank beyond the break in the railroad grade. Something made the doctor pass slowly, for the figure appealed to his interest. Presently, the man turned away and, climbing up to the National pike road before him, made his way into town. As the last light of evening fell full upon him, it revealed to Doctor Carey a very white face, and eyes that stared, as if seeing nothing – even the bluff face and huge form of Darley Champers.
Two weeks later when Darley Champers gave Leigh Shirley the deed in her own name to the Cloverdale Ranch, he said, in his bluff way:
“I’m sayin’ nothin’ against Jim Shirley, madam, when I say I hope you’ll keep this in your own name. Some day you’ll know why. And I hope to Gawd you’ll prosper with it. It’s cost more’n the money paid out for it to get that quarter section of prairie out of the wilderness. Sorrow and disappointment, bad management, and blasted hopes, and hard work, and hate. But I reckon it’s clean hands and a pure heart, as the Good Book says, that you are usin’ now. This money don’t represent all it’ll cost me yet by a danged sight.”
He bade her a hearty good-by and strode away.
The mortgage for the loan was given to Horace Carey, as agreed upon between himself and Miss Jane Aydelot.
“If Leigh knows it’s Aydelot money she might feel like she’s taking what should be Thaine’s. Would the Aydelots feel the same if they knew it?” Miss Jane had asked.
“The thing the Aydelots have never grieved for is this Ohio inheritance,” Carey answered her. “Asher gave it up to live his life in his own way. If you knew what a prince of a fellow he is, although he’s only a Kansas farmer, you would understand how that prairie ranch and the lure of the sunflower have gripped him to the West,”
The day after the completion of the sale Dr. Carey went to the Big Wolf neighborhood. In the dusk of the evening he drove up to Darley Champers’ office in Wykerton. As he was hitching his team Rosie Gimpke rushed out of the side street and lunged across to the hitching post.
“Oh, Doctor Carey, coom queek mit me,” she exclaimed in a whisper. “Coom, I just got here from Mis’ Aydelot’s. They mak’ me coom home to work at the Wyker House, ant a man get hurt bad in there. Coom, do coom,” she urged in a frenzy of eagerness.
“What’s the trouble?” Dr. Carey asked.
“Coom. I show you. I ’fraid the man coom back and finish heem. Don’t make no noise, but coom.” Rosie was clutching hard at Dr. Carey’s arm as she whispered.
“That sounds surprising, but life is full of surprises,” the doctor thought as he took up his medicine case and followed Rosie’s lead.
The way took them to the alley behind the Wyker House, through a rear gate to the back door of the kitchen, from which it was a short step to the little “blind tiger” beyond the dining room. Sounds of boisterous talking and laughter and a general shuffling of dishes told that the evening meal was beginning. For her size and clumsiness Rosie whisked the doctor deftly out of sight and joined the ranks of the waiters in the dining room.
The only light inside the little room came from the upper half of the one window looking toward the alley. As it was already twilight the doctor did not get his bearings until a huge form on the floor near the table made an effort to rise.
“What’s the trouble here?” Carey asked in the sympathetic-professional voice by which he controlled sick rooms.
“Lord, Doc, is that you?” Darley Champers followed the words with a groan.
“You are in a fix,” Carey replied as he lifted Champers to his feet.
Blood was on his face and clothes and the floor, and Champers himself was almost too weak to stand.
“Get me out of here as quick as you can, Doc,” he said in a thick voice.
At the same moment Rosie Gimpke appeared from the kitchen.
“Slip him out queek now. I hold the dining room door tight,” she urged, rushing back to the kitchen.
Carey moved quickly and had Darley Champers safely out and into his own office before Rosie had need to relax her grip on the dining room door-knob.
“I guess you’ve saved me,” Champers said faintly as the doctor examined his wounds.
“Not as bad as that,” Dr. Carey replied cheerfully. “An ugly scalp wound and loss of blood, but you’ll come back all right.”
“And a kick in the abdomen,” Champers groaned. “But it was from what was comin’ you saved me. I’ve never been sick a day in my life and I’ve had little sympathy for you and your line, and then to be knocked down so quick by a little whiffet like Smith and roll over like a log at the first blow!”
“You’re in luck. Most men in your line ought to have been knocked down a good many times before now,” the doctor declared. “How did this happen?”
“I settled with Smith and made him sign everything up to a hog-tight contract. Then he started in to abuse me till I got tired and told him I’d just got back from Ohio and a thing or two I saw there. Then he suddenly belted me and, against all rules of the game, kicked me when I was down, and left me, threatening to come back and finish me. That’s what you saved me from.”
“Champers, my old buggy is like a rocking chair. Let me take you home with me for a few days while you are wearing patches on your head,” Horace Carey suggested.
Darley Champers stared at his helper in surprise. Then he said slowly:
“Say, Doc, I’ve hated you a good many years for doin’ just such tricks for folks. It was my cussedness made me do it, I reckon. I’d like to get out of town a little while. That joint of Wyker’s has seen more’n one fellow laid out, and some of ’em went down Big Wolf later, and some of ’em fell into Little Wolf and never come out. It’s a hole, I tell you. And Smith is a devil tonight.”
On the homeward way Dr. Carey said quietly:
“By the way, Champers, I saw you at Cloverdale, Ohio, last week.”
Champers did not start nor seem surprised as he replied:
“Yes, I seen you, but I didn’t want to speak to nobody right then.”
“No?” Dr. Carey questioned.
“No. I’ve got hold enough of Smith now to make him afraid of me if I’d turn loose. I’d a made money by doin’ it, too. Good clean money. That’s why he’s gettin’ good and drunk to beat me up again tonight, maybe.”
“Well, why don’t you tighten up on him? Why let a scoundrel like that run free?” Carey inquired.
“Because it might drag Leigh Shirley’s name into the muss. And I’m no devourer of widders and orphans; I’m a humane man, and I’ll let Smith run till his tether snaps and he falls over the precipice and breaks his neck for hisself. Besides I’m not sure now whether he’s a agent, representin’ some principal, or the principal representin’ hisself. And in that case I’d have to deal the cards different for him, and them he’d do harm to.”
“You are a humane man, Champers,” Carey declared. “I think I’ve hated you, too, a good many years. These gray hairs of ours ought to make us better behaved now. But, even if you do let Smith run, that ’blind tiger’ of Wyker’s must go out of business. I’ll start John Jacobs after that hole one of these days. He holds the balance of power on public sentiment out here. He’ll clear it out. His hatred of saloons is like Smith’s hatred of Shirley, only it’s a righteous indignation. I’ve heard John’s father was a drunkard and his mother followed her husband into a saloon in Cincinnati to persuade him out and was killed by a drunken tough. Anyhow, John will break up that game of Wyker’s one of these times. See if he doesn’t.”
Darley Champers slowly shifted his huge frame into an easier posture as he replied:
“Yes, he can do it all right. But mark me, now, the day he runs Hans Wyker out of that doggery business it will be good-by to John Jacobs. You see if it isn’t. I wouldn’t start him after it too quick.”
Darley Champers spent two weeks with his physician, and the many friends of Dr. Carey smiled and agreed with Todd Stewart, who declared:
“Carey would win Satan to be his fast friend if the Old Scratch would only let Carey doctor him once.”
But nobody understood how the awakening of the latent manhood in Darley Champers and his determination to protect an orphan girl were winning the doctor to him as well.
