Kitabı oku: «Winning the Wilderness», sayfa 3
CHAPTER III
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.
“Nothing in the world but loneliness,” her husband replied.
“Well, I must get used to that, you know. I can begin now,” Virginia said lightly.
But for all her courage, she watched him drive away with a sob in her throat. In all the universe there was nothing save a glaring sunlight and an endless cringing of yellow, wind-threshed grass.
Asher Aydelot had come here with half a dozen other young fellows, all of whom took up claims along Grass River. Six months later Jim Shirley had come to the settlement with a like company who extended the free-holdings until it was seven miles by the winding of the river from Aydelot’s claim on the northwest down the river to Shirley’s claim on the southeast.
Eighteen months later only two men were left in the Grass River valley, Aydelot and Shirley. The shorter trail as the crow flies between their claims was marked by a golden thread of sunflowers. At the third bend of the winding stream a gentle ripple of ground rose high enough to hide the cabin lights from each other that otherwise might have given a neighborly comfort to the two lone settlers.
Shirley’s cabin stood on a tiny swell of ground, mark of a one-time island, set in a wide bend in the river that was itself a natural fireguard for most of the circle of the premises.
The house was snug as a squirrel’s nest. Before it was a strip of white clover, as green and fresh looking as if it were on the banks of Clover Creek in Ohio. Above the door a plain board bore the one word, “Cloverdale.”
Jim Shirley stood watching Asher coming down the trail against the wind, followed by the big shepherd dog, Pilot, who had bounded off to meet him.
“Hello! How did you get away on a day like this?” he called, as the team drew near.
“Why, you old granny!” Asher stopped here.
Both men had been on the Kansas plains long enough not to mind the wind. It flashed into Asher’s mind that Jim was hoping to see his wife with him, and he measured anew the loneliness of the man’s life.
“Most too rude for ladies just yet, although I didn’t like to leave Virginia alone.”
“What could possibly harm her? Your fireguard’s done, double done; there’s no water to drown in, no Indian to frighten, no wild beast to enter, no white man, in God knows how many hundred miles. Just nothing to be afraid of.”
“Yes, that’s it – just nothing. And it’s enough to make even a braver woman afraid. It’s the eternal vast nothingness, when the very silence cries out at you. It’s the awful loneliness of the plains that makes the advance attack in this fight with the wilderness. Don’t we both know that?”
“I reckon we do, but we got over it, and so will Mrs. Aydelot.”
“How do you know that?” Asher inquired eagerly. “I believe she could hardly keep back the tears till I got away.”
“Then why didn’t you get away sooner? I know she will get over it, because she’s as good a woman as we are men, and we stood for it.”
“Well, here’s your plow. Better get your guard thrown up. I can smell smoke now. There’s a prairie fire sweeping in on this wind somewhere. There’s a storm brewing, too. Remember what a fight we had with fire a year ago?”
Asher was helping to put Jim’s team in the harness.
“Yes, you saved your well and a few other little things. But you’ve got your grit, you darned Buckeye, to hold on and start again from the ashes. And now you have your wife here. You are lucky,” Jim declared.
“Where’s that broken plow of yours? Is it bolt or weld? Maybe I can mend it.” Asher was casting about for tools.
“It’s bolt. Everything is on the stable shelves,” Jim called back against the wind, as he drove the plow deep in the black soil. “Be sure you put ’em back when you are through with ’em, too.”
“Poor Jim!” Asher said to himself with a smile. “The artist in him makes him keep the place in order. He’d stop to hang up his coat and vest if he had to fight a mad bull. Poor judgment puts a good many tragedies into lives as well as stage villain types of crime.”
And then Asher thought of Virginia, and wondered what she was doing through the long afternoon. He was whistling softly with a smile in his eyes as Jim Shirley made the tenth round of the premises and stopped opposite the stable door.
“Hey, Asher, come out and see the sky now,” he called. “It’s prairie fire and equinoctial storm combined.”
Asher hurried out to see the dull southwest heavens shutting off the sunlight out of which raged a wind searing the sky to a dun gray.
“Don’t stand there staring, you idiot. Why don’t you get your plowing done?” he cried to Shirley.
Shirley began to loose the trace-chain from the plow.
“That strip is wide enough now,” he declared. “I’ve got a clover guard, anyhow. I don’t need to back-fire like my neighbors do.”
As Asher untied his ponies and climbed into the wagon, Jim held their reins.
“Stop a minute. Let a single man offer you a word of advice, will you?” he asked.
“All right, I need advice,” Asher smiled down on Jim’s earnest face.
“Then heed it, too. No use to tell you to take care of your wife. You’ll do that to a fault. But don’t make any mistake about Mrs. Asher Aydelot. She went through Rebel and Union lines once to save your life. Don’t doubt her strength to hold her own here as soon as the first fight is over. She is like that Kentucky thoroughbred of hers; she’s got endurance as well as grace and beauty.”
“Bless you, Jim,” Asher said, as he clasped Shirley’s hand. “I wish you had a wife.”
“Well, they are something of an anxiety, too. Hustle home ahead of the storm. I’ve always wished that bluff at the deep bend didn’t hide us from each other’s sight. I’d like to blast it out.”
Asher Aydelot hurried northward ahead of the hot winds and deepening shadows of the coming storm. And all the time, in spite of Jim’s comforting words, an anxiety grew and grew. The miles seemed endless, the heavens darkened, and the wind suddenly gave a gasp and died away, leaving a hot, blank stillness everywhere.
Meanwhile, Virginia, alone in the cabin, had fallen asleep from sheer nerve weariness. When she awoke, it was late in the afternoon. The screaming outside had ceased, but the whir and whine were still going on, and the blaring light was toned by the dust-filled air.
“I was only tired,” Virginia said to herself. “Now I am rested, I don’t mind the wind.”
She went out to watch the trail for Asher’s coming. He was not in sight, so she came inside again, but nothing there could interest her.
“I’ll go out and wait awhile,” she thought.
Tying a veil over her head, she shut the cabin door and sat down outside. The wind died suddenly away, the trail was lifeless, and all the plain cut by the trail as well. Then the solitude of the thing took up the flight where the wind had left off.
“How can I ever stand this,” Virginia cried, springing up. “But Asher stood it before I came, or even promised to come. No knight of the old chivalry days ever endured such hardships as the claimholders on these Kansas plains must endure. But it takes women to make homes. They can never, never win here without wives. I could go back to Virginia if I would.” She shut her teeth tightly, and the small hands were clenched. “But I won’t do it. I’ll stay here with Asher Aydelot. Other men and women as eager as we are will come soon. We can wait, and some day, Oh, some day, we’ll not miss what the Thaines lost by the war and the Aydelots lost by the Thaines, for we’ll have a prince’s holdings on these desolate plains!”
She stood with her hands clasped looking with far-seeing dark eyes down the long trail by the dry river bed, like a goddess of Conquest on a vast untamed prairie.
A sudden sweep of the wind aroused her, and the loneliness of the plains rose up again.
“I’ll get Juno and follow the trail till I meet Asher. I can’t get lost where there’s nothing but space,” she said aloud, as she hurried to the stable and led out the petted thoroughbred.
Horses are very human creatures, responding not only to the moods of their masters, but to the conditions that give these moods. The West was no kinder to the eastern-bred horse than to the eastern-bred man. All day Juno had plunged about the stable and pawed the hard earth floor in sheer nervousness. She leaped out of doors now at Virginia’s call, as eager for comfort as a homesick child.
“We’ll chase off and meet Asher, darling.”
Even the soft voice the mare had heard all her days did not entirely soothe her. As Virginia mounted the wind flung shut the stable door with a bang. Juno leaped as from a gunshot, and dashed away up the river to the northwest. Her rider tried in vain to change her course and quiet her spirit. The mare only surged madly forward, as if bent on outrunning the tantalizing, grinding wind. With the sense of freedom, and with the boundlessness of the plains, some old instinct of the unbridled days of by-gone generations woke to life and power in her, and with the bit between her teeth, she swept away in unrestrained speed.
Virginia was a skilled horsewoman, and she had no fear for herself, so she held the reins and kept her place.
“I can go wherever you can, you foolish Juno,” she cried, giving herself up to the exhilarating ride. “We’ll stay together to the end of the race, and we will get it out of our systems once for all, and come back ‘plains-broke.’”
Beyond a westward sweeping curve of the river’s course the chase became a climb up a long slope that grew steeper and steeper, cutting off the view of the stream. Here Juno’s speed slackened, then dropped into a steady canter, as she listened for a command to turn back.
“We’ll go on to the edge of that bluff, lady, now we are here, and see what is across the river,” Virginia said. “Then we will hurry home to Asher and prairie hay.”
When they came at last over a rough shale outcrop to the highest headland, the river bed lay between its base and a barren waste of sand dunes, with broad grassy regions beyond them spreading southward. The view from the bluff’s top was magnificent. Virginia held Juno to the place and looked in wonder at the vast southwest on this strange September afternoon. Across a reach of level land, miles wide, a prairie fire was sweeping in the majesty of mastery. The lurid flames leaped skyward, while roll on surging roll of black smoke-waves, with folds of gray ashes smothering between, poured out along the horizon. Beyond the fire was the dark blue storm-cloud, banded across the front by the hail mark of coppery green.
Virginia sat enchanted by the grandeur of the scene. The veil had fallen from her head, and with white face and fascinated eyes, she watched the glowing fury, a graceful rider on a graceful black horse, on the crest of the lone headland outlined against the sky.
Suddenly the terror of it broke upon her. She was miles from the cabin with its double fireguard. Asher had said such fires could leap rivers. Between her and safety were many level banks where the sandy stream bed was narrow, and many grassy stretches where there was no water at all.
Distance, storm wind, fire and hail, all seemed ready to close down upon her, making her senses reel. One human being, alone before the wrath of Nature! In all the years that followed, she never forgot that scene. For in that moment a whisper came from somewhere out of the void, “The Eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms,” and she clasped her hands in a wordless prayer.
The wind that had been cruel all day grew suddenly kind. A dead calm held the air in a hot stillness. Then with a whip and a whirl, it swung its course about and began to pour cool and strong out of the northwest.
“The wind is changing,” Virginia cried, as she felt its chill and saw the flame and smoke tower upward and bend back from the way. “It is blowing the fire to the east, to the southeast. But, will it catch Asher? Oh, you good Wind, blow south! blow south!” she pleaded, as she dashed down the long slope for the homeward race.
When Asher reached his claim, he looked in vain for Virginia’s face as he passed the cabin window. He hurried the ponies into the corral, and the wagon under the lean-to beside the stable, half conscious that something was missing inside. Then he hastened to the cabin, but Virginia was not there.
“She may be in the stable.” He half whispered the words in his anxiety.
The ponies in the corral were greedily eating their hay, but the black mare Juno was gone. As Asher turned toward the house, he caught the low roaring of the tempest and felt a rush of cool wind from somewhere. A huge storm-wave of yellow dust was rolling out of the southwest; beyond it the heavens were copper-green, and back of that, midnight darkness; while, borne onward by its force, low waves of prairie fire were swept along the ground.
Down at the third bend of the river where long growths overhung the stream, the flames crossed easily. Even as Asher Aydelot watched the storm cloud, long tongues of fire came licking up the valley toward him, not a towering height, but a swift crawling destruction which he looked at with unseeing eyes, for his only thought was for Virginia.
“How could I have missed her if she started to meet me? Yet, where can she be now?” he groaned.
The hungry flames gnawed vainly about his broad fireguard, then wavered back and forth along the south prairie, while he watched them under the fascination the mastery of the elements can exert. He turned at last from the fire and storm to see Juno and her rider swinging down the northwest prairie, keeping close to the river line before the chill north wind.
“Oh, Virgie, Virgie,” he cried, as she slipped from the saddle and he caught her in his arms. “I’ve lived a hundred years since I left you this afternoon. What made you run away?”
In the joy of her safe return, he forgot the fire.
“Why, don’t you see the wind is from the north? And it is blowing everything south now? I saw it begin away up the river. Did that guard really keep off that thing I saw from the high bluff up yonder?”
“I put it there to do it, and I’d take the chances. Awful as it is, it can’t do anything but burn, and there’s nothing here to burn. If it hadn’t been there, everything would have been gone and you would have come back to a pile of ashes if the wind had left a pile.”
“And you put your puny hands to the plow handles and say to that awful fury, ‘So far, and no farther. This is my home.’ You, one little human being!” Virginia’s eyes were glowing with wonder at the miracle.
“Yes, with my puny hands. Me – a little man,” Asher smiled quizzically, as he spread his broad brown hands before his face and drew himself up to his full six feet of height. “Only I say, ’our home.’ But I was so scared about you, I forgot to notice the change in the wind. The fire is chasing to the south, and the hailstorm has veered off down that stream this side of those three headlands over there. The wind gives and the wind takes away. You can’t plow a guard around it.”
They sat down by the cabin door to watch the storm and flame blown far away in whirls of glaring light and surging cloud, until the rain at last drowned all the fury and washed it over the edge of the south horizon out of the world.
“Sometime we’ll plant hedges and forest trees and checker the country with windbreaks until days like this will belong only to an old pioneer’s memory,” Asher said, as the storm swept wide away.
“Then, I’m glad I came early enough to see this. I’m getting ’plains-broke’ along with Juno. Isn’t it wonderful to be a real pioneer? Back in Virginia we were two centuries of generations away from the first settlers,” Virginia exclaimed.
But Asher did not answer. He was thinking of Jim Shirley’s declaration: “She’s got endurance as well as grace and beauty.”
