Winning the Wilderness. Margaret Hill McCarter

and in prison. This little girl took care of me. Only a soldier really knows what a woman’s hand means in sickness. But she did more. She risked everything, even her life, to get letters through the lines to you and to get me exchanged. I shiver yet when I think of her, disguised as a man in soldier’s clothes, taking the chance she did for me. And, well, I left my heart down there. That’s all.”

      “Why haven’t you ever told us this before, Asher?” his father asked.

      Asher stood up where the white moonlight fell full on his face. Somehow the old Huguenot defiance and the old Quaker endurance of his ancestors seemed all expressed in him.

      “I wasn’t twenty-one, then, and I have nothing yet to offer a girl by way of support,” he said. 12

      “Why, Asher!” Mrs. Aydelot exclaimed, “you have everything here.”

      “Not yet, mother,” he replied. “And I haven’t told you because her name is Virginia Thaine, and she is a descendant of Jerome Thaine. Are the Aydelots big enough to bury old hates?”

      Francis Aydelot sat moveless as a statue. When at length he spoke, there was no misunderstanding his meaning.

      “You have no means by which to earn a living. You will go down to town and take charge of the Shirley House at once, or go to work as a hired hand here. But remember this: from the day you marry a Thaine of Virginia you are no longer my son. Family ties, family honor, respect for your forefathers forbid it.”

      He rose without more words, and went into the house.

      Then came the mother’s part.

      “Sit down, Asher,” she said, and Asher dropped to his place on the step.

      “We don’t seem to see life through the same spectacles,” he said calmly. “Am I wrong, mother? Nobody can choose my life for me, nor my wife, either. Didn’t old grandfather, Jean Aydelot, leave his home in France, and didn’t grandmother, Mercy Pennington, marry to suit her own choice?”

      Even in the shadow, his mother noted the patient expression of the gray eyes looking up at her.

      “Asher, it is Aydelot tradition to be determined and self-willed, and the bitterness against Jerome Thaine and his descendants has never left the blood—till now.”

      She stroked his hair lovingwise, as mothers will ever do. 13

      “Do you suppose father will ever change?”

      “I don’t believe he will. We have talked of this many times, and he will listen to nothing else. He grows more set in his notions as we all do with years, unless—”

      “Well, you don’t, mother. Unless what?” Asher asked.

      “Unless we think broadly as the years broaden out toward old age. But, Asher, what are your plans?”

      “I’m afraid I have none yet. You know I was a farmer boy until I was fifteen, a soldier boy till I was nineteen, a college student for two years, and a Plains scout for two years more. Tell me, mother, what does all this fit me for? Not for a tavern in a town of less than a thousand people.”

      He sat waiting, his elbow resting on his knee, his chin supported by his closed hand.

      “Asher, when you left school and went out West, I foresaw what has happened tonight,” Mrs. Aydelot began. “I tried to prepare your father for it, but he would not listen, would not understand. He doesn’t yet. He never will. But I do. You will not stay in Ohio always, because you do not fit in here now. Newer states keep calling you westward, westward. This was frontier when we came here in the thirties; we belong here. But, sooner or later, you will put your life into the building of the West. Something—the War or the Plains, or may be this Virginia Thaine, has left you too big for prejudice. You will go sometime where there is room to think and live as you believe.”

      “Mother, may I go? I dream of it night and day. I’m so cramped here. The woods are in my way. I can’t see a 14 mile. I want to see to the edge of the world, as I can on the prairies. A man can win a kingdom out there.”

      He was facing her now, his whole countenance aglow with bright anticipation.

      “There is only one way to win that kingdom,” Mrs. 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 I mean to go when the time comes. I hope it will come soon, and I know you will give me your blessing then.”

      His mother’s hands were pressed lovingly upon his forehead, as he leaned against her knee.

      “My blessing, and more than mine. The blessing of Moses to Asher of old, as well. ‘Thy shoes shall be iron and brass; and as thy days, so shall thy strength be. The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.’ ”

      She bent over her boy, and pushing back the hair from his forehead, she kissed it reverently, nor dreamed in how many a bitter strife would the memory of this sacred hour come back to him, with the blessed note of victory.

      The next morning Asher put on his working clothes and began the life of a hired man on his father’s farm. The summer was long and hot, and in the late August the dread 15 typhoid malaria swept up from the woods marshes. It was of virulent form and soon had its way with Asher’s father and mother.

      When the will of Francis Aydelot was read in court, the inexorable will of a stubborn man, it declared that the Cloverdale Hotel, the bank stock, and the farm with all the appurtenances thereunto pertaining, should descend to Asher Aydelot, provided he should remain a resident of Ohio and should never be united in marriage to any descendant of Jerome Thaine of the State of Virginia. Failing in this, all the property, except a few hundred dollars in cash, should descend to one Jane Aydelot, of Philadelphia, and her heirs and assigns forever; provided these heirs were not the children of Virginia Thaine of the state of Virginia.

      On the same day, Asher wrote to one Jane Aydelot, of Philadelphia, to come to Ohio and take possession of her property. Then he carefully sodded the two mounds in the graveyard, and planted old-fashioned sweet pinks upon them, and bidding good-by to the home of his boyhood, he turned his face hopefully to the West.

       16

CHAPTER II

       Table of Contents

The Sign of the Sunflower

       Table of Contents

Little they knew what wealth untold Lay hid where the desolate prairies rolled: Who would have dared, with brush or pen, As this land is now, to paint it then? —Allerton.

      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. But this was the only likeness. The pike was a gravel-built, upgraded highway, bordered by little rail-fenced fields and deep forests hiding malarial marshes in the lower places.

      This