I the honor of addressing now?” Champers asked awkwardly, as if to change the subject.
“Mrs. Asher Aydelot.”
“Well, now, I’ve heard of Aydelot. Where is your man today? I’d like to meet him, Mrs. A.”
It was the man’s way of being friendly, but even a duller-fibred man than Champers would have understood Mrs. Aydelot’s tone as she said:
“You will find him at Shirley’s, or on the way. Only the long trail winds around some bluffs, and you might pass each other without knowing it.”
“How many men in this settlement now?” Champers asked.
“Only two,” Virginia replied, patting Pilot’s head involuntarily.
“Only two! That’s sixteen more’n’ll ever make it go here,” Darley Champers declared. “Excuse me for saying it, Mrs. Aydelot, but I’ve been pretty much over Kansas, and this is the poorest show for settlement the Lord ever left out of doors. I’ve always heard this valley was full of claims you simply couldn’t give away, but my friend, who has no end of money and influence fur developin’ the country, wanted me to look over the ground along the Grass River, It’s dead desolation, that’s all; no show on earth in fifty year out here, and in fifty year we won’t none of us care for more’n six feet of ground anywhere. I’m sorry for you, Madam. You must be awfully lonely here, but you’ll be gettin’ away soon, I hope. I must be off. Thank you, Madam, for the information. Good day,” and he left the cabin abruptly.
The sunshine grew pallid and the prairies lay dull and endless. 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.
“That woman and her fool dog were half afraid of me at first. They don’t know that women aren’t in my line. I’d never harm a one of ’em.”
“They’re in my line always. Was she good looking? I never pass a pretty woman,” Thomas Smith said smoothly.
“Don’t be a danged fool, Smith. I might cut a man’s throat to some extent, if it would help my business any, but I’d cut it more’n some if he forgets his manners round a woman. We’re a coarse, grasping lot out here fur as property goes, and we ain’t got drawing-room manners, but it takes your smug little easterners to be the real dirty devils. Come on.”
And Thomas Smith knew that the big, coarse-grained man was sincere.
“Yonder’s Aydelot now. Want to see him?” Darley Champers declared, sighting Asher down the short trail beyond the deep bend.
“I’ve no business with him, and he’s the man I don’t want to see,” Thomas Smith said hastily. “I’ll ride on out of sight round this bend and wait for you. It’s a good place when you don’t want to be seen.”
“Depends on how much of a plainsman Aydelot is. He ought to have sighted both of us half a mile back,” Champers declared.
But Smith hurried away and was soon behind the low bluff at the deep bend. Asher Aydelot had seen the two before they saw him, and he saw them part company and only one come on to meet him.
“You’re Aydelot from the claim up the river, I s’pose. I’m just out lookin’ at the country. Not much to it but looks,” Champers declared as the two met at the deep bend.
“Yes, sir; my name is Aydelot,” Asher replied, deciding at once that this stranger was not to be accepted on sight, a judgment based not on a woman’s instinct but on a man’s experience.
“Any of these claims ever been entered?” Champers asked.
“Yes, sir; most of them,” Asher responded.
“I see. Couldn’t make it out here. I s’pose you’ll get out next. Hard place to take root. Most too far away, and land’s a little thin, I see,” the real estate dealer remarked carelessly.
“Yes, it’s pretty well out,” Asher assented.
“The river ever get low here?” was the next query.
“Not often, in the winter,” Asher replied.
“Most too uncertain for water power, though, and the railroad ain’t comin’ this way at all. I must be gettin’ on. One man’s too few to be travelin’ so fur from civilization.”
“Come up to the cabin for the night,” Asher said, with a plainsman’s courtesy.
“Thank you, no. Hope to see you again nearer to the Lord’s ground; losin’ game here. Good-by.”
Asher did not look like a disappointed man when he reached the Sunflower Inn.
“Best news in the world,” he declared when Virginia related what had happened in the cabin that afternoon. “A man who goes prospecting around the Kansas prairies doesn’t discourage the poor cuss he pities; he tries to encourage the wretch to hold on to land he wouldn’t have himself. Listen to me, Virgie. That man has his eye on Grass River right now. I know his breed.”
Meanwhile the early dusk found Champers and Smith approaching Shirley’s premises.
“I don’t know about Aydelot,” Champers declared as they lariated their ponies beyond the corral. “He’s one of the clear-eyed fellows who sees a good thing about as soon as you sight it yourself, and then he turns clam and leach and you won’t move him nor get nothin’ out of him, and that’s all there is to it.”
“Yes, I know that. I mean, you say he does?” Smith seemed too preoccupied to follow his own words, but Champers followed Smith shrewdly enough.
They made a hasty but careful examination of the premises, keeping wide of the cabin where the sick man lay.
“He’s got three horses in there. He’s well fixed,” Champers declared, peering into the stable, where it was too dark to discover that the third horse was Dr. Carey’s. “Let’s hike off for some deserted shack for the night and get an early start for the Crossing in the morning. Easy trick, this, gettin’ in and out of here unseen. And it’s one of the best claims on Grass River.”
“Couldn’t we slip into the cabin?” Smith asked in a half whisper. “If he’s too sick” – Something in the man’s face made it look diabolical in the fading twilight, and he seemed about to start toward the house.
“Now, see here, Mr. Smith,” Champers said with slow sternness. “What’d I say back there about women? Neither we ain’t man-slaughterers out here, though your Police Gazette and your dime novels paint us that way. There’s more murderers per capiter to a single street in New York than in the whole state of Kansas, right now. If it’s land and money, we’re after it, tooth an’ toenail, but forget the thing in your mind this minute or you an’ me parts company right here, an’ you can hoof it back to Carey’s Crossing or Wilmington, Delaware.”
Smith made no reply and they mounted their ponies and galloped away.
And all the while Dr. Horace Carey, inside the
