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 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 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.
CHAPTER II
The Sign of the Sunflower
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?
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 trail, flat along the ungraded ground, tended in the direction of least resistance, generally toward the southwest. It was bounded by absence of landmarks, boulder or tree or cliff. Along either side of it was a fringe of spindling sunflower stalks, with their blooms of gold marking two gleaming threads across the plains far toward the misty nothingness of the western horizon.
The mid-September day had been intensely hot, but the light air was beginning to flow a bit refreshingly out of the sky. A gray cloud-wave, creeping tide-like up from the southwest, was tempering the afternoon glare. In all the landscape the only object to hold the eye was a prairie schooner drawn by a team of hard-mouthed little Indian ponies, and followed by a free-limbed black mare of the Kentucky blue blood.
Asher Aydelot sat on the wagon seat holding the reins. Beside him was his wife, a young, girlish-looking woman with large dark eyes, abundant dark hair, a straight, aristocratic nose, and well-formed mouth and chin.
The two, coming in from the East on the evening before, had reached the end of the stage line, where Asher’s team and wagon was waiting for them.
The outfit moved slowly. It had left Carey’s Crossing at early dawn and had put twenty-five miles between itself and that last outpost of civilization.
“Why don’t you let the horses trot down this hill slope, Asher?” The woman’s voice had the soft accent of the South.
“Are you tired, Virgie?” Asher Aydelot looked earnestly down at his wife.
“Not a bit!” The bright smile and vigorous lift of the shoulders were assuring.
“Then we won’t hurry. We have several miles to go yet. It is a long day’s run from Carey’s to our claim. Wolf County is almost like a state. The Crossing hopes to become the county seat.”
“Why do they call that place Carey’s Crossing?” Mrs. Aydelot asked.
“It was a trading post once where the north and south trail crossed the main trail. Later it was a rallying place for cavalry. Now it’s our postoffice,” Asher explained.
“I mean, why call it Carey? I knew Careys back in Virginia.”
“It is named for a young doctor, the only one in ten thousand miles, so far as I know.”
“And his family?” Virginia asked.
“He’s a bachelor, I believe. By the way, we aren’t going down hill. We are on level ground.”
Mrs. Aydelot leaned out beyond the wagon bows to take in the trail behind them.
“Why, we are right in a big saucer. All the land slopes to the center down there before us. Can’t you see it?”
“No, I’ve seen it too often. It is just a trick of the plains – one of the many tricks for the eye out here. Look at the sunflowers, Virgie. Don’t you love them?”
Virginia Aydelot nestled close to her husband’s side and put one hand on his. It was a little hand, white and soft, the hand of a lady born of generations of gentility. The hand it rested on was big and hard and brown and very strong looking.
“I’ve always loved them since the day you sent me the little one in a letter,” she said in a low voice, as if some one might
