brass; and as thy days, so shall thy strength be.”
He leaped from the wagon seat and put up his arms to help his wife to the ground.
“This is the end of the trail,” he said gaily. “We have reached the inn with ’The Sign of the Sunflower.’ See the signboard Jim has put up for us.”
At that moment a big shepherd dog came bounding out of the weeds by the river and leaped toward them with joyous yelps; a light shone through the doorway, and a voice at once deep and pleasant to the ear, called out:
“Well, here you are, just as supper is ready. Present me to the bride, Asher, and then I’ll take the stock off your hands.”
“Mrs. Aydelot, this is Mr. James Shirley, at present the leading artistic house decorator as well as corn king of the Southwest. Allow me, Jim, to present my wife. You two ought to like each other if each of you can stand me.”
They shook hands cordially, and each took the other’s measure at a glance. What Shirley saw was a small, well-dressed woman whose charm was a positive force. It was not merely that she was well-bred and genial of manner, nor that for many reasons she was pretty and would always be pretty, even with gray hair and wrinkles. There was something back of all this; something definite to build on; a self-reliance and unbreakable determination without the spirit that antagonizes.
“A thoroughbred,” was Shirley’s mental comment. “The manners of a lady and the will of a winner.”
What Virginia saw was a big, broad-shouldered man, tanned to the very limit of brownness, painfully clean shaven, and grotesquely clean in dress; a white shirt, innocent of bluing in its laundry, a glistening celluloid collar, a black necktie (the last two features evidently just added to the toilet, and neither as yet set to their service), dark pantaloons and freshly blacked shoes. But it was Shirley’s face that caught Virginia’s eyes, for even with the tan it was a handsome face, with regular features, and blue eyes seeing life deeply rather than broadly. Just a hint of the artistic, however, took away from rather than added to the otherwise manly expression. Clearly, Jim Shirley was a man that men and women, too, must love if they cared for him at all.. And they couldn’t help caring for him. He had too much of the quality of eternal interest.
“I’m glad to meet you, and I bid you welcome to your new home, Mrs. Aydelot. The house is in order and supper is ready. I congratulate you, Asher,” he said, as he turned away to take the ponies.
“You will come in and eat with us,” Virginia said cordially.
“Not tonight. I must put this stock away and hurry home.”
Asher opened his lips to repeat his wife’s invitation, but something in Jim’s face held the words, so he merely nodded a good-by as he led his wife into the sod cabin.
Two decades in Kansas saw hundreds of such cabins on the plains. The walls of this one were nearly two feet thick and smoothly plastered inside with a gypsum product, giving an ivory-yellow finish, smooth and hard as bone. There was no floor but the bare earth into which a nail could scarcely have been driven. The furniture was meager and plain. There was only one picture on the wall, the sweet face of Asher’s mother. A bookshelf held a Bible with two or three other volumes, some newspapers and a magazine. Sundry surprising little devices showed the inventive skill of the home-builder, but it was all home-made and unpainted. It must have been the eyes of love that made this place seem homelike to these young people whose early environment had been so vastly different in everything!
Jim Shirley had a supper of fried ham, stewed wild plums, baked sweet potatoes, and hot coffee, with canned peaches and some hard little cookies. Surely the Lord meant men to be the cooks. Society started wrong in the kitchen, for the average man prepares a better meal with less of effort and worry than the average or super-average woman will ever do. It was not the long ride alone, it was this appetizing food that made that first meal in the sod mansion one that these two remembered in days of different fortune. They remembered, too, the bunch of sunflowers that adorned the table that night. The vase was the empty peach can wrapped round with a piece of newspaper.
As they lingered at their meal, Asher glanced through the little west window and saw Jim Shirley sitting by the clump of tall sunflowers not far away watching them with the eager face of a lonely man. A big white-throated Scotch collie lay beside him, waiting patiently for his master to start for home.
“I am glad Jim has Pilot,” Asher thought. “A dog is better than no company at all. I wish he had a wife. Poor lonely fellow!”
Half an hour later the two came outside to the seat by the doorway. The moon was filling the sky with its radiance. A chorus of crickets sang joyously in the short brown grass about the sunflowers. The cottonwoods along the river course gleamed like alabaster in the white night-splendor, and the prairie breeze sang its low crooning song of evening as it flowed gently over the land. “How beautiful the world is,” Virginia said, as she caught the full radiance of the light on the prairie.
“Is this beautiful to you, Virgie?” Asher asked, as he drew her close to him. “I’ve seen these plains when they seemed just plain hell to me, full of every kind of danger: cholera, poison, cold, hunger, heat, hostile Indian, and awful loneliness. And yet, the very fascination of the thing called me back and hardened me to it all. But why? What is there here on these Kansas prairies to hold me here and make me want to bring you here, too? Not a feature of this land is like the home country in Virginia. When the Lord gave Adam and Eve a tryout in the Garden of Eden, He gave them everything with which to start the world off right. Out here we doubt sometimes if there is any God west of the Missouri River. He didn’t leave any timber for shelter, nor wood, nor coal for fuel, nor fruit, nor nuts, nor roots, nor water for the dry land. All there is of this piece of the Lord’s leftovers is just the prairie down here, and the sky over it. And it’s so big I wonder sometimes that there is even enough skystuff to cover it. And yet, it is beautiful and maddening in its hold, once it gets you. Why?”
“Maybe it is the very unconquerableness that cries out to the love of power in you. Maybe the Lord, who knew how easily Adam let Eden slip through his fingers, decided that on the other side of the world He would give a younger race of men, a fire-tried race in battle, the chance to make their own Eden. So He left the stuff here for such as you and me to picture out our own plan and then work to the pattern. It is the real land of promise. Everything waiting to be done here.”
“And there’s only one way to do it. I am sure of that,” Asher replied. “Armies don’t win, they terrorize and destroy. We whipped back the Indians out here; they’d come again, if they dared – but they never will,” he added quickly, as he saw his wife’s face whiten in the moonlight. “It’s a struggle to win the soil, with loneliness and distance and a few thousand other things to fight, beside. But I told you all this before I asked you to come out here.”
“I wish I could have brought some property to you to help you, Asher, but you know how the Thaine estate was reduced.”
“Yes, I helped the family to that,” Asher replied.
“Well, I seem to have helped you to lose the Aydelot inheritance. We are starting neck and neck out here,” Virginia cried, “and we’ll win. I can see our plantation – ranch, you call it – now, with groves and a little lake and a big ranch house, and just acres of wheat and meadows, and red clover and fine stock and big barns, and you and me, the peers of a proud countryside when we have really conquered. ‘Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree.’ Isn’t that the promise?”
“Oh, Virgie, any man could win a kingdom with a wife like you,” Asher said tenderly. “Back in Ohio, when I grubbed the fence corners, I saw this country night and day, waiting for us
