Winning the Wilderness Part 29

"You can have a boom right here that'll make you all rich men inside of a year. Why not turn capitalists yourselves for a while, you hard-working farmers. Money is easy and credit long, now. Take your chance at it and make five hundred per cent on your investments. I'm ready to take subscriptions for stock in this new town right now. Why not stop this snail's pace of earnin' and go to livin' like gentlemen--like some Careyville men I know who own hundreds of acres they never earned and they won't improve so's to help others?"

"You're right there," a farmer sitting beside Asher Aydelot called out.

"We all know how Careyville got her start. It's kept some of us poor doing it. I'll invest in Town Company stock right now."

Asher Aydelot turned toward the speaker in surprise.

"Jacobs helped you out as well as the rest of us in the drouth and gra.s.shopper time of seventy-four," he said. "What's your grievance against him now?"

"Yes, and hung onto me like a leech of a Jew ever since," the man muttered.

"Because you never paid either interest or princ.i.p.al. And Jacobs has carried you along and waited your time," Asher a.s.serted frankly.

But the farmer plunged into the discussion again, not realizing that his grudge against Careyville was the outgrowth of his own shortcomings.

"Take this site right here in the middle of your neighborhood where you've already got your church and your schoolhouse, and your graveyard,"

Champers declared. "Aydelot here gave part of it and Pryor Gaines the rest. Gaines don't farm it any more himself, it's most too big a job for a man of brains like him. And that quarter across the river that used to be all sand, you own that now, Aydelot, don't you? What did you think of doin' with it now?"

"I think I'll set it in alfalfa this fall," Asher replied.

"Yes, yes, now these two make the very site we want. You are lucky, for you are ready right now to start things. How much stock do you want, Aydelot, and how will you sell?"

As Asher listened he seemed to see the whole scheme of the town builder bare itself before him, and he wondered at the credulity of his neighbors.

"Gentlemen," he said, standing before them, "it is a hard thing to put yourself against neighborhood sentiment and not seem to be selfish. But as I was the first man in this valley and have known every man who settled here since, I ought to be well enough known to you to need no certificate of good moral character here. I offer no criticism on the proposition before you. You are as capable of judging as I am. The end may show you more capable, but I decline to buy stock, or to donate, or sell any land for a townsite at the deep bend of Gra.s.s River. A man's freehold is his own."

Asher's influence had led in Gra.s.s River affairs for years. But Darley Champers had the crowd in the hollow of his paw tonight.

"How about Gaines?" he demanded. "You join him on the south. You ought to know some of his notions."

"Gaines has no land to consider," Asher said frankly. "He sold it more than a year ago."

"You mean the Jew foreclosed on the preacher, don't you?" someone said sarcastically.

"You'll have to ask the preacher," Asher replied good-naturedly. "I didn't understand it so at the time. But as for myself, I'm no boomer. I stand for the prosperity that builds from day to day, and stays built. The values here are in the soil, not in the s.h.i.+ning bubbles that glitter and burst on top of it. You'll have to count me out of your scheme. I'm a farmer still. So I'll wish you all good luck and good night."

"Good night, I must go with papa," Thaine Aydelot said, springing up from his play outside.

"No, you've got to stay here. Hold him, Leigh," Jo Bennington commanded, clutching at Thaine's arm.

Leigh sat calmly disobedient.

"He's his papa's boy, I guess, and he ought to go," she a.s.serted.

"You meany, meany," Jo whispered, "I don't like you."

But Leigh paid little heed to her opinion.

As Asher pa.s.sed out of the room there was an ugly look in Darley Champers'

eyes.

"No more ambition than a cat. One of them quiet, good-natured fellers that are as stubborn as the devil once they take a stand. Just a danged clod-hopper farmer, but he don't leave no enemies behind him. That's enough to make any man hate him. He's balked twice when I tried to drive.

I'll not be fooled by him always."

So Champers thought as he watched Asher Aydelot walk out of the room. And in the silence that followed his going the company heard him through the open window whistling some old patriotic air as he strode away in the June moonlight with little Thaine trotting beside him.

"s.h.i.+rley, where is Pryor tonight?" Cyrus Bennington broke the silence with the query. "I couldn't get him to come; said he had no land for sale nor money to invest," Jim replied.

"Then Jacobs got him at last. Fine friend to you fellers, that man Jacobs.

Easy to see what he wants. He ain't boomin' no place but Careyville,"

Champers snarled. "But the deep bend ain't the only bend in Gra.s.s River.

Or do you want to shove prosperity away when it comes right to your door?"

n.o.body wants to do that. Least of all did the Kansas settlers of the boom days turn away from the promise of a fortune.

So the boom came to the Gra.s.s River Valley as other disasters had come before it. Where a decade and a half ago Asher and Virginia Aydelot had lived alone with each other and G.o.d, in the heart of the wide solitary wilderness, the town of Cloverdale was staked out now over the prairie.

Stock in the new venture sold rapidly, and n.o.body ever knew how much clear profit came to Champers & Co. from this venture. A big slice of the Cloverdale ranch went into the staking of the new city, and prosperity seemed wedded to Jim s.h.i.+rley. He ceased farming and became a speculator with dreams of millions in his brain. Other settlers followed his example until the fever had infected every man in the community except Asher Aydelot, who would not give up to it, and Pryor Gaines, who had nothing to give up.

Everything fell out as advertised. The railroad grade swelled up like a great welt across the land, seemingly in a day. Suburban additions radiated for miles in every direction. Bonds were voted for light and water and public buildings and improvements. Speculators rushed to invest and unload their investments at a profit. The Gra.s.s River Farmers'

Company built the Gra.s.s River Creamery. And because it looked big and good they built the Gra.s.s River Sugar Factory and the Gra.s.s River Elevator. But while they were building their money into stone and machinery they forgot to herd cattle to supply the creamery and to grow cane for the sugar product and to sow and reap grain to be elevated.

Also, the Cloverdale Farmers' Company, made up mostly of the members of the Gra.s.s River Farmers' Company, built the Cloverdale Hotel, and the Cloverdale State Bank, and the Cloverdale Office Block. And the sad part of it all was that mortgaged and doubly mortgaged farms and not the price of crops had furnished the capital for the boom building.

It is an old story now, and none too interesting--the story of a boom town, founded on prairie breezes and built out of fortune seekers'

dreams.

Meanwhile, Asher Aydelot, watching the sudden easy prosperity of his neighbors, fought down the temptation to join them and resolutely strove with the soil for its best yield. The drouth and hot winds had not forgotten all their old tricks, and even the interest on his mortgage could not be met promptly sometimes. Yet with the same old Aydelot tenacity with which his father had held Cloverdale in Ohio away from the old farm beside the National pike road, the son of this father held the boundary of the Sunflower Ranch intact, nor yielded up one acre to be platted into a suburban addition to the new Cloverdale in the Gra.s.s River Valley in Kansas. And all the while the Aydelot windbreaks strengthened; the Aydelot grove struck deeper root; the long corn furrows and the acres on acres of broken wheat stubble of the Sunflower Ranch wooed the heavier rainfall, narrowing the sand dunes and deepening the water courses.

For two brief years Cloverdale, in the Gra.s.s River Valley in Kansas, had a name, even in the Eastern money markets. Speculation became madness; and riotous commercialism had its little hour of strut and rave.

Then the bubble burst, and all that the boom had promised fell to nothingness. Many farms were mortgaged, poor crops worked tribulation, taxes began to eat up acres of weed-grown vacant town lots, Eastern money was withdrawn to other markets, speculators departed, the strange enthusiasm burned itself out, and the Wilderness came again to the Gra.s.s River Valley. Not the old Wilderness of loneliness, and drouth, and gra.s.shoppers, and prairie fires that had dared the pioneer to conquest; but the Prairie, waiting again the kingly hand on the plow handle, gave no quarter to him whom the gilded boom had lured to s.h.i.+pwreck.

PART TWO

THE SON

Give me the land where miles of wheat Ripple beneath the wind's light feet, Where the green armies of the corn Sway in the first sweet breath of morn; Give me the large and liberal land Of the open heart and the generous hand; Under the wide-s.p.a.ced Kansas sky Let me live and let me die.

--Harry A. Kemp.

CHAPTER XIII

THE ROLLCALL