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On the afternoon before the picnic Leigh Shirley took her work to the lawn behind the house. What most ranches gave over to weed patches, or hog lots, or dumping grounds along the stream, at Cloverdale had become a shady clover-sodded lawn sloping down to the river's edge. The biggest cottonwoods and elms in the whole valley grew on this lawn.
Nevertheless, I've left enough money in the Cloverdale bank to take you back East and start up some little sort of a living there, if you find you cannot stay here. I couldn't bring you here and burn all the bridges. All you have to do is to say you want to go back, and you can go." "You are very good, Asher." His wife's voice was low and soft. "But I don't want to go back.
The last words were said jokingly, but Asher's mother saw a sudden hardening of the lines of his face as he sat looking out at the darkening landscape. There was only a faint glow in the west now. The fields toward Cloverdale were wrapped in twilight shadows. Behind the eastern treetops the red disk of the rising moon was half revealed. Asher Aydelot waited long before he spoke.
I never could forgive the founders for stopping by Clover Creek, when they might have gone twenty miles further on where a town was needed and left me here. But that's all past now. I've improved the time. I have a good share of stock in the bank and I own the only hotel in Cloverdale. I closed with Shirley as soon as I heard you were coming home.
Darley Champers' business took him down the river to the Cloverdale Ranch, where he found Leigh Shirley training the young vines up the trellis by the west porch. "You got a mighty pretty place here; just looks like Jim Shirley," Champers declared as he greeted the young gardener. "Yes, Uncle Jim is never so happy as when he is puttering about the lawn and garden," Leigh answered.
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 Grass River Farmers' Company, built the Cloverdale Hotel, and the Cloverdale State Bank, and the Cloverdale Office Block.
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 Grass 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 God, in the heart of the wide solitary wilderness, the town of Cloverdale was staked out now over the prairie.
Some years ago, before there was a wagon-road between Cloverdale and Mendocino City, or Big River, as it is more commonly called up here on the northern coast, the mail was carried on horse or, more usually, on mule back; and the mail-rider was caught, on one stormy and dark night, upon the road, and found himself unable to go farther.
They say he doctored Miss Jane in Philadelphia, an' got in good with her, more'n a dozen years ago." "Well," drawled the second watcher of affairs, "if he thinks he can get anything out'n o' her by hangin' round Cloverdale, he's barkin' up the wrong saplin'. Miss Jane, she's close, an' too set in her ways now. She must be nigh forty." "That's right. But, I'll bet he's goin' there now. Let's see."
See, the storm didn't get this side of the purple notches; it stayed over there with Pryor Gaines and Prince Quippi." They rode awhile in silence, then Thaine said: "Leigh, I will go up to Careyville and send Doctor Carey down to Cloverdale to see you. It will save you some time at least, and I'll tell him you want to see him particularly and alone.
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