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Updated: May 3, 2025
The old Aydelot farmhouse was as neat and white, with gardens and flower beds as well kept, as if only a day had passed since the master and mistress thereof had gone out to their last earthly home in the Cloverdale graveyard. Fifteen years had seen the frontier pushed westward with magic swiftness.
It's an awfully long way from here to Ohio. A little six-year-old girl can't come alone. I couldn't go back myself. I may be a coward, but the Almighty made me as I am. I can't go back to Cloverdale and see only a grave I can stay here and remember, and maybe do a kind of a man's part, but I can't go back." He bowed his head and sat very still.
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 Grass River Valley in Kansas, had a name, even in the Eastern money markets.
It was never a labor of love with him, however, and although he grew well-to-do in the tilling, he resented the touch of the soil as something degrading. Cloverdale did not grow toward him, because, out of prejudice at its being, he would not sell one foot of his ground for town lot purposes.
But" his tone changed abruptly "if you figger you can take your danged rainy-day bank account out'n the Cloverdale bank and grab onto this land, you leave yourself, and hold onto it while you stay East a few years, and then sneak back here and get rich off their loss, I tell you now, you can't do it.
Withal, he had the shabby, run-down appearance as of a man in hard lines financially. "I want money and I want it quick, or I'd not come clear out here. And you are going to get it for me. That Cloverdale quarter I've held grown to weeds so long you will sell to the first buyer now. Jim Shirley's at the last of his string. I did what I wanted to do with him.
I've got to go to Cloverdale next week an' settle things there, an' see that the probatin's are straight. Lemme hear from you before I go. I must be gettin' on. Danged fine country, this Grass River Valley. Who'd a' thought it back in the seventies when Jim Shirley an' Asher Aydelot squatted here? Goodday."
Years ago Cloverdale set up a hotel, a poor enough tavern even for those days, but it robbed me of the patronage this house had before that time, and I had to go to farming. Every kind of drudgery I've had to do here. Cutting down forests, and draining swamps is a back-breaking business.
Two years of fighting a foe from every way the winds blow, cold and hunger, storms and floods and desert heat, poisonous reptiles, poisoned arrows of Indians, and the deadly Asiatic cholera; sometimes with brave comrades, sometimes with brutal cowards, sometimes on scout duty, utterly and awfully alone; over miles on endless miles of grassy level prairies, among cruel canyons, in dreary sand lands where men die of thirst, monotonous and maddening in their barren, eternal sameness; and sometimes, between sunrises of superb grandeur, and sunsets of sublime glory, over a land of exquisite virgin loveliness it is small wonder that the ruddy cheeks were bronze as an Indian's, that the roundness of boyhood had given place to the muscular strength of manhood, that the gray eyes should hold something of patience and endurance and of a vision larger than the Cloverdale neighborhood might understand.
I'd like to get out of town a little while. That joint of Wyker's has seen more'n one fellow laid out, and some of 'em went down Big Wolf later, and some of 'em fell into Little Wolf and never come out. It's a hole, I tell you. And Smith is a devil tonight." On the homeward way Dr. Carey said quietly: "By the way, Champers, I saw you at Cloverdale, Ohio, last week."
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