“By the way, there was a bank failure at Cloverdale once that interested you. Did you ever investigate it?”
“There was nothing to investigate,” Asher replied. 147
It did not occur to him to connect the query with Carey’s knowledge of Shirley’s affairs or with his studying in the East.
“You have relatives there?” Carey asked.
“Yes, a Jane Aydelot. Married, single, widowed, I can’t tell. My father left his estate to her. I was in love with the West then, and madly in love with my wife. My father wasn’t impressed with either one. But, you see, I was rash about little things like money matters. I had so much faith in myself and I couldn’t give up a girl like Virginia Thaine. Understand, I have no quarrel with Jane Aydelot. Her property is absolutely her own, not mine to crave and look forward to getting some day.”
“I understand,” Horace Carey said, looking out toward the purple notches now more clearly outlined against the sky. “How this country has changed since that cold day when Mrs. Aydelot came almost to the old Crossing after me. The sand dunes narrow and the river deepens a little every year. The towns come and go on the prairies, but the homesteaders build better. It is the farmer who really makes a new country habitable.”
“That’s what my mother said when I talked of coming West. But the real test will come with the second generation. If it is loyal we will have won. Here is the old Grass River trail that Jim and I followed many lonely days. The valley is slowly coming out of the wilderness,” Asher replied, remembering his wife’s words long before when she said: “The real story of the plains is the story of the second generation. The real romance out here will be Thaine Aydelot’s romance.”
They had reached the old trail that led to the Grass River 148 settlement now. It was still a new country where few trees, save some lone cottonwoods, were as tall as a cabin, and nothing broke the view. But groves had rooted, low windbreaks cut the country at frequent intervals; many acres of sod had been turned by the plow, and many more were being shut in by fences where the open cattle range was preempted by freeholds. One bit of woodland, however, was beginning to dignify the valley. The Aydelot grove spread over a hundred acres before the one-time sod Sunflower Inn. The new home was on the swell now as Virginia had seen the Colonial mansion of the mirage on the day she went seeking aid for the grasshopper-beset neighborhood. But this was just a little cottage waiting, like the grove, for years of time in which to grow a mansion shaded with tall trees, with the lake and the woodland before it, and the open prairie beyond.
Down at Jim Shirley’s ranch the changes were many, for Jim had an artist’s eye. And the energy other settlers spent on the needs of wives and children Jim spent on making his little dwelling attractive. He had brought clover seed from Ohio, and had carefully sowed a fire guard around his sod shack. Year by year the clover business increased; fire guard grew to clover-lot, and clover-lot to little meadow. Then the little meadow expanded along Grass River to a small cattle range. Over the door of his four-roomed cottage he put the name “Cloverdale,” as he had put it over his sod cabin years before. And the Cloverdale Ranch, like the Sunflower Ranch farther up the river, became a landmark on the trail.
Pryor Gaines, still the teacher-preacher of the Grass River settlement, had come to the Cloverdale Ranch on an 149 errand, and he and Jim Shirley were chatting beside the well curb when Dr. Carey drove up.