“Town lots do not appeal to me, Jacobs,” Asher replied. “I’m a slow-growing Buckeye, I’ll admit, but I can’t see anything but mushrooms in these towns out West where there is no farming community about them. I’ve waited and worked a good while; I’m willing to work and wait a while longer. Some of my dreams have come true. I’ll 184 hold to my first position, even if I don’t get rich so fast.”
“You are level-headed,” Jacobs assured him. “You notice I have not turned an acre in on this boom. Why? I’m a citizen of Kansas. And while I like to increase my property, you know my sect bears that reputation—”Jacobs never blushed for his Jewish origin—“I want to keep on living somewhere. Why not here? Why do the other fellows out of their goods, as we Jews are always accused of doing, if it leaves me no customer to buy? I want farmers around my town, not speculators who work a field from hand to hand, but leave it vacant at last. It makes your merchant rich today but bankrupt in a dead town tomorrow. I’m a merchant by calling.”
“Horace Greeley said thirty years ago that the twin curses of Kansas were the land agent and the one-horse politician,” Asher observed.
“You are a grub, Aydelot. You have no ambition at all. Why, I’ve heard your name mentioned favorably several times for the legislature next winter,” Jacobs insisted jokingly.
“Which reminds me of that rhyme of Hosea Bigelow:
| If you’re arter folks o’ gumption You’ve a darned long row to hoe. |
“I’m not an office seeker,” Asher replied.
“Do I understand you won’t sell lots off that ranch of yours to start a new town, and you won’t run for the legislature when you’re dead sure to be elected. May I ask how you propose to put in the fall after wheat harvest?” Jacobs asked, with a twinkle in his black eyes.
“I propose to break ground for wheat again, and to 185 experiment with alfalfa, the new hay product, and to take care of that Aydelot grove and build the Aydelot lake in the middle of it. And I’ll be supplying the wheat market and banking checks for hay one of these years when your town starters will be hunting clerkships in your dry goods emporium, and your farmers, who imagine themselves each a Cincinnatus called to office, will be asking for appointment as deputy county assessor or courthouse custodian. Few things can so unfit a Kansas fellow for the real business of life as a term in the lower house of the Kansas legislature. If you are a merchant, I’m a farmer, and we will both be booming the state when these present-day boomers are gone back East to wife’s folks, blaming Kansas for their hard luck. Now, mark my words. But to change the subject,” Asher said smiling, “I thought we should have company for dinner. I saw Darley Champers and another fellow head in here before us. Darley is in clover now, planning to charter a town for every other section on Grass River. Did you know the man who was with him?”
“That’s one fly-by-night calling himself Thomas Smith. Innocent name and easy to lose if you don’t want it. Not like Gimpke or Aydelot, now. He’s from Wilmington, Delaware—maybe.”