“Nine cats! You left at six sharp to go with John Jacobs over to Wolf Creek after what you never got, judging from this empty wagon. And I had half of the feeding done when you left the house here. I saw you when I was out by the old stone corral looking after the pigs, but they squealed so loud you could not hear me telling you good-by.”
“All pigs squeal alike to me,” Asher began, but Thaine choked him to silence. 209
“Hurry up and get togged out for the party,” he urged. “The Benningtons will be over early. Jo’s been here all day. I’ll take care of the horses. Hike!”
“Be sure to rub them down. They had to pull hard today,” Asher called back as he went up the walk toward the house.
“Oh, fiddle! Always take care of a horse like it was a prize poodle. Farms like he was decorating chinaware. Good enough dad, but too particular. Me for the State University and the professional or military life. This ranch is all right for Asher Aydelot, but it’s pretty blamed slow for T. A. And Jo Bennington doesn’t like a farm either,” he added with a smile.
In the superiority of his youth Thaine fumed at his father’s commands, but failed not to obey them. He was just nineteen, as tall as his father, and brawny with the strength of the outdoors life of the prairie ranch. Strength of character was not expressed in his face so much as the promise of strength with the right conditions for its development in future days. His features were his mother’s set in masculine lines, with the same abundant dark hair, the same lustrous dark eyes, the same straight nose and well-formed chin. The same imperious will of all the Thaines to do as he chose was his heritage, too, and he walked the prairies like a king.
“The real story of the plains is the story of the second generation; the real romance here will be Thaine Aydelot’s romance, for he was born here.”
So Virginia Aydelot had declared on the day she had gone to visit the Bennington baby, Josephine, and coming home had met Asher with little Thaine beside Mercy 210 Pennington’s grave. Sorrow for the dead had become a tender memory that day, and joy in the living made life full of hope.
In Virginia’s mind a pretty romance was begun in which Thaine and Josephine were central figures. For mothers will evermore weave romances for their children so long as the memory of their own romance lives.
The time of the second generation came swiftly, even before the wilderness of the father’s day had been driven entirely from the prairie. Some compensation for the loss of eastern advantages belonged to the simple life of the plains children. If they lacked the culture of city society they were also without its frivolity and temptations. What the prairies denied them in luxuries they matched with a resourcefulness to meet their needs. Something of the breadth of the landscape and of the free sweeping winds of heaven gave them breadth and power to look the world squarely in the face, and to measure it at its true value, when their hour for action came.