He was facing her now, his whole countenance aglow with bright anticipation.
“There is only one way to win that kingdom,” Mrs. Aydelot declared. “The man who takes hold of the plow-handles is the man who will really conquer the prairies. His scepter is not the rifle, but the hoe.”
For all his life, Asher Aydelot never forgot his mother’s face, nor the sound of her low prophetic words on that moonlit night on the shadowy veranda of his childhood home.
“You are right, mother. I don’t want to fight any more. It must be the soil that is calling me back to the West, the big, big West! And I mean to go when the time comes. I hope it will come soon, and I know you will give me your blessing then.”
His mother’s hands were pressed lovingly upon his forehead, as he leaned against her knee.
“My blessing, and more than mine. The blessing of Moses to Asher of old, as well. ‘Thy shoes shall be iron and brass; and as thy days, so shall thy strength be. The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.’”
She bent over her boy, and pushing back the hair from his forehead, she kissed it reverently, nor dreamed in how many a bitter strife would the memory of this sacred hour come back to him, with the blessed note of victory.
The next morning Asher put on his working clothes and began the life of a hired man on his father’s farm. The summer was long and hot, and in the late August the dread 15 typhoid malaria swept up from the woods marshes. It was of virulent form and soon had its way with Asher’s father and mother.
When the will of Francis Aydelot was read in court, the inexorable will of a stubborn man, it declared that the Cloverdale Hotel, the bank stock, and the farm with all the appurtenances thereunto pertaining, should descend to Asher Aydelot, provided he should remain a resident of Ohio and should never be united in marriage to any descendant of Jerome Thaine of the State of Virginia. Failing in this, all the property, except a few hundred dollars in cash, should descend to one Jane Aydelot, of Philadelphia, and her heirs and assigns forever; provided these heirs were not the children of Virginia Thaine of the state of Virginia.
On the same day, Asher wrote to one Jane Aydelot, of Philadelphia, to come to Ohio and take possession of her property. Then he carefully sodded the two mounds in the graveyard, and planted old-fashioned sweet pinks upon them, and bidding good-by to the home of his boyhood, he turned his face hopefully to the West.