“The clod-hopper, Buckeye farmer,” Jim added affectionately, and they drank to Asher’s health.
“Lord bless you, Aydelot. You said the money was in the soil, not on top of it. I remember you looked like a prophet when you said it,” Cyrus Bennington declared. “But I was wild to get rich quick and let my soil go. I never look at Aydelot’s spreading acres of wheat increasing in area every year without wondering why the Lord let me be such a fool.”
“Well, you’ve spent a lot of days in an easy chair in the shade of a county office since then while I was driving a reaper in the hot sunshine,” Asher insisted.
“You are the strongest man here now, for all your farm work, Aydelot,” John Jacobs asserted. “It is the store that really breaks a man down.” 222
“Not in his nerve, nor in pocketbook,” Todd Stewart added. “Here’s a toast, now, to the second generation, and especially to Thaine Aydelot, son of the Sunflower Ranch. Nineteen years old tonight.”
“What is Thaine going to follow, Asher?” someone inquired. “I suppose you’ll be making a gentleman out of him, since he’s your only child.”
“My father tried to make a gentleman out of me and failed, as you see,” Asher replied.
“Tragic failure,” Jim groaned.
“Seriously, Aydelot, what’s Thaine to do?” The query came from Dr. Carey; the company awaited the answer.
“He isn’t wanting to follow anything right now. He has a notion that the earth is following him,” Asher said with a smile. “And having handled Aydelots all my life, I’m letting him alone a little with the hope that at last he’ll come back to the soil as I did. He goes to the Kansas University this fall and he has all sorts of notions, even a craving for military glory. I can’t blame him. I had the same disease once. I don’t believe in any wild oats business. I hope Thaine will be a gentleman, but I don’t wonder that a green country boy who has looked out all his life on open prairies and lonely distances should have a longing for city pavements and the busy haunts of men. How well he will make his way and what he will let these things fit him to do depends somewhat on how well grounded the farm life and home life have made him. The old French Aydelot blood had something of the wanderlust in it. I hope that trait may not reappear in Thaine. But where’s Pryor Gaines in this rollcall? We are getting away from the subject before the house.” 223