“You declare that I’ll leave here as soon as I can get away, and that I’m brutal to use my influence to keep the settlers here; that I am working a trick you have worked out already for me, to get the land myself because it is valuable; you, in your humane love for your fellowmen, you threaten me with all unknown calamities if I refuse your demand. And then you ask me what I have to say, what I am going to do, and, with fine gestures, what I see?” 96
“Well?” Champers queried urgently.
The plains life made men patient and deliberate of speech, and Asher did not hasten his words for all the bluster.
“I say I am not using my influence to keep any man here or push him out of here. I speak only for the family at the Sunflower Inn. I know ’danged well’ I am not going to leave the Grass River country this fall. Further, I know your hand before you play it, and I know that if you can play it against Todd Stewart and Jim Shirley and Cyrus Bennington and the rest of them, I haven’t taken their measure right. I know, again, that I am not afraid of you, nor can any threat you make have an influence on my action. And, lastly, as to what I see.”
Asher turned toward the west where the hot air quivered between the iron earth and a sky of brass.
“I see a land fair as the garden of Eden, with grazing herds on broad meadows, and fields on fields of wheat, and groves and little lakes and rivers, a land of comfortable homes and schools and churches—and no saloons nor breweries.”
“I see a danged fool,” Darley Champers cried, springing up.
“Come down here in twenty-five years and make a hunt for me, then,” Asher said with a smile, but Champers had already plunged inside the schoolhouse.
The council following was a brief one. Three or four Grass River settlers agreed to give up the equity on their claims of one hundred and sixty acres for enough money to transport themselves and their families to their former homes east of the Mississippi River. This decision left 97 only one child of all the little ones there, Todd Stewart, a stubby little fellow, as much of a Scotchman as his fair-haired father, who wound one arm about his father’s neck, and whispered:
“They can’t budge us, can they, dad?”