“I have known the Thaine family all my life,” Horace Carey said quietly. And Asher, whose mind was surged with anxiety, did not even think to be surprised.
“We did not recognize each other when I found her on the way to Carey’s Crossing three or four years ago, and—I did not know she was married then.”
He sat a while in silence, looking at the window against which the wind outside was whirling the snow. When he spoke again his tone was hopeful.
“Mrs. Aydelot has had a nervous shock. But she is 130 young. She has a heritage of will power and good blood. She will climb up rapidly with the coming on of spring.”
How strange it was to Asher Aydelot to listen to such words! He had not slept for fifty hours. It had seemed to him that the dreadful storm outside and sickness and the presence of death within were to be unending, and that in all the world Jim Shirley would henceforth be his only friend.
“You both need sleep,” Carey was saying in a matter-of-fact way. “Bo Peep will take care of things here, and I will look after Mrs. Aydelot. You will attend to the burial at the earliest possible time in order to save her any signs of grieving. And you will not grieve either until you have more time. And remember, Aydelot,” he put his hand comfortingly on Asher’s shoulders. “Remember in this affliction that your ambition may stake out claims and set up houses, but it takes a baby’s hand to really anchor the hearthstones. And sometimes it takes even more. It needs a little grave as well. I understood from Shirley that some financial loss last fall prevented you from going back to Ohio. You wouldn’t leave Grass River now if you could.”
Dr. Carey’s face was magnetic in its earnestness, and even in the sorrow of the moment Asher remembered that he had known Virginia all her life and he wondered subconsciously why the two had not fallen in love with each other.
And so it was that as the Sunflower Inn had received the first bride and groom to set up the first home in the Grass River Valley, so the first baby born in the valley opened its eyes to the light of day in the same Sunflower 131 Inn. And out of this sod cabin came the first form to its burial. And it was the Sunflower Ranch that gave ground for God’s Acre there for all the years that followed. It happened, too, that as Jim Shirley had been the friendly helper at that bridal supper and happy house-warming more than three years ago, so now it was Jim Shirley who in the hour of sorrow was the helper still.
The winter season passed with the passing of the blizzard. The warm spring air was delicious and all the prairies were presently abloom with a wild luxuriance of flowers.