“I am Mrs. Asher Aydelot from the Grass River Valley,” Virginia went on. “There are only three settlers out there now, Mr. Shirley and my husband and myself. Mr. Shirley is very sick with pneumonia, and Mr. Aydelot could not leave him, so I started to Carey’s Crossing to see if you could come to him. I missed the trail somewhere. I was trying to help, but I failed, you see.”

The doctor was looking at her with a puzzled expression which she thought was born of his sympathy. To the mention of her failing he responded quickly:

“No, Mrs. Aydelot, you succeeded. I had started to Shirley’s myself on personal business, and I was letting some whim turn me aside. If you had kept the trail we should have missed each other, for I was on my way to Big Wolf Creek, a good distance away, and your leaving the trail and wandering down here was providential for Shirley. Shall I show you on to the Crossing?”

“Oh, no, Doctor, if you will only come back with me. I don’t want to go on,” Virginia insisted.

“You are a regular westerner, Mrs. Aydelot,” Carey declared. “But you haven’t been out here long. I heard of your passing through our town late last summer. I was up on Big Wolf then and failed to see you. I know something of your husband, but I have never met him.”

He helped her to mount her horse and together they sought the trail and followed it westward in the face of the wind.

Near midnight down in Jim Shirley’s cabin Asher Aydelot turned from a lull in the sick man’s ravings to see Dr. Horace Carey entering the door with a pair of saddle bags in his hand.

“Hello, sir! Aydelot? I’m Carey, the doctor.”

Then as his quick eye took in the haggard face of the man before him, he said cheerily:

“Everything fit as a fiddle up your way. I left your cabin snug and warm as a prairie dog’s hole, and your wife is sound asleep by this time, with a big dog on guard. Yes, I understand,” he added, as Asher silently gripped his hand. “You’ve died a thousand deaths today. Forget it, and give me a hand here. My own are too stiff, and I must get these wet boots off. I always go at my work dry shod.”

He had pulled a pair of heavy shoes from the saddle bags, and was removing his outer coat and sundry scarfs, warming his hands between whiles and seemingly unconscious of the sick man’s presence.

“You are wet to the knees. You dared the short trail and the strange fords of rivers on a night so dark as this,” Asher declared as he helped Carey to put off his wrappings.

“It’s a doctor’s business to forget himself when he sees a distress signal.” Then Carey added quietly: “Tell me about Shirley. What have you been doing for him?”

He was beside Jim’s bunk now and his presence seemed to fill the whole cabin with its subtle strength.

“You know your business, doctor; I’m a farmer,” Asher said, as he watched this frontier physician moving deftly about his work.

“Well, if you mean to farm so far from pill bags you have done well to follow my trade a little, as you seem to have done with Shirley,” Carey asserted, as he noted the evidences of careful nursing.

“Oh, Virginia – Mrs. Aydelot – helped me,” Asher assured him. “She’s a nurse by instinct.”

“What did you call your wife?” the doctor inquired.

“Virginia – from her own state. Pretty sick man here.” Asher said this as Dr. Carey suddenly bent over Shirley with stern eyes and tightening lips. But the eyes grew tender when Jim looked up into his face.

“You’re all right, Shirley. You must go to sleep now.”

And Shirley, who in his delirium had fought his neighbor all day, became as obedient as a child, as a very sick child, that night under Horace Carey’s hand.

The next morning Virginia Aydelot was not able to rise from her bed, and for many days she could do nothing more than to sit in the rocking chair by the windows and absorb sunshine.

On the fourth day after Carey had reached Shirley’s Asher went down the river in the early afternoon to find how Jim’s case was progressing, leaving his wife comfortably tucked up in the rocking chair by the west window. The snow was gone and the early December day was as crisp and beautiful as an Indian summer day in a colder climate. Virginia sat watching the shadows of the clouds flow along the ground and the prairie hues changing with the angle of the afternoon sunlight. Suddenly a sound of ponies’ feet outside was followed by a loud rap on the door.

“Come in!” Virginia called. “Lie down, Pilot!”

Pilot did not obey, but sat up alert before his mistress as Darley Champers’ bulk filled the doorway.

“Excuse me, Madam,” the real estate dealer said, lifting his hat, “Me and my friend, Mr. Smith out there, are looking up a claim for a friend of ours somewhere out in the Grass River settlement. Can you tell me who owns the last claim taken up down the river, and how far it is from here?”

“Mr. Shirley’s claim is a few miles down the river, if you go by the short trail and ford at the bends, but much longer if you go around by the long trail,” Virginia explained.

“Is it occupied?” Champers put the question in a careless tone.

Pilot’s bristles, that had fallen at the sound of Virginia’s voice, rose again with the query. It is well to be wary of one whom a dog distrusts. But the woman’s instinct in Virginia responded little to the dog’s uneasiness, and she replied courteously:

“Yes, Mr. Shirley is there, very sick.”

“Um, who have I the honor of addressing now?” Champers asked awkwardly, as if to change the subject.

“Mrs. Asher Aydelot.”

“Well, now, I’ve heard of Aydelot. Where is your man today? I’d like to meet him, Mrs. A.”

It was the man’s way of being friendly, but even a duller-fibred man than Champers would have understood Mrs. Aydelot’s tone as she said:

“You will find him at Shirley’s, or on the way. Only the long trail winds around some bluffs, and you might pass each other without knowing it.”

“How many men in this settlement now?” Champers asked.

“Only two,” Virginia replied, patting Pilot’s head involuntarily.

“Only two! That’s sixteen more’n’ll ever make it go here,” Darley Champers declared. “Excuse me for saying it, Mrs. Aydelot, but I’ve been pretty much over Kansas, and this is the poorest show for settlement the Lord ever left out of doors. I’ve always heard this valley was full of claims you simply couldn’t give away, but my friend, who has no end of money and influence fur developin’ the country, wanted me to look over the ground along the Grass River, It’s dead desolation, that’s all; no show on earth in fifty year out here, and in fifty year we won’t none of us care for more’n six feet of ground anywhere. I’m sorry for you, Madam. You must be awfully lonely here, but you’ll be gettin’ away soon, I hope. I must be off. Thank you, Madam, for the information. Good day,” and he left the cabin abruptly.

The sunshine grew pallid and the prairies lay dull and endless. The loneliness of solitude hung with a dead heaviness and hope beat at the lowest ebb for Virginia Aydelot, trying bravely to deny his charge against the future of the land she had struggled so to dream into fruitfulness. She was only a woman, strong to love and brave to endure, but neither by nature nor heritage shrewd to read the tricks of selfish trade. And she believed that while Asher and Jim Shirley were hopeful dreamers like herself, here was an ill-mannered but unprejudiced man who saw the situation as they could not see it.

“That woman and her fool dog were half afraid of me at first. They don’t know that women aren’t in my line. I’d never harm a one of ’em.”

“They’re in my line always. Was she good looking? I never pass a pretty woman,” Thomas Smith said smoothly.

“Don’t be a danged fool, Smith. I might cut a man’s throat to some extent, if it would help my business any, but I’d cut it more’n some if he forgets his manners round a woman. We’re a coarse, grasping lot out here fur as property goes, and we ain’t got drawing-room manners, but it takes your smug little easterners to be the real dirty devils. Come on.”

And Thomas Smith knew that the big, coarse-grained man was sincere.

“Yonder’s Aydelot now. Want to see him?” Darley Champers declared, sighting Asher down the short trail beyond the deep bend.

“I’ve no business with him, and he’s the man I don’t want to see,” Thomas Smith said hastily. “I’ll ride on out of sight round this bend and wait for you. It’s a good place when you don’t want to be seen.”

“Depends on how much of a plainsman Aydelot is. He ought to have sighted both of us half a mile back,” Champers declared.

But Smith hurried away and was soon behind the low bluff at the deep bend. Asher Aydelot had seen the two before they saw him, and he saw them part company and only one come on to meet him.

“You’re Aydelot from the claim up the river, I s’pose. I’m just out lookin’ at the country. Not much to it but looks,” Champers declared as the two met at the deep bend.

“Yes, sir; my name is Aydelot,” Asher replied, deciding at once that this stranger was not to be accepted on sight, a judgment based not on a woman’s instinct but on a man’s experience.

“Any of these claims ever been entered?” Champers asked.

“Yes, sir; most of them,” Asher responded.

“I see. Couldn’t make it out here. I s’pose you’ll get out next. Hard place to take root. Most too far away, and land’s a little thin, I see,” the real estate dealer remarked carelessly.

“Yes, it’s pretty well out,” Asher assented.

“The river ever get low here?” was the next query.

“Not often, in the winter,” Asher replied.

“Most too uncertain for water power, though, and the railroad ain’t comin’ this way at all. I must be gettin’ on. One man’s too few to be travelin’ so fur from civilization.”

“Come up to the cabin for the night,” Asher said, with a plainsman’s courtesy.

“Thank you, no. Hope to see you again nearer to the Lord’s ground; losin’ game here. Good-by.”

Asher did not look like a disappointed man when he reached the Sunflower Inn.

“Best news in the world,” he declared when Virginia related what had happened in the cabin that afternoon. “A man who goes prospecting around the Kansas prairies doesn’t discourage the poor cuss he pities; he tries to encourage the wretch to hold on to land he wouldn’t have himself. Listen to me, Virgie. That man has his eye on Grass River right now. I know his breed.”

Meanwhile the early dusk found Champers and Smith approaching Shirley’s premises.

“I don’t know about Aydelot,” Champers declared as they lariated their ponies beyond the corral. “He’s one of the clear-eyed fellows who sees a good thing about as soon as you sight it yourself, and then he turns clam and leach and you won’t move him nor get nothin’ out of him, and that’s all there is to it.”

“Yes, I know that. I mean, you say he does?” Smith seemed too preoccupied to follow his own words, but Champers followed Smith shrewdly enough.

They made a hasty but careful examination of the premises, keeping wide of the cabin where the sick man lay.

“He’s got three horses in there. He’s well fixed,” Champers declared, peering into the stable, where it was too dark to discover that the third horse was Dr. Carey’s. “Let’s hike off for some deserted shack for the night and get an early start for the Crossing in the morning. Easy trick, this, gettin’ in and out of here unseen. And it’s one of the best claims on Grass River.”

“Couldn’t we slip into the cabin?” Smith asked in a half whisper. “If he’s too sick” – Something in the man’s face made it look diabolical in the fading twilight, and he seemed about to start toward the house.

“Now, see here, Mr. Smith,” Champers said with slow sternness. “What’d I say back there about women? Neither we ain’t man-slaughterers out here, though your Police Gazette and your dime novels paint us that way. There’s more murderers per capiter to a single street in New York than in the whole state of Kansas, right now. If it’s land and money, we’re after it, tooth an’ toenail, but forget the thing in your mind this minute or you an’ me parts company right here, an’ you can hoof it back to Carey’s Crossing or Wilmington, Delaware.”

Smith made no reply and they mounted their ponies and galloped away.

And all the while Dr. Horace Carey, inside the unlighted cabin, had watched their movements with grim curiosity, even to the hesitating, half-expressed intention of entering the dwelling.

“Champers would pull up another man’s stakes and drive them into his own ground if he wanted them, but that Thomas Smith would drive them through the other fellow’s body if nobody else was around,” was the doctor’s mental comment as he went outside and watched the course of the two men till the twilight gathered them in.

When the turning point came to the sick man, the up-climb was marvelous, as his powers of recoil asserted themselves.

“It is just a matter of self-control and good spirits now, Shirley, and you have both,” Dr. Carey said, as he sat by his patient on the ninth day.

“You staid the game out, Carey,” Shirley said with an undertone of hopelessness behind his smile. “What possessed you to happen in, anyhow?”

“I was possessed not to come and turned back after I’d started. If I hadn’t met Mrs. Aydelot coming after me I’d have rampsed off up on Big Wolf Creek for a week, maybe, and missed your case entirely.”

“And likewise my big fee,” Jim interrupted. “Some men are born lucky. And so Mrs. Aydelot went after you. Asher’s a fortunate man to have a wife like Virginia, although he had to give up an inheritance for her.”

“How was that?” Carey asked, glad to see the hopeless look leaving Jim’s eyes.

“Oh, it’s a pretty long story for a sick man. The mere facts are that Asher Aydelot was to have bank stock, a good paying hotel, and a splendid big farm if he’d promise never to marry any descendant of Jerome Thaine, of Virginia. Asher hiked out West and enlisted in the cavalry and did United States scout duty for two years, hoping to forget Virginia Thaine, who is a descendant of this Jerome Thaine. But it wasn’t any use. Distance don’t count, you know, in cases like that.”

“Yes, I know.”

Shirley was too sick to notice Dr. Carey’s face, and he did not remember afterward how low and hard those three words sounded.

“It seems Virginia had pulled Asher through a fever in a Rebel hospital, and we all love our nurses.” Jim patted the doctor’s knee as he said this. “And when the father’s will was read out against ever, ever, ever his son marrying a Thaine, Asher promptly said that the whole inheritance, bank stock, hotel, and farm, might go where – the old man Aydelot had already gone – maybe. Anyhow, he married Virginia Thaine and she was game to come out here and pioneer on a Grass River claim. Strange what a woman will do for love, isn’t it? And to go on a forty-mile ride to save a worthless pup’s life! That’s me. Think of the daughter of one of those old Virginia homes up to a trick like that?”

“You’ve talked enough now.”

Shirley looked up in surprise at this stern command, but Dr. Carey had gone to the other side of the cabin and sat staring out at the river running bank-full at the base of the little slope.

When he turned to his patient again, the old tender look was in his eyes. Men loved Jim Shirley if they cared for him at all. And now the pathetic hopelessness of Jim’s face cut deep as Carey studied it.

“I say, Shirley, did you ever know a man back East named Thomas Smith?” he asked.

“No. Strange name, that! Where’d you run onto it? Smith! Smith! How do you spell it?” Jim replied indifferently.

“With a spoonful of quinine in epsom salts, taken raw, if you don’t pay attention. Now listen to me.” The doctor’s tone was as cheery as ever.

“Well, don’t make it necessary for me to tell you when you’ve talked enough.”

In spite of the joking words, there was a listless hopelessness in Shirley’s voice, matching the dull, listless eyes. And Horace Carey rose to the situation at once.

“A stranger named Thomas Smith came to the Crossing the day I came down here. Rather a small man, with close-set, dark eyes; signed his name in a cramped, left-handed writing. I noticed his right hand seemed a little stiff, sort of paralyzed at the wrist. But here’s the funny thing. He made me uneasy, and he made me think of you. Could you identify him? He looked as much like you as I look like that young darkey, Bo Peep, up at the Jacobs House.”

“None of my belongings. You are a delicate plant to be so sensitive to strangers.” Jim sighed from mental weariness more than from physical weakness.

“I was sensitive, and when I heard Stewart call out your name in the mail and saw this man step up as if to take the letter, I took it. And if you’ll take a brace and decide it’s worth while you can have it. It’s addressed in a woman’s handwriting, not a Thomas Smith style of pinching letters out of a penholder and squeezing them off the pen point. Lie down there, man!”

For Jim was sitting up, listening intently. With trembling fingers he took the letter and read it eagerly. Then he looked at Carey with eyes in which listlessness had given place to determination.

“Doctor, I was ready to throw up the game five minutes ago. Now I’ll do anything to get back to strength and work.”

“You don’t seem very joyous, however,” the doctor responded.

“Joy don’t belong to me. We parted company some years ago. But life is mine.”

“And duty?”

“Yes, and duty. Say, Doctor, if you’d ever cared all there was in you to care for one woman, and then had to give her up, you’d know how I feel. And if, then, a sort of service opened up before you, you’d know how I welcome this.”

Jim’s face, white from his illness, was wonderfully handsome now, and he looked at his friend with that eager longing for sympathy men of his mould need deeply. Horace Carey stood up beside the bed and, looking down with a face where intense feeling and self-control were manifest, said in a low voice:

“I have cared. I have had to give up, and I know what service means.”