Winning the Wilderness

Asher and Virginia Aydelot had come out on the veranda to look for Leigh. A moment they waited, then Asher said softly:

“He has forgotten us, but he has come back to the life we love.”

“And he will come back to us tenfold more ours, because his heart is here,” Virginia answered, and the two stole softly indoors.

“See the roses Jim brought; they seem to belong to that beautiful vase,” Virginia said as they stood at the door of the dining room. “I think Jim must have meant them for Leigh and Thaine.”

“Yes, he brought us sunflowers in an old tin peach-can wrapped with a newspaper, and we had no mahogany dining room set and not so much cut-glass and china and silver in our cupboard, nor quite such a good rug on our hardwood floor,” Asher replied.

“But we had each other and the vision to see all these things coming to us,” Virginia said as she looked up into her husband’s face with love-lighted eyes. “I wonder where Jim is.”

“Jim is present.” Jim Shirley came in quietly from the side porch. “He prepared your wedding supper for you. He buried your first-born, and now he comes to give you a daughter, He’s been first aid to the Aydelots all along the line, as he will hope to continue to be, world without end, and a little more.”

The homestead on the Purple Notches looks out on a level land stretching away in an unbroken line to the far westward horizon. Broad fields of wheat grow golden in the summer sunshine, and acres of dark alfalfa perfume the air above them. With a clearer vision of what reward farm life may bring for him who goes forth and earns that reward, the man whom the Tondo road made a soldier, Caloocan a patriot, and Yang-Tsun a Christian, has found in the conquest of the soil a life of usefulness and power.

And the father and mother, Asher and Virginia Aydelot, who, through labor and loneliness and hopes long deferred, won a desert to fruitfulness, a wilderness to beauty – these two, in the zenith of their days, have proved their service not in vain, for that they have also won the second generation back to the kingdom whose scepter is the hoe.

Not in vain did the scout of half a century ago drive back the savage Indian from the plains; not in vain did Funston and his “Fighting Twentieth” wade the Tulijan and swim the Marilao; not in vain did Chaffee’s army burst the gates of Peking, nor Calvin Titus fling out Old Glory above its frowning walls.

Behind the scout came a patient, brave-hearted band of settlers who, against loneliness and distances and drouth and prairie fire and plague and boom, slowly but gloriously won the wilderness. Into the jungles of Luzon will go the saw and spade and spelling book. Upon the Chinese republic has a new light shined.

Not more to him who drives back the frontier than to him who follows after and wins that wilderness with sword re-shaped to a plowshare does the promise to Asher of old stand evermore secure!

“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.”

THE END