“Where did you learn to do all these things for sick people?” Virginia asked.
“Partly from a hospital nurse I had in the war. Also, it’s a part of the game here. I learned a few things fighting the cholera in sixty-seven. We must look everything on the frontier squarely in the face, danger and death along with the rest, just as we have to do everywhere else, only we have to depend on each other more here. Hold on there, Jim!”
Asher sprang toward Shirley, who was sitting upright, staring wildly at the two. Then a struggle began, for the sick man, crazed with delirium, was bent on driving his helpers from the cabin. When he lay back exhausted at length, Asher turned to his wife.
“One of us must go to Carey’s Crossing for a doctor. You can’t hold Jim. It’s all I can do to hold him. But it’s a long way to Carey’s. Can you go?”
“I’ll try,” Virginia replied. And Asher remembered what Jim had said on the windy September day: “She’s as good a woman as we are men.”
“You must take Pilot with you and leave him at home. You can’t get lost, for you know the way up to the main trail, and that runs straight to the Crossing. Dr. Carey knows Jim, and he will come if he can, I am sure. He pulled Jim back once a year or two ago when the pneumonia had him. Heaven keep you safe, you brave little soul. Jim may turn the trick for us some day.”
He kissed her good-by and watched her gallop away on her errand of mercy.
“The men will have all the credit by and by for settling this country. Little glory will come to their wives,” he thought. “And yet, the women make anchor for every hearthstone, and share in every deed of daring and every test of endurance. God make me worthy of such a wife!”
Virginia Aydelot had spoken truly when she declared that the war had left the Thaines little except inherited pride and the will to do as they pleased. Inherited tendencies take varying turns. What had made a reformer of old Jean Aydelot made a narrow bigot of his descendant, Francis. What had made a proud, exclusive autocrat of Jerome Thaine, in Virginia Thaine developed into a pride of conquest for the good of others. It was this pride and the Thaine will to do as she pleased in defiance of the prairie perils that sent her now on this errand of mercy for a neighbor in need. And she took little measure of the reality of the journey. But she was prudent enough to stop at the Sunflower Inn and make ready for it. She slipped on a warm jacket under her heavy cloak, and put on her thickest gloves and overshoes. She wound a long red scarf about her neck and swathed her head in the gray nubia. Then she mounted her horse for her long, hard ride.
The little sod house with all its plainness seemed very cosy as she took leave of it, and the woman instinct for home made its outcry in her when she turned her face resolutely from its sheltering warmth and felt the force of the north wind whipping mercilessly upon her. But she steeled herself to meet the cold, and her spirits rose with the effort.
“You are a mean little wind. Not half as big as the September zephyrs. Do your worst, you can’t scare me,” she cried, tucking her head down against its biting breath.
Upon the main trail the snow that had fallen after midnight deepened in the lower places as the wind whirled it from the prairie swells. It was not smooth traveling, although the direction of the trail was clear enough at first.
Virginia’s heart bounded hopefully as Juno covered mile after mile with that persistent, steady canter that means everything good for a long ride. But the open plains were bitterly cold and the wind grew fiercer as the hours passed. High spirits and hope began to give place to determination and endurance. Virginia shut her teeth in a dogged resolve not to give up. Indeed, she dared not give up. She must go on. A life depended on her now, and two lives might be forfeited if she let this unending wind chill her to forgetfulness.
And so, alone in a white cruelty of solitary land, bounded only by the gray cruelty of the sky, with a dimming trail before her under a deeper snowfall, and with long miles behind her, she struggled on.
She tried to think of everything cheerful and good. She tried to find comfort in the help she would take to Jim. Truly, she was not nearly so cold now and she was very weary and a wee bit sleepy. A tendency to droop in the saddle was overcoming her. She roused herself quickly, and with a jerk at the reins plunged forward at a gallop.
“It will take the stupor out of me,” she cried.
Then the reins drooped and the fight with the numbing cold began again.
“I wonder how far along I am. I must be nearly there. I remember we lost sight of Carey’s Crossing soon after we left last September. Some swell of ground cut us off quickly – and I’ve never seen a human being since then, except Asher and Jim Shirley and Pilot,” she added.
“The snow is so much heavier right here. It varies so. I’ve passed half a dozen changes, but this is the deepest yet. I’m sure I can see the town beyond this slope ahead. Why! where’s the trail, anyhow?”
It was nearing mid-afternoon. Neither horse nor rider had had food nor water, save once when Juno drank at a crossing. Virginia sat still, conscious suddenly that she has missed the trail somewhere.
“It isn’t far, I know. Could I have left it when I took that gallop?” she asked herself.
She was wide awake now, for the reality of the situation was upon her, and she searched madly for some sign of the trail. In that level prairie sea there was no sign to show where the trail might lie. The gray sky was pitiless still, and with no guiding ray of sunshine the points of the compass failed, and the brave woman lost all sense of direction.
“I won’t give up,” she said at last, despairingly, “but we may as well rest a little before we try again.”
She had dropped down a decided slope and hurried to a group of low bushes in a narrow draw. While the wind was sliding the snow endlessly back and forth on the higher ground, the bushes were moveless. Slipping to the ground beside them, she stamped her feet and swung her arms until the blood began to warm her chilled body.
“It is so much warmer here. But what next? Oh, dear Father, help me, help me!” she cried in the depth of her need.
And again the same clear whisper that had spoken to her on the headland when she watched the September prairie fire, a voice from out of the vast immensity of the Universe, came to her soul with its calm strength.
“The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.”
How many a time in the days of winning the wilderness did the blessed promise come to the pioneer women who braved the frontier to build the homes of a conquering nation.
“I can’t try that blind game again for awhile,” Virginia said to herself. “I’ll run up a distress signal; maybe somewhere help is coming to me. I know now how Jim felt all alone with only a dog’s instinct to depend on. I’m glad I’ve tried to help him, even if I have failed.”
She unwound the long red scarf from her neck and bound her nubia closer about her throat. Then bending the tallest bush that she could reach she fastened the bright fabric to its upper limbs and let it swing to its place again. The scarf spread a little in the breeze and hung above her, a dumb signal of distress where help was not.
The minutes dragged by like hours to Virginia, trying vainly to decide on what to do next. The fury of a Plains blizzard would have quickly overcome her, but this was a lingering fight against cold and a pathless solitude. Suddenly the memory of one lonely Sabbath day came to her, and how Asher, always resourceful, had said:
“When you are afraid, pray; but when you are lonely, sing.”
She had prayed, and comfort had come with the prayer. She could sing for comfort, if for nothing else. Somebody might hear. And so she sang. The song heard sometimes in the little prayer meeting in some country church; sometimes by sick beds when the end of days is drawing near; sometimes in hours of shipwreck, above the roar of billows on wide, stormy seas; and sometimes on battlefields when mangled forms lie waiting the burial trench and the mournful drumbeat of the last Dead March – the same song rose now on the lonely prairie winds sweeping out across the hidden