A few days after the battle Captain Ward wrote to Miss Lucy telling her that some soldiers slightly wounded would go home on a furlough to Lawrence, and that they would take John with them and put him on the stage at Lawrence for Sycamore Ridge. Then Ward's letter continued: "It is all so horrible—this curse of war; sometimes I think it is worse than the curse of slavery. There is no 'pomp and circumstance of glorious war.' Men died screaming in agony, or dumb with fear. They were covered with dirt, and when they were dead they merged into the landscape like inanimate things. What vital difference is there between a living man and a dead man, that one stands out in a scene big and obtrusive, and the other begins to fade into the earth as soon as death touches the body? The horror of death is upon me, and I cannot shake it off. It is a fearful thing to see a human soul pass 'in any shape, in any mood.' And I have seen so many deaths—we lost one man out of every three—that I am all unnerved. I saw General Lyon die—the only abolitionist in the regular army, they say. He died like a soldier—but not as the soldiers die in pictures. He sank off his horse so limp, and so like an animal with its death wound, and gasped so weakly, 'I'm killed—take care of my body,' that when we covered his face and bore him away, we could not realize we were carrying a man's body. And now, my dear, if I should go as these men go, I have neither kith nor kin to mourn me—only you, and you must not mourn, for I shall be near you always and always, without sign or token, and when you feel my presence near, know that it is real, and not a seeming. For the great force of life that moves events in this world has but one symbol, but one vital manifestation, and that is love, and when a soul is touched with that, it is immortal."

But Martin Culpepper, with his dancing plumes, saw things in another light. Perhaps we always see things in another light when forty years have passed over them. But in his chapter "The Shrill Trump," in the Biography, he writes: "'O you mortal engines, whose rude throats the immortal Jove's dread clamours counterfeit,' O for the 'spirit-stirring drum, and the ear-splitting fife' 'in these piping times of peace.' Small wonder it was that with the clang and clank of sabre and artillery in his ears, with the huzzas of comrades and the sparkle of the wine of war in his eyes, our hero wrote the never dying words that made him famous. How the day comes back with all its pageantry, the caparisoned horses, the handsome men stepping to the music of inspiring melody, the clarion commands of the officers, and the steady rumble of a thousand feet upon the battle ground, going careless whether to death or immortality in deathless fame."

A curious thing is that deathless fame which Martin speaks of—a passing curious thing; for when word came of Henry Schnitzler's death, Mary Murphy, of the Thayer House, put off Gabriel Carnine's ring, and wept many tears in the stage driver's coffee and wore black in her hat for a year, and when Gabriel came home, she married him and all went as merrily as a wedding-bell. What covert tenderness or dream of gauzy romance was in her memory, the town could never know; but the Carnines' first boy was named Henry, and for many years after the war, she was known among the men, who do not understand a woman's heart, as the "War widow by brevet." Yet that was Henry's "deathless fame" in Sycamore Ridge, for the town has long since forgotten him, and even his name means nothing to our children, who see it on the bronze statue set up by the rich John Barclay to commemorate our soldier dead.

But John was our first war hero. And when he brought his battle scars home that September night in '61, for hours before the stage drove across Sycamore Creek the boy was filled with a nameless dread that he might be spanked.

They carried him on a cot to his mother's house, and put him in the great carved four-poster bed, and in the morning Miss Lucy came and hovered over him, and they talked of Captain Ward to her heart's content, and the boy told Miss Lucy the gossip of the hospital,—that Captain Ward was to be made a major,—and she kissed him and petted him until he was glad none of the boys was around to see the sickening spectacle. And then Miss Lucy and Mrs. Barclay told the child of their plans,—that Miss Lucy was going to war as a nurse, and that Mrs. Barclay was to teach the Sycamore Ridge school during the winter. And in a few weeks John was out of the hero business, working in Culpepper's store after school, and getting used to a limp that stayed with him all his life.

The next spring he traded a carbine that he brought home from the army for an Indian pony, and then he began business for himself. He organized the cows of the town into a town herd and took them every morning to pasture on the prairie. All day he rode in the open air, and the town boys came out to play with him, and they explored the cave by his mother's house, and with their sling-shots killed quails and prairie chickens and cooked them, and they played war through the long summer days. But John did not grow as the other boys grew; he remained undersized, and his limp put him at a disadvantage; so he had few fights, but he learned cunning, and got his way by strategy rather than by force—but he always had his way. He was strong; the memory of what he had seen and what he had been that one awful day in the battle made lines on his face; sometimes at night he would wake screaming, when he dreamed he was running away from the surgeon with the bloody knife in his teeth and that the man was going to throw an arm at him. And when he wished to bring Ellen Culpepper to time he would begin in a low terrorful voice, "And I saw—the man—take—a—g-r-e-a-t l-o-n-g knife d-r-i-p-p-i-n-g with r-e-d-b-l-o-o-d out of his t-e-e-t-h and go slish, k-slish," but he never got farther than this, for the girl would begin shaking, and if they were alone, would run to him and grab him and put her hand to his mouth to make him stop.

And so his twelfth year passed under the open sky in the sunshine in summer and in winter working after school in town where men were wanting, and where a boy could always find work. He grew brown and lean, and as his voice grew squeaky and he sang alto in the school, he became more and more crafty and masterful. The fact that his mother was the teacher, did not give him more rights in school than other boys, for she was a sensible woman, but it gave him a prestige on the playground that he was not slow to take. He was a born trader; and he kept what he got and got more. His weakness was music. He kept two cows in his herd in the summer time in return for the use of the melodeon at the Thayer House, and moved it to his own home and put it in the crowded little room, and practised on it at night when the other boys were loafing at the town pump. For a consideration in marbles he taught Buck Culpepper the chords in "G" on the guitar, and for further consideration taught him the chords in "D" and "C," and with the aid of Jimmy Fernald, aged nine, and Molly Culpepper, aged eleven, one with a triangle and the other with a pumpkin reed pipe, John organized his Band, which he led with his mouth-organ, and exhibited in Culpepper's barn, appropriating to himself as the director the pins charged at the door. Forty years afterward, when Molly called his attention to his failure to divide with the children, John Barclay smiled as he lifted his lame foot to a fat leather chair in front of him and said, "That was what we call the promoter's profit." And then the talk ran to Ellen, and John opened his great desk and from a box without a mark on it he brought out a tintype picture of Ellen at fourteen, a pink-cheeked child in short sleeves, with the fringe of her pantalets showing above her red striped stockings and beneath her bulging skirts, and with a stringy, stiff feather rising from the front of her narrow-rimmed hat.

During the time when he was going to school by day and working evenings and caring for the town herd through the summer, the war was dragging wearily on. Sometimes a soldier came home on a furlough and there was news of the Sycamore Ridge men, but oftener it was a season of waiting and working. The women and children cared for the farms and the stores as best they could and lived, heaven only knows how, and opened every newspaper with horror and dread, and glanced down the long list of names of the dead, the missing and the wounded, fearful of what they might see. Mrs. Barclay heard from Miss Lucy and through her kept track of Philemon Ward, who was transferred to another regiment after he was made major. And when he was made a colonel at Shiloh, there were tear blots on Miss Lucy's letter that told of it, and after Appomattox he was brevetted a general. As for Captain Culpepper, he came home a colonel, and Jake Dolan came home a first lieutenant. But Watts McHurdie came home with a letter from Lincoln about his song, and he was the greatest man of all of them.

It is odd that Sycamore Ridge grew during the war. Where the people came from, no one could say—yet they came, and young Barclay remembered even during the war of playing in the foundations and running over the rafters of new houses. But when the war closed, the great caravan that had lagged while the war was raging, began to trail itself steadily in front of Mrs. Barclay's door, through the streets of Sycamore Ridge and out over the western hills. Soldiers with their families passed, going to the free homesteads, and the line of movers' wagons began with daybreak and rumbled by far into the night. But hundreds of wagons stopped in Sycamore Ridge, and the stage came crowded every night. Brick buildings, the town's mortal pride, began showing their fronts on Main Street, and other streets in the town began to assert themselves. Mrs. Barclay's school grew from a score of children in 1864 to three rooms full in '65, and in '66 the whole town turned out to welcome General and Mrs. Ward, she that was Miss Lucy Barnes, and there was a reunion of "C" Company that night, and a camp-fire in Culpepper Hall, and the next day Lige Bemis was painting a sign which read "Philemon R. Ward, Attorney-at-Law, Pension Matters Promptly Attended To." And the first little Ward was born at the Thayer House and named Eli Thayer Ward.

The spring that found John Barclay sixteen years old found him a browned, gray-eyed, lumpy sort of a boy, big at the wrong places, and stunted at the wrong places, with a curious, uneven sort of an education. He knew all about Walden Pond; and he knew his Emerson—and was mad with passion to see the man; he had travelled over the world with Scott; had crossed the bridge with Caesar in his father's books; had roamed the prairie and the woods with Cooper's Indians; had gone into the hearts of men with Thackeray and Dickens, holding his mother's hand and listening to her voice; but he knew algebra only as a name, and rhetoric was a dictionary word with him. Of earthly possessions he had two horses, a bill of sale for his melodeon, a saddle, a wagon, a set of harness; four mouth-organs, one each in "A," "D," "E," and "C," all carefully rolled in Canton flannel on a shelf above his bed; one concertina,—a sort of German accordion,—five pigs, a cow, and a bull calf. Moreover, there were two rooms in the Barclay home; and the great rock was gone from the door of the cave, and a wooden door was in its place and the Barclays were using it for a spring-house. The boy had a milk route and sold butter to the hotel. But the chiefest treasure of the household was John's new music book. And while he played on his melodeon, Ellen Culpepper's eyes smiled from the pages and her voice moved in the melodies, and his heart began to feel the first vague vibration with the great harmony of life. And so the pimples on his chin reddened, and the squeak in his voice began to squawk, and his big milky eyes began to see visions wherein a man was walking through this vain world. As for Ellen Culpepper, her shoe tops were tiptoeing to her skirts, and her eyes were full of dreams of the warrior bold, "with spurs of gold," who "sang merrily his lay." And rising from these dreams, she always stepped on her feet. But that was a long time ago, and men and women have been born and loved, and married and brought children into the world since then. For it was a long time ago.



CHAPTER IV

The changes of time are hard to realize. One knows, of course, that the old man once was young. One understands that the tree once was a sapling, and conversely we know that the child will be a man and the gaunt sapling stuck in the earth in time will become a great spreading tree. But the miracle of growth passes not merely our understanding, but our imagination.

So though men tell us, and grow black in the face with the vehemence of telling, that the Sycamore Ridge of the sixties—a gray smudge of unpainted wooden houses bordering the Santa Fe trail, with the street merging into the sunflowers a block either way from the pump,—is the town that now lies hidden in the elm forest, with its thirty miles of paving and its scores of acres of wide velvet lawns, with its parks wherein fountains play, guarded by cannon discarded by the pride of modern war, with the court-house on the brink of the hill that once was far west of the town and with twenty-two thousand people whizzing around in trolleys, rattling about in buggies or scooting down the shady avenues in motor-cars—whatever the records may show, the real truth we know; the towns are not the same; the miracle of growth cannot fool us. And yet here is the miracle in the making. Always in John Barclay's eyes when he closed them to think of the first years that followed the war between the states, rose visions of yellow pine and red bricks and the litter and debris of building; always in his ears as he remembered those days were the confused noises of wagons whining and groaning under their heavy loads, of gnawing saws and rattling hammers, of the clink of trowels on stones, of the swish of mortar in boxes, and of the murmur of the tide of hurrying feet over board sidewalks, ebbing and flowing night and morning. In those days new boys came to town so rapidly that sometimes John met a boy in swimming whom he did not know, and, even in 1866, when Ellen and Molly Culpepper were giving a birthday party for Ellen, she declared that she "simply couldn't have all the new people there."

And so in the sixties the boy and the town went through their raw, gawky, ugly adolescence together. As streets formed in the town, ideas took shape in the boy's mind. As Lincoln Avenue was marked out on the hill, where afterward the quality of the town came to live, so in the boy's heart books that told him of the world outlined vague visions. Boy fashion he wrote to Bob Hendricks once or twice a month or a season, as the spirit moved him, and measured everything with the eyes of his absent friend. For he came to idealize Bob, who was out in the wonderful world, and their letters in those days were curious compositions—full of adventures by field and wood, and awkward references to proper books to read, and cures for cramps and bashfully expressed aspirations of the soul. Bob's father had become a general, and when the war closed, he was sent west to fight the Indians, and he took Lieutenant Jacob Dolan with him, and Bob sent to John news of the Indian fighting that glorified Bob further.

And when a letter came to the Ridge from Dolan announcing that he and the Hendricks family were coming back to the Ridge to live,—the general to look after his neglected property, and Dolan to start a livery-stable,—John heard the news with a throb of great joy. When a letter from Bob confirmed the news, John began to count the days. For the love of boys is the most unselfish thing in a selfish world. They met awkwardly and sheepishly at the stage, and greeted each other with grunts, and became inseparable. Bob came back tall, lanky, grinny, and rather dumb, and he found John undersized, wiry, masterful, and rather mooney, but strong and purposeful, for a boy. But each accepted the other as perfect in every detail.

Nothing Bob did changed John's attitude, and nothing John did made Bob waver in his faith in John. Did the boys come to John with a sickening story that Bob's sister made him bring a towel to the swimming hole, John glared at them a moment and then waved them aside with, "Well, you big brutes,—didn't you know what it was for?" When they reported to John that Bob's father was making him tip his hat to the girls, they got, instead of the outbreak of scorn they expected, "Well—did the girls tip back?" And when Bob's sister said that the Barclay boy—barefooted, curly-headed, dusty, and sunburned—looked like something the old cat had dragged into the house, the boy-was impudent to his sister and took a whipping from his father.

That fall the children of Sycamore Ridge assembled for the first time in their new seven-room stone schoolhouse, and the two boys were in the high school. The board hired General Philemon Ward to teach the twenty high school pupils, and it was then he first began to wear the white neckties which he never afterwards abandoned. Ward's first clash with John Barclay occurred when Ward organized a military company. John's limp kept him out of it, so he broke up the company and organized a literary society, of which he was president and Ellen Culpepper secretary, and a constitution was adopted exempting the president and secretary from work in the society. It was natural enough that Bob Hendricks should be made treasurer, and that these three officers should be the programme committee, and then a long line of vice-presidents and assistant secretaries and treasurers and monitors was elected by the society.

So John became the social leader of the group of boys and girls who were just coming out of kissing games into dances at one another's homes in the town. John decided who should be in the "crowd" and who might be invited only when a mixed crowd was expected. Fathers desiring trade, and mothers faithful to church ties, protested; but John Barclay had his way. It was his crowd. They called themselves the "Spring Chickens," and as John had money saved to spend as he pleased, he dictated many things; but he did not spend his money, he lent it, and his barn was stored with, skates and sleds and broken guns and scrap-iron held as security, while his pockets bulged with knives taken as interest.

As the winter waned and the Spring Chickens waxed fat in social honours, Bob Hendricks glanced up from his algebra one day, and discovered that little Molly Culpepper had two red lips and two pig-tail braids of hair that reached below her waist. Then and there he shot her deftly with a paper wad, chewed and fired through a cane pipe-stem, and waited till she wiped it off her cheek with her apron and made a face at him, before he plunged into the mysteries of x2 + 2xy + y2. And thus another old story began, as new and as fresh as when Adam and Eve walked together in the garden.

John Barclay was so busy during his last year in the Sycamore Ridge school that he often fancied afterwards that the houses on Lincoln Avenue in Culpepper addition must have come with the grass in the spring, for he has no memory of their building. Neither does he remember when General Madison Hendricks built the brick building on the corner of Main Street and Fifth Avenue, in which he opened the Exchange National Bank of Sycamore Ridge. Yet John remembered that his team and wagon were going all winter, hauling stone for the foundation of the Hendricks home on the hill—a great brick structure, with square towers and square "ells" rambling off on the prairie, and square turrets with ornate cornice pikes pricking the sky. For years the two big houses standing side by side—the Hendricks house and the Culpepper house, with its tall white pillars reaching to the roof, its double door and its two white wings spreading over the wide green lawn—were the show places of Sycamore Ridge, and the town was always divided in its admiration for them. John's heart was sadly torn between them. Yet he was secretly glad to learn from his mother that his Uncle Union's house in Haverhill had tall columns, green blinds on the white woodwork, and a wide hall running down the centre. For it made him feel more at home at the Culpeppers'. But when the Hendricks' piano came, after they moved into the big house, the boy's heart was opened afresh; and he spent hours with Bob Hendricks at the piano, when he knew he would be welcome at the Culpeppers'. He leased his town herd in the summer to Jimmie Fernald—giving him the right to take the cows to the commons around town upon the payment of five dollars a month to John for keeping out of the business, and passing Jimmie good-will. In the meantime, by day, John worked his team, and hired two others and took contracts for digging cellars. At nights he went to the country with his concertina and played for dances, making two dollars a night, and General Hendricks for years pointed with pride to the fact that when the Exchange National Bank of Sycamore Ridge opened for business the first morning, standing at the head of the line of depositors was John Barclay, with his concertina under his arm, just as he had returned from a country dance at daylight, waiting to be first in line, with $178.53 in his pocket to deposit. That deposit slip, framed, still hangs over the desk in the office of the president of the bank, and when John Barclay became famous, it was always a part of the "Art Loan Exhibit," held by the women in Barclay Memorial Hall.

That summer of '67 John capitulated to life, held his hands up for the shackles and put on shoes in summer for the first time. Also, he only went swimming twice—both times at night, and he bought his first box of paper collars and his mother tried to make his neckties like those in Dorman's store; but some way she did not get the hang of it, and John bought a Sunday necktie of great pride, and he and his mother agreed that it was off the tail of Joseph's coat of many colours. But he wore it only on state occasions. At work, he made an odd figure limping over the dirt heaps and into the excavations bossing men old enough to be his father. He wore a serious face in those days,—for a boy,—and his mouth was almost hard, but something burned in his eyes that was more than ambition, though that lighted his face like a flame, and he was always whistling or singing. At night he and Bob Hendricks wandered away together, and sometimes they walked out under the stars and talked as boys will talk of their little world and the big world about them, or sometimes they sat reading at one or the other's home, and one would walk home with the other, and the other walk a piece of the way back. They read poetry and mooned; "Lalla Rookh" appealed to John because of its music and melody, and both boys devoured Byron, and gobbled over the "Corsair" and the "Giaour" and "Childe Harold" with the book above the table, and came back from the barn on Sundays licking their chops after surreptitiously nibbling "Don Juan." But they had Captain Mayne Reid and Kingsley as an antidote, and they soon got enough of Byron.

The two boys persuaded each other to go away to school, and John chose the state university because it was cheap and because he heard he could get work in Lawrence to carry him through. He did not recollect that his mother had any influence in the matter; but in those days she always seemed to be sitting by the lamp in their little home, sewing, with his shirts and underwear strewn about her. She had a permanent place in the town schools, and the Barclay home had grown to a kitchen and two bedrooms as well as the big room with its fireplace. His mother's hair was growing gray at the temples, but her clear, firm, unwrinkled skin and strong broad jaw kept youth in her countenance, and as Martin Culpepper wrote in the Biography, where he names the pioneers of Sycamore Ridge whose lives influenced Watts McHurdie's, "the three graces, Faith, Hope, and Charity, were mirrored in her smile."

One night when the boy came in tired after his night's ramble, he left his mother, as he often did those last nights before he went away to school, bending over her work, humming a low happy-noted song, even though the hour was late. He lay in his bed beside the open window looking out into the night, dreaming with open eyes about life. Perhaps he actually dreamed a moment, for he did not hear her come into the room; but he felt her bend over him, and a tear dropped on his face from hers. He turned toward her, and she put her arms about his neck. Then she sobbed: "Oh, good-by, my little boy—good-by. I am coming here to bid you good-by, every night now." He kissed her hand, and she was silent a moment, and then she spoke: "I know this is the last of it all, John. You will never come back to me again—not you, but a man. And you will seem strange, and I will seem strange." She paused a moment to let the cramp in her throat leave, then she went on: "I was going to say so many things—when this time came, but they're all gone. But oh, my boy, my little tender-hearted boy—be a good man—just be a good man, John." And then she sobbed for an unrestrained minute: "O God, when you take my boy away, keep him clean, and brave, and kind, and—O God, make him—make him a good man." And with a pat and a kiss she rose and said as she left him, "Now good night, Johnnie, go to sleep."

* * * * *

In the Sycamore Ridge Banner for September 12, 1867, appeared some verses by Watts McHurdie, beginning:—

"Hail and farewell to thee, friend of my youth, Pilgrim who seekest the Fountain of Truth, Hail and farewell to thy innocent pranks, No more can I send thee for left-handed cranks. Farewell, and a tear laves the ink on my pen, For ne'er shall I 'noint thee with strap-oil again."

It was a noble effort, and in his notes to the McHurdie poems following the Biography published over thirty years after those lines were written, Colonel Culpepper writes: "This touching, though somewhat humorous, poem was written on the occasion of the departure for college of one who since has become listed with the world's great captains of finance—none other than Honourable John Barclay, whose fame is too substantial to need encomium in these humble pages. Suffice it to say that between these two men, our hero, the poet, and the great man of affairs, there has always remained the closest friendship, and each carries in his bosom, wrapped in the myrrh of fond memory, the deathless blossom of friendship, that sweetest flower in the conservatory of the soul."

The day before John left for Lawrence he met Lieutenant Jacob Dolan.

"So ye're going to college—ay, Johnnie?"

"Yes, Mr. Dolan," replied the boy.

"Well, they're all givin' you somethin', Johnnie: Watts here has given a bit of a posey in verse; and my friend, General Hendricks, I'm told, has given you a hundred-dollar note; and General Philemon Ward has given you Wendell Phillips' orations; and your sweetheart—God bless her, whoever she is—will be givin' ye the makins' of a broken heart; and your mother'll be givin' you her blessin'—and the saints' prayers go with 'em; and me, havin' known your father before you and the mother that bore you, and seein' her rub the roses off her cheeks tryin' to keep your ornery little soul in your worthless little body, I'll give you this sentiment to put in your pipe and smoke: John Barclay, man—if they ever be's a law agin damn fools, the first raid the officers should make is on the colleges. And now may ye be struck blind before ye get your education and dumb if it makes a fool of ye." And so slapping the boy on the back, Jake Dolan went down the street winding in and out among the brick piles and lumber and mortar boxes, whistling "Tread on the Tail of me Coat."

For life was all so fine and gay with Lieutenant Dolan in those days. And he whistled and sang, and thought what he pleased, and said what he pleased, and did what he pleased, and if the world didn't like it, the world could picket its horses and get out of Jacob Dolan's livery barn. For Mr. Dolan was thinking that from the livery-stable to the office of sheriff is but a step in this land of the free and home of the brave; so he carried his head back and his chest out and invited insult in the fond hope of provoking assault. He was the flower of the times,—effulgent, rather gaudy, and mostly red!



CHAPTER V

Good times came to Sycamore Ridge in the autumn. The dam across the creek was furnishing power for a flour-mill and a furniture factory. The endless worm of wagons that was wriggling through the town carrying movers to the West, was sloughing many of its scales in Sycamore Ridge. Martin Culpepper had been East with circulars describing the town and adjacent country. He had brought back three stage loads of settlers, and was selling lots in Culpepper's addition faster than they could be surveyed. The Frye blacksmith shop had become a wagon shop, and then a hardware store was added; the flag fluttered from the high flagstaff over the Exchange National Bank building, and all day long farmers were going from the mill to the bank. General Philemon Ward gave up school-teaching and went back to his law office; but he was apt to take sides with President Andrew Johnson too vigorously for his own good, and clients often avoided his office in fear of an argument. Still he was cheerful, and being only in his early thirties, looked at the green hills afar from his pasture and was happy. The Thayer House was filled with guests, and the Fernalds had money in the bank; Mary Murphy and Gabriel Carnine were living happily ever after, and Nellie Logan was clerking in Dorman's Dry Goods store and making Watts McHurdie understand that she had her choice between a preacher and a drummer. Other girls in the dining room of the Thayer House were rattling the dinner dishes and singing "Sweet Belle Mahone" and "Do you love me, Molly Darling?" to ensnare the travelling public that might be tilted back against the veranda in a mood for romance. And as John and Bob that hot September afternoon made the round of the stores and offices bidding the town good-by, it seemed to them that perhaps they were seizing the shadow and letting the substance fade. For it was such a good-natured busy little place that their hearts were heavy at leaving it.

But that evening John in his gorgeous necktie, his clean paper collar, his new stiff hat, his first store clothes, wearing proudly his father's silver watch and chain, set out to say good-by to Ellen Culpepper, and his mother, standing in the doorway of their home, sighed at his limp and laughed at his strut—the first laugh she had enjoyed in a dozen days.

John and Bob together went up the stone walk leading across a yard, still littered with the debris of building, to the unboxed steps that climbed to the veranda of the Culpepper house. There they met Colonel Culpepper in his shirt-sleeves, walking up and down the veranda admiring the tall white pillars. When he had greeted the boys, he put his thumbs in his vest holes and continued his parade in some pomp. The boys were used to this attitude of the colonel's toward themselves and the pillars. It always followed a hearty meal. So they sat respectfully while he marched before them, pointing occasionally, when he took his cigar from his mouth and a hand from his vest, to some feature of the landscape in the sunset light that needed emphatic attention.

"Yes, sir, young gentlemen," expanded the colonel, "you are doing the right and proper thing—the right and proper thing. Of all the avocations of youth, I conceive the pursuit of the sombre goddess of learning to be the most profitable—entirely the most profitable. I myself, though a young man,—being still on the right side of forty,—have reaped the richest harvest from my labours in the classic shades. Twenty years ago, young gentlemen, I, like you, left my ancestral estates to sip at the Pierian spring. In point of fact, I attended the institution founded by Thomas Jefferson, the father of the American democracy—yes, sir." He put his cigar back in his mouth and added, "Yes, sir, you are certainly taking a wise and, I may say, highly necessary step—"

Mrs. Culpepper, small, sprightly, blue-eyed, and calm, entered the veranda, and cut the colonel off with: "Good evening, boys. So you are going away. Well—we'll miss you. The girls will be right out."

But the colonel would not be quenched; his fires were burning deeply. "As I was saying, Mrs. Culpepper," he went on, "the classic training obtained from a liberal education such as it was my fortune—"

Mrs. Culpepper smiled blandly as she put in, "Now, pa, these boys don't care for that."

"But, my dear, let me finish. As I started to say: the flowers of poetry, Keats and his large white plumes, the contemplation of nature's secrets, the reflective study of—"

"Yes,—here's your coat now, pa," said the wife, returning from a dive into the hall. "John, how's your ma going to get on without you? And, pa, be sure don't forget the eggs for breakfast. I declare since we've moved up here so far from the stores, we nearly starve."

The colonel waited a second while a glare melted into a smile, and then backed meekly into the arms stretched high to hold his alpaca coat. As he turned toward the group, he was beaming. "If it were not," exclaimed the colonel, addressing the young men with a quizzical smile, "that there is a lady present—a very important lady in point of fact,—I might be tempted to say, 'I will certainly be damned!'" And with that the colonel lifted Mrs. Culpepper off her feet and kissed her, then lumbered down the steps and strode away. He paused at the gate to gaze at the valley and turned to look back at the great unfinished house, then swung into the street and soon his hat disappeared under the hill.

As he went Mrs. Culpepper said, "Let them say what they will about Mart Culpepper, I always tell the girls if they get as good a man as their pa, they will be doing mighty well."

Then the girls appeared bulging in hoops, and ruffles, with elbow sleeves, with a hint of their shoulders showing and with pink ribbons in their hair. Clearly it was a state occasion. The mother beamed at them a moment, and walked around Molly, saying, "I told you that was all right," and tied Ellen's hair ribbon over, while the young people were chattering, and before the boys knew it, she had faded into the dusk of the hall, and the clattering of dishes came to them from the rear of the house. John fancied he felt the heavy step of Buchanan Culpepper, and then he heard: "Don't you talk to me, Buck Culpepper, about woman's work. You'll do what I tell you, and if I say wipe dishes—" the voice was drowned by the rattle of a passing wagon. And soon the young people on the front porch were so busy with their affairs that the house behind them and its affairs dropped to another world. They say, who seem to know, that when any group of boys and girls meet under twenty-five serious years, the recording angel puts down his pen with, a sigh and takes a needed nap. But when the group pairs off, then Mr. Recorder pricks up his ears and works with both hands, one busy taking what the youngsters say, and the other busy with what they would like to say. And shame be it upon the courage of youth that what they would like to say fills the larger book. And marvel of marvels, often the book that holds what the boys would say is merely a copy of what the girls would like to hear, and so much of the work is saved to the angel.

It was nine o'clock when the limping boy and the slender girl followed the tall youth and the plump little girl down the walk from the Culpepper home through the gate and into the main road. And the couple that walked behind took the opposite direction from that which they took who walked ahead. Yet when John and Ellen reached the river and were seated on the mill-dam, where the roar of the falling water drowned their voices, Ellen Culpepper spoke first: "That looks like them over on the bridge. I can see Molly, and Bob's hat about three feet above her."

"I guess so," returned the boy. He was reaching behind him for clods and pebbles to toss into the white foaming flood below them. The girl reached back and got one, then another, then their hands met, and she pulled hers away and said, "Get me some stones." He gave her a handful, and she threw the pebbles away slowly and awkwardly, one at a time. There was a long gap in their talk while they threw the pebbles. The girl closed it with, "Ma made old Buck wipe the dishes." Then she giggled, "Poor Buckie."

John managed to say, "Yes, I heard him." Then he added, "What does your mother think of Bob?"

"Oh, she likes him fine. But she's glad you're all going away."

The boy asked why and the girl returned, "Watch me hit that log." She threw, and missed the water.

"Why?" persisted the boy.

The girl was digging in a crevice for a stone and said, "Can you get that out?"

John worked at it a moment and handed it to her with, "Why?"

She threw it, standing up to give her arm strength. She sat down and folded her hands and waited for another "why." When it came she said, "Oh, you know why." When he protested she answered, "Ma thinks Molly's too young."

"Too young for what?" demanded the boy, who knew.

"Too young to be going with boys."

There was a long pause, then he managed to say it, "She's no younger than you were—nor half as old."

"When?" returned the girl, giving him the broadside of her eyes for a second, and letting them droop. The eyes bewitched the boy, and he could not speak. At length the girl shivered, "It's getting cold—I must go home."

The boy found voice. "Aw no, Bob and Molly are still up there."

She started to rise, he caught her hand, but she pulled it away and resigned herself for a moment. Then she looked at him a long second and said, "Do you remember years ago at the Frye boy's party—when we were little tots, and I chose you?"

The boy nodded his head and turned full toward her with serious eyes. He devoured her feature by feature with his gaze in the starlight. The moon was just rising at the end of the mill-dam behind them, and its light fell on her profile. He cried out, "Yes, Ellen, do you—do you?"

She nodded her head and spoke quickly, "That was the time you got your hands stuck in the taffy and had to be soaked out."

They laughed. John tried to get the moment back. "Do you remember the rubber ring I gave you?"

She grew bold and turned to him with her heart in her face: "Yes—yes, John, and the coffee-bean locket. I've got them both in a little box at home." Then, scampering back to her reserve, she added, "You know ma says I'm a regular rat to store things away." She felt that the sudden reserve chilled him, for in a minute or two she said, looking at the bridge: "They're going now. We mustn't stay but a minute." She put her hand on the rock between them, and said, "You remember that night when you went away before?" Before he answered she went on: "I was counting up this afternoon, and it's six years ago. We were just children then."

Again the boy found his voice: "Ellen Culpepper, we've been going together seven years. Don't you think that's long enough?"

"We were just children then," she replied.

The boy leaned awkwardly toward her and their hands met on the rock, and he withdrew his as he asked, "Do you—do you?"

She bent toward him, and looked at him steadily as she nodded her head again and again. She rose to go, saying, "We mustn't stay here any longer."

He caught her hand to stop her, and said, "Ellen—Ellen, promise me just one thing." She looked her question. He cried, "That you won't forget—just that you won't forget."

She took his hand and stood before him as he sat, hoping to stay her. She answered: "Not as long as I live, John Barclay. Oh, not as long as I live." Then she exclaimed: "Now—" and her voice changed, "we just must go, John; Molly's gone, and it's getting late." She helped him limp over the rocks and up the steep road, but when they reached the level, she dropped his hand, and they walked home slowly, looking back at the moon, so that they might not overtake the other couple. Once or twice they stopped and sat on lumber piles in the street, talking of nothing, and it was after ten o'clock when they came to the gate. The girl looked anxiously up the walk toward the house. "They've come and gone," she said. She moved as if to go away.

"I wish you wouldn't go right in," he begged.

"Oh—I ought to," she replied. They were silent. The roar of the water over the dam came to them on the evening breeze. She put out her hand.

"Well," he sighed as he rested his lame foot, and started, "well—good-by."

She turned to go, and then swiftly stepped toward him, and kissed him, and ran gasping and laughing up the walk.

The boy gazed after her a moment, wondering if he should follow her, but while he waited she was gone, and he heard her lock the door after her. Then he limped down the road in a kind of swoon of joy. Sometimes he tried to whistle—he tried a bar of Schubert's "Serenade," but consciously stopped. Again and again under his breath as loud as he dared, he called the name "Ellen" and stood gazing at the moon, and then tried to hippety-hop, but his limp stopped that. Then he tried whistling the "Miserere," but he pitched it too high, and it ran out, so he sang as he turned across the commons toward home, and that helped a little; and he opened the door of his home singing, "How can I leave thee—how can I bear to part?" The light was burning in the kitchen, and he went to his mother and kissed her. His face was aglow, and she saw what had happened to him. She put him aside with, "Run on to bed now, sonny; I've got a little work out here." And he left her. In the sitting room only the moon gave light. He stood at the window a moment, and then turned to his melodeon. His hands fell on the major chord of "G," and without knowing what he was playing he began "Largo." He played his soul into his music, and looking up, whispered the name "Ellen" rapturously over and over, and then as the music mounted to its climax the whole world's mystery, and his personal thought of the meaning of life revelled through his brain, and he played on, not stopping at the close but wandering into he knew not what mazes of harmony. When his hands dropped, he was playing "The Long and Weary Day," and his mother was standing behind him humming it. When he rose from the bench, she ran her fingers through his hair and spoke the words of the song, "'My lone watch keeping,' John, 'my lone watch keeping.' But I think it has been worth while."

Then she left him and he went to bed, with the moon in his room, and the murmur of waters lulling him to sleep. But he looked out into the sky a long time before his dream came, and then it slipped in gently through the door of a nameless hope. For he wished to meet her in the moon that night, but when they did meet, the white veil of the falling waters of the dam blew across her face and he could not brush it away. For one is bold in dreams.

A little after sunrise the next morning John rode away from his mother's door, on one of his horses, leading the other one. He was going up the hill to get Bob Hendricks, and the two were to ride to Lawrence. He had been promised work, carrying newspapers, and the Yankee in him made him believe he could find work for the other horse. As the boy turned into Main Street waving his mother good-by, he saw the places where he and Ellen Culpepper had stopped the night before, and they looked different some way, and he could not realize that he was in the same street.

As he climbed the hill, he passed General Ward, working in his flower garden, and the man sprang over the fence and came into the road, and put his hand on the horse's bridle, saying, "Stop a minute, John: I just wanted to say something." He hesitated a moment before going on: "You know back where I came from—back in New England—the name of John Barclay stands for a good deal—more than you can realize, John. Your father was one of the first martyrs of our cause. I guess your mother never has told you, but I'm going to—your father gave up a business career for this cause. His father was rich—very rich, and your grandfather was set on your father going into business." John looked up the hill toward the Hendricks home, and Ward saw it, and mistook the glance for one of impatience. "Johnnie," said the man, his fine thin, features glowing with earnestness, "Johnnie—I wish I could get to your heart, boy. I want to make you hear what I have to say with your soul and not with your ears, and I know youth is so deaf. Your grandfather was angry when your father entered the ministry and came out here. He thought it was folly. The old man offered to give fifty thousand dollars to the Kansas-Nebraska cause, and that would have sent a good many men out here. But your father said no. He said money wouldn't win this cause. He said personal sacrifice was all that would win it. He said men must give up themselves, not their money, to make this cause win—and so he came; and there was a terrible quarrel, and that is why your mother has stayed. She had faith in God, too—faith that her life some way in His Providence would prove worth something. Your father and mother, John, believed in God—they believed in a God, not a Moloch; your father's faith has been justified. The death he died was worth millions to the cause of liberty. It stirred the whole North, as the miserable little fifty thousand dollars that Abijah Barclay offered never could have done. But your mother's sacrifice must find its justification in you. And she, not your father, made the final decision to give up everything for human freedom. She has endured poverty, Johnnie—" the man's voice was growing tense, and his eyes were ablaze; "you know how she worked, and if you fail her, if you do not live a consecrated life, John, your mother's life has failed. I don't mean a pious life; God knows I hate sanctimony. But I mean a life consecrated to some practical service, to an ideal—to some actual service to your fellows—not money service, but personal service. Do you understand?" Ward leaned forward and looked into the boy's face. He took hold of John's arm as he pleaded, "Johnnie—boy—Johnnie, do you understand?"

The boy answered, "Yes, General—I think I get your meaning." He picked up his bridle, and Ward relaxed his hold on the boy's arm. The man's hand dropped and he sighed, for he saw only a boy's face, and heard a boy's politeness in the voice that went on, "Thank you, General, give my love to Miss Lucy." And the youth rode on up the hill.

In a few minutes the boys were riding down the steep clay bank that led to the new iron bridge across the ford of the Sycamore, and for half an hour they rode chattering through the wood before they came into the valley and soon were Climbing the bluff which they had seen the night before from the Culpepper home. On the brow of the bluff Bob said, "Hold on—" He turned his horse and looked back. The sun was on the town, and across on the opposite hill stood the colonel's big house with its proud pillars. No trees were about it in those days, and it and the Hendricks house stood out clearly on the horizon. But on the top of the Culpepper home were two little figures waving handkerchiefs. The boys waved back, and John thought he could tell Ellen from her sister, and the night and its joy came back to him, and he was silent.

They had ridden half an hour without speaking when Bob Hendricks said, "Awful fine girls—aren't they?"

"That's what I've always told you," returned John.

After another quarter of a mile Bob tried it again. "The colonel's a funny old rooster—isn't he?"

"Well, I don't know. That day at the battle of Wilson's Creek when he walked out in front of a thousand soldiers and got a Union flag and brought it back to the line, he didn't look very funny. But he's windy all right."

Again, as they crossed a creek and the horses were drinking, Bob said: "Father thinks General Ward's a crank. He says Ward will keep harping on about those war bonds, and quarrelling because the soldiers got their pay in paper money and the bondholders in gold, until people will think every one in high places is a thief."

"Oh, Ward's all right," answered John. "He's just talking; he likes an argument, I guess. He's kind of built that way."

It was a poor starved-to-death school that the boys found at Lawrence in those days; with half a dozen instructors—most of whom were still in their twenties; with books lent by the instructors, and with appliances devised by necessity. But John was happy; he was making money with his horses, doing chores for his board, and carrying papers night and morning besides. The boy's industry was the marvel of the town. His limp got him sympathy, and he capitalized the sympathy. Indeed, he would have capitalized his soul, if it had been necessary. For his Yankee blood was beginning to come out. Before he had been in school a year he had swapped, traded, and saved until he had two teams, and was working them with hired drivers on excavation contracts. In his summer vacations he went to Topeka and worked his two teams, and by some sharp practice got the title to a third. He was rollicking, noisy, good-natured, but under the boyish veneer was a hard indomitable nature. He was becoming a stickler for his rights in every transaction.

"John," said Bob, one day after John had cut a particularly lamentable figure, gouging a driver in a settlement, "don't you know that your rights are often others' wrongs?"

John was silent a moment. He looked at the driver moving away, and then the boy's face set hard and he said: "Well—what's the use of blubbering over him? If I don't get it, some one else will. I'm no charitable institution for John Walruff's brewery!" And he snapped the rubber band on his wallet viciously, and turned to his books.

But on the other hand he wrote every other day to his mother and every other day to Ellen Culpepper with unwavering precision. He told his mother the news, and he told Ellen Culpepper the news plus some Emerson, something more of "Faust," with such dashes of Longfellow and Ruskin as seemed to express his soul. He never wrote to Ellen of money, and so strong was her influence upon him that when he had written to her after his quarrel with the driver, he went out in the night, hunted the man up, and paid him the disputed wages. Then he mailed Ellen Culpepper's letter, and was a lover living in an ethereal world as he walked home babbling her name in whispers to the stars. Often when this mood was not upon him, and a letter was due to Ellen, he went downstairs in the house where he lived and played the piano to bring her near to him. That never failed to change his face as by a miracle. "When John comes upstairs," wrote Bob Hendricks to Molly, "he is as one in a dream, with the mists of the music in his eyes. I never bother him then. He will not speak to me, nor do a thing in the world, until that letter is written, sealed, and stamped. Then he gets up, yawns and smiles sheepishly and perhaps hits me with a book or punches me with his fist, and then we wrestle over the room and the bed like bear cubs. After the wrestle he comes back to himself. I wonder why?"

And Ellen Culpepper read those letters from John Barclay over and over, and curiously enough she understood them; for there is a telepathy between spirits that meet as these two children's souls had met, and in that concord words drop out and only thoughts are merchandized. Her spirit grew with his, and so "through all the world she followed him."

But there came a gray dawn of a May morning when John Barclay clutched his bedfellow and whispered, "Bob, Bob—look, look." When the awakened one saw nothing, John tried to scream, but could only gasp, "Don't you see Ellen—there—there by the table?" But whatever it was that startled him fluttered away on a beam of sunrise, and Bob Hendricks rose with the frightened boy, and went to his work with him.

Two days later a letter came telling him that Ellen Culpepper was dead.

Now death—the vast baffling mystery of death—is Fate's strongest lever to pry men from their philosophy. And death came into this boy's life before his creed was set and hard, and in those first days while he walked far afield, he turned his face to the sky in his lonely sorrow, and when he cried to Heaven there was a silence.

So his heart curdled, and you kind gentlemen of the jury who are to pass on the case of John Barclay in this story, remember that he was only twenty years old, and that in all his life there was nothing to symbolize the joy of sacrifice except this young girl. All his boyish life she had nurtured the other self in his soul,—the self that might have learned to give and be glad in the giving. And when she went, he closed his Emerson and opened his Trigonometry, and put money in his purse.[1]

There came a time when Ellen Culpepper was to him as a dream. But she lived in her mother's eyes, and through all the years that followed the mother watched the little girl grow to maturity and into middle life with the other girls of her age. And even when the little headstone on the Hill slanted in sad neglect, Mrs. Culpepper's old eyes still saw Ellen growing old with her playmates. And she never saw John Barclay that she did not think of Ellen—and and what she would have made of him.

And what would she have made of him? Maybe a poet, maybe a dreamer of dreams—surely not the hard, grinding, rich man that he became in this world.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] To the Publisher.—"In returning the Mss. of the life of John Barclay, which you sent for my verification as to certain dates and incidents, let me first set down, before discussing matters pertaining to his later life, my belief that your author has found in the death of Ellen Culpepper an incident, humble though it is, that explains much in the character of Mr. Barclay. The incident probably produced a mental shock like that of a psychological earthquake, literally sealing up the spring of his life as it was flowing into consciousness at that time, and the John Barclay of his boyhood and youth became subterranean, to appear later in life after the weakening of his virility under the strain of the crushing events of his fifties. Yet the subterranean Barclay often appeared for a moment in his life, glowed in some kind act and sank again. Ellen Culpepper explains it all. How many of our lives are similarly divided, forced upward or downward by events, Heaven only knows. We do not know our own souls. I am sure John never knew of the transformation. Surely 'we are fearfully and wonderfully made.'... The other dates and incidents are as I have indicated.... Allow me to thank you for your kindness in sending me the Mss., and permit me to subscribe myself,

"Yours faithfully,

"Philemon R. Ward."



CHAPTER VI

John Barclay returned to Sycamore Ridge in 1872 a full-fledged young man. He was of a slight build and rather pale of face, for five years indoors had rubbed the sunburn off. During the five years he had been absent from Sycamore Ridge he had acquired a master's degree from the state university, and a license to practise law. He was distinctly dapper, in the black and white checked trousers, the flowered cravat, and tight-fitting coat of the period; and the first Monday after he and his mother went to the Congregational Church, whereat John let out his baritone voice, he was invited to sing in the choir. Bob Hendricks came home a year before John, and with Bob and Watts McHurdie singing tenor at one end of the choir, and John and Philemon Ward holding down the other end of the line, with Mrs. Ward, Nellie Logan, Molly Culpepper, and Jane Mason of Minneola,—grown up out of short dresses in his absence,—all in gay colours between the sombre clothes of the men, the choir in the Congregational Church was worth going miles to see—if not to hear.

Now you know, of course,—or if you do not know, it is high time you were learning,—that when Fate gives a man who can sing a head of curly hair, the devil, who is after us all, quits worrying about that young person. For the Old Boy knows that a voice and curly hair are mortgages on a young man's soul that few young fellows ever pay off. Now there was neither curly head nor music in all the Barclay tribe, and when John sang "Through the trees the night winds murmur, murmur low and sweet," his mother could shut her eyes and hear Uncle Leander, the black sheep of three generations of Thatchers. So that the fact that John had something over a thousand dollars to put in General Hendricks' bank, and owned half a dozen town lots in the various additions to the town, made the mother thankful for the Grandfather Barclay's blood in him. But she saw a soul growing into the boy's face that frightened her. What others admired as strength she feared, for she knew it was ruthlessness. What others called shrewdness she, remembering his Grandfather Barclay, knew might grow into blind, cruel greed, and when she thought of his voice and his curly hair, and recalled Uncle Leander, the curly-headed, singing ne'er-do-well of her family, and then in the boy's hardening mouth and his canine jaw saw Grandfather Barclay sneering at her, she was uncertain which blood she feared most. So she managed it that John should go into partnership with General Ward, and Bob Hendricks managed it that the firm should have offices over the bank, and also that the firm was made attorneys for the bank,—the highest mark of distinction that may come to a law firm in a country town. The general realized it and was proud. But he thought the young man took it too much as a matter of course.

"John," said the general, one day, as they were dividing their first five-hundred-dollar fee, "you're a lucky dog. Everything comes so easily with you. Let me tell you something; I've figured this out: if you don't give it back some way—give it back to the world, or society, or your fellows,—or God, if you like to bunch your good luck under one head,—you're surely going to suffer for it. There is no come-easy-go-easy in this world. I've learned that much of the scheme of things."

"You mean that I've got to pay as I go, or Providence will keep books on me and foreclose?" asked John, as he stood patting the roll of bills in his trousers pocket.

"That's the idea, son," smiled the elder man.

The younger man put his hand to his chin and grinned. "I suppose," he replied, "that's why so many men keep the title to their religious proclivities in their wife's name." He went out gayly, and the elder man heard the boyish limp almost tripping down the stairs. Ward walked to the window, straightening his white tie, and stood looking into the street at the young man shaking hands and bowing and raising his hat as he went. Ward's hair was graying at the temples, and his thin smooth face was that of a man who spends many hours considering many things, and he sighed as he saw John turn a corner and disappear.

"No, Lucy, that's not it exactly," said the general that afternoon, as he brought the sprinkler full of water to the flower bed for the eighth time, and picketed little Harriet Beecher Ward out of the watermelon patch, and wheeled the baby's buggy to the four-o'clocks, where Mrs. Ward was working. "It isn't that he is conceited—the boy isn't that at all. He just seems to have too little faith in God and too much in the ability of John Barclay. He thinks he can beat the game—can take out more happiness for himself than he puts in for others."

The wife looked up and put back her sunbonnet as she said, "Yes, I believe his mother thinks something of the kind."

One of the things that surprised John when he came home from the university was the prominence of Lige Bemis in the town. When John left Sycamore Ridge to go to school, Bemis was a drunken sign-painter married to a woman who a few years before had been the scandal of half a dozen communities. And now though Mrs. Bemis was still queen only of the miserable unpainted Bemis domicile in the sunflowers at the edge of town, Lige Bemis politically was a potentate of some power. General Hendricks consulted Bemis about politics. Often he was found in the back room of the bank, and Colonel Culpepper, although he was an unterrified Democrat, in his campaign speeches referred to Bemis as "a diamond in the rough." John was sitting on a roll of leather one day in Watts McHurdie's shop talking of old times when Watts recalled the battle of Sycamore Ridge, and the time when Bemis came to town with the Red Legs and frightened Mrs. Barclay.

"Yes—and now look at him," exclaimed John, "dressed up like a gambler, and referred to in the Banner as 'Hon. E. W. Bemis'! How did he do it?"

McHurdie sewed two or three long stitches in silence. He leaned over from his bench to throw his tobacco quid in the sawdust box under the rusty stove, then the little man scraped his fuzzy jaw reflectively with his blackened hand as if about to speak, but he thought better of it and waxed his thread. He showed his yellow teeth in a smile, and motioned John to come closer. Then he put his head forward, and whispered confidentially:—

"What'd you ruther do or go a-fishing?"

"But why?" persisted the young man.

"Widder who?" returned Watts, grinning and putting his hand to his ear.

When John repeated his question the third time, McHurdie said:—

"I know a way you can get rich mighty quick, sonny." And when the boy refused to "bite," Watts went on: "If any one asks you what Watts McHurdie thinks about politics so long as he is in the harness business, you just take the fellow upstairs, and pull down the curtain, and lock the door, and tell him you don't know, and not to tell a living soul."

With Bob Hendricks, John had little better success in solving the mystery of the rise of Bemis. "Father says he's effective, and he would rather have him for him than against him," was the extent of Bob's explanation.

Ward's answer was more to the point. He said: "Lige Bemis is a living example of the power of soft soap in politics. We know—every man in this county knows—that Lige Bemis was a horse thief before the war, and that he was a cattle thief and a camp-follower during the war; and after the war we know what he was—he and the woman he took up with. Yet here he has been a member of the legislature and is beginning to be a figure in state politics,—at least the one to whom the governor and all the fellows write when they want information about this county. Why? I'll tell you: because he's committed every crime and can't denounce one and goes about the country extenuating things and oiling people up with his palaver. Now he says he is a lawyer—yes, sir, actually claims to be a lawyer, and brought his diploma into court two years ago, and they accepted it. But I know, and the court knows, and the bar knows it was forged; it belonged to his dead brother back in Hornellsville, New York. But Hendricks downstairs said we needed Lige in the county-seat case, so he is a member of the bar, taking one hundred per cent for collecting accounts for Eastern people, and giving the country a black eye. A man told me he was on over fifty notes for people at the bank; he signs with every one, and Hendricks never bothers him. He managed to get into all the lodges, right after the war when they were reorganized, and he sits up with the sick, and is pall-bearer—regular professional pall-bearer, and I don't doubt gets a commission for selling coffins from Livingston." Ward rose from the table his full six feet and put his hands in his pocket and stretched his legs as he added, "And when you think how many Bemises in the first, second, or third degree there are in this government, you wonder if the Democrats weren't right when they declared the war was a failure."

The general spoke as he did to John partly in anger and partly because he thought the youth needed the lesson he was trying to implant. "You know, Martin," explained the general, a few days later, to Colonel Culpepper, "John has come home a Barclay—not a Barclay of his father's stripe. He has taken back, as they say. It's old Abijah—with the mouth and jaw of a wolf. I caught him palavering with a juror the other day while we had a case trying."

The colonel rested his hands on his knees a moment in meditation and smiled as he replied: "Still, there's his mother, General. Don't ever forget that the boy's mother is Mary Barclay; she has bred most of the wolf out of him. And in the end her blood will tell."

And now observe John Barclay laying the footing stones of his fortune. He put every dollar he could get into town lots, paying for all he bought and avoiding mortgages. Also he joined Colonel Culpepper in putting the College Heights upon the market. "For what," explained the colonel, when the propriety of using the name for his addition was questioned, when no college was there nor any prospect of a college for years to come—"what is plainer to the prophetic eye than that time will bring to this magnificent city an institution of learning worthy of our hopes? I have noticed," added the colonel, waving his cigar broadly about him, "that learning is a shy goddess; she has to be coaxed—hence on these empyrean heights we have provided for a seat of learning; therefore College Heights. Look at the splendid vista, the entrancing view, in point of fact." It was the large white plumes dancing in the colonel's prophetic eyes. So it happened that more real estate buyers than clients came to the office of Ward and Barclay. But as the general that fall had been out of the office running for Congress on the Greeley ticket, still protesting against the crime of paying the soldiers in paper and the bondholders in gold, he did not miss the clients, and as John saw to it that there was enough law business to keep Mrs. Ward going, the general returned from the canvass overwhelmingly beaten, but not in the least dismayed; and as Jake Dolan put it, "The general had his say and the people had their choice—so both are happy."

As the winter deepened John and Colonel Culpepper planted five hundred elm trees on the campus on College Heights, lining three broad avenues leading from the town to the campus with the trees. John rode into the woods and picked the trees, and saw that each one was properly set. And the colonel noticed that the finest trees were on Ellen Avenue and spoke of it to Mrs. Culpepper, who only said, "Yes, pa—that's just like him." And the colonel looked puzzled. And when the colonel added, "They say he is shining up to that Mason girl from Minneola, that comes here with Molly," his wife returned, "Yes, I expected that sooner than now." The colonel gave the subject up. The ways of women were past his finding out. But Mrs. Culpepper had heard Jane Mason sing a duet in church with John Barclay, and the elder woman had heard in the big contralto voice of the girl something not meant for the preacher. And Mrs. Culpepper heard John answer it, so she knew what he did not know, what Jane Mason did not know, and what only Molly Culpepper suspected, and Bob Hendricks scoffed at.

As for John, he said to Bob: "I know why you always want me to go over with you and Molly to get the Mason girl—by cracky, I'm the only fellow in town that will let you and Molly have the back seat coming home without a fuss! No, Robbie—you don't fool your Uncle John." And so when there was to be special music at the church, or when any other musical event was expected, John and Bob would get a two-seated buggy, and drive to Minneola and bring the soloist back with them. And there would be dances and parties, and coming from Minneola and going back there would be much singing. "The fox is on the hill, I hear him calling still," was a favourite, but "Come where the lilies bloom" rent the midnight air between the rival towns many times that winter and spring of '73. And never once did John try to get the back seat. But there came a time when Bob Hendricks told him that Molly told him that Jane had said that Molly and Bob were pigs—never to do any of the driving. And the next time there was a trip to Minneola, John said as the young people were seated comfortably for the return trip, "Molly, I heard you said that I was a pig to do all the driving, and not let you and Bob have a chance. Was that true?"

"No—but do you want to know who did say it?" answered Molly, and Jane Mason looked straight ahead and cut in with, "Molly Culpepper, if you say another word, I'll never speak to you as long as I live." But she glanced down at Barclay, who caught her eye and saw the smile she was swallowing, and he cried: "I don't believe you ever said it, Molly,—it must have been some one else." And when they had all had their say,—all but Jane Mason,—John saw that she was crying, and the others had to sing for ten minutes without her, before they could coax away her temper. And crafty as he was, he did not know it was temper—he thought it was something entirely different.

For the craft of youth always is clumsy. The business of youth is to fight and to mate. Wherever there is young blood, there is "boot and horse," and John Barclay in his early twenties felt in him the call for combat. It came with the events that were forming about him. For the war between the states had left the men restless and unsatisfied who had come into the plain to make their homes. They had heard and followed in their youth the call John Barclay was hearing, and after the war was over, they were still impatient with the obstacles they found in their paths. So Sycamore Ridge and Minneola, being rival towns, had to fight. The men who made these towns knew no better settlement than the settlement by force. And even during his first six months at home from school, when John sniffed the battle from afar, he was glad in his soul that the fight was coming. Sycamore Ridge had the county-seat; but Minneola, having a majority of the votes in the county, was trying to get the county-seat, and the situation grew so serious for Sycamore Ridge that General Hendricks felt it necessary to defeat Philemon Ward for the state senate so that Sycamore Ridge could get a law passed that would prevent Minneola's majority from changing the county-seat. This was done by a law which Hendricks secured, giving the county commissioners the right to build a court-house by direct levy, without a vote of the people,—a court-house so large that it would settle the county-seat matter out of hand.

The general, however, took no chances even with his commissioners. For he had his son elected as one, and with the knowledge that John was investing in real estate in the Ridge and had an eye for the main chance, the general picked John for the other commissioner. The place was on the firing-line of the battle, and John took it almost greedily. As the spring of '73 opened, there were alarms and rumours of strife on every breeze, and youth was happy and breathed the fight into its nostrils like a balsam. For all the world of Sycamore Ridge was young then, and all the trees were green in the eyes of the men who kept up the town. Each town had its hired desperadoes, and there were pickets about each village, and drills in the streets of the two towns, and a martial spirit all over the county. And as John limped about his tasks in those stirring spring days, he felt that he was coming into his own. But it was all a curious mock combat,—that between the towns,—for though the pickets drilled, and the bad men swaggered on the streets, and the bullies roared their anathemas, the social relations between the towns were not seriously disturbed. Youths and maidens came from Minneola to the Ridge for parties and dances, and from the Ridge young men went to Minneola to weddings and festivals of a social nature unmolested, for it takes a real war—and sometimes more than that—to put a bar across the mating ground of youth. So Bob and Molly and John drove to Minneola time and again for Jane Mason, and other boys and girls came and went from town to town, while the bitterness and the bickering and the mimic war between the rival communities went on.

Dolan was made sheriff, and Bemis county attorney, and with those two officers and a majority of the county commissioners the Ridge had the forces of administration with her. And so one night Minneola came with her wrinkled front of war; viz., forty fighting men under Gabriel Carnine and an ox team, prepared to take the county records by force and haul them home by main strength. But Lycurgus Mason, whose wife had locked him in the cellar that night to keep him from danger, was the cackling goose that saved Rome; for when, having escaped his wife's vigilance, he came riding down the wind from Minneola to catch up with his fellow-townsmen, his clatter aroused the men of the Ridge, and they hurried to the court-house and greeted the invaders with half a thousand armed men in the court-house yard. And in a crisis where craft and cunning would not help him, courage came out of John Barclay's soul for the first time and into his life as he limped through the guns into the open to explain to the men from Minneola when they finally arrived that Lycurgus Mason had not betrayed them, but had rushed into the town, thinking his friends were there ahead of him. It was a plucky thing for John to do, considering that his death would stop the making of the levy for the court-house that was to be recorded in a few days. But the young man's blood tingled with joy as he jumped the court-house fence and went back to his men. There was something like a smile from Jane Mason in his joy, but chiefly it was the joy that youth has in daring, that thrilled him. And the next day, or perhaps it was the next,—at any rate, it was a Sunday late in June,—when an armed posse from Minneola came charging down on the town at noon, John ran from his office unseen, over the roofs of buildings upon which as a boy he had romped, and ducking through a second-story window in Frye's store, got two kegs of powder, ran out of the back door, under the exposed piling supporting the building, put the two kegs of powder in a wooden culvert under the ammunition wagons of the Minneola men, who were battling with the town in the street, and taking a long fuse in his teeth, crawled back to the alley, lit the fuse, and ran into the street to look into the revolver of J. Lord Lee—late of the Red Legs—and warn him to run or be blown up with the wagons. And when the explosion came, knocking him senseless, he woke up a hero, with the town bending over him, and Minneola's forces gone.

And so John and the town had their fling together. And we who sit among our books or by our fire—or if not that by our iron radiator exuding its pleasance and comfort—should not sniff at that day when blood pulsed quicker and joy was keener, and life was more vivid than it is to-day.

Thirty-five years later—in August, 1908, to be exact—the general, in his late seventies, sat in McHurdie's harness shop while the poet worked at his bench. On the floor beside the general was the historical edition of the Sycamore Ridge Banner—rather an elaborate affair, printed on glossy paper and bedecked with many photogravures of old scenes and old faces. A page of the paper was devoted to the County Seat War of '73. The general had furnished the material for most of the article,—though he would not do the writing,—and he held the sheet with the story upon it in his hand. As he read it in the light of that later day, it seemed a sordid story of chicanery and violence—the sort of an episode that one would expect to find following a great war. The general read and reread the old story of the defeat of Minneola, and folded his paper and rolled it into a wand with which he conjured up his spirit of philosophy. "Heigh-ho," he sighed. "We don't know much, do we?"

McHurdie made no reply. He bent closely over his work, and the general went on: "I was mighty mad when Hendricks defeated me for the state senate in '72, just to get that law passed cheating Minneola out of a fair vote on the court-house question. But it's come out all right."

The harness maker sewed on, and the general reflected. Finally the little man at the bench turned his big dimmed eyes on his visitor, and asked, "Did you think, General, that you knew more than the Lord about making things come out right?" There was no reply and McHurdie continued, "Well, you don't—I've got that settled in my mind."

There was silence for a time, and Ward kept beating his leg with the paper wand in his hand. "Watts," said the general, finally, "I know what it was—it was youth. John Barclay had to go through that period. He had to fight and wrangle and grapple with life as he did. Do you remember that night the Minneola fellows came up with their ox team and their band of killers to take the county records—" and there was more of it—the old story of the town's wild days that need not be recorded, and in the end, in answer to some query from the general on John's courage, Watts replied, "John was always a bold little fice—he never lacked brass."

"Was he going with Jane Mason then, Watts,—I forget?" queried the general.

"Yes—yes," replied McHurdie. "Don't you remember that very next night she sang in the choir—well, John had brought her over from Minneola two days before, and that Sunday when the little devil went in the culvert across Main Street and blew up the Minneola wagons, Jane was in town that day—I remember that; and man—man—I heard her voice say things to him in the duet that night that she would have been ashamed to put in words."

The two old men were silent. "That was youth, too, Watts,—fighting and loving, and loving and fighting,—that's youth," sighed the general.

"Well, Johnnie got his belly full of it in his day, as old Shakespeare says, Phil—and in your day you had yours, too. Every dog, General—every dog—you know." The two voices were silent, as two old men looked back through the years.

McHurdie put the strap he was working upon in the water, and turned with his spectacles in his hands to his comrade. "Maybe it's this way: with a man, it's fighting and loving before we get any sense; and with a town it's the same way, and I guess with the race it's the same way—fighting and loving and growing sensible after it's over. Maybe so—maybe so, Phil, comrade, but man, man," he said as he climbed on his bench, "it's fine to be a fool!"



CHAPTER VII

In Sycamore Ridge every one knows Watts McHurdie, and every one takes pride in the fact that far and wide the Ridge is known as Watts McHurdie's town, and this too in spite of the fact that from Sycamore Ridge Bob Hendricks gained his national reputation as a reformer and the further fact that when the Barclays went to New York or Chicago or to California for the winter in their private car, they always registered from Sycamore Ridge at the great hotels. One would think that the town would be known more as Hendricks' town or Barclay's town; but no—nothing of the kind has happened, and when the rich and the great go forth from the Ridge, people say: "Oh, yes, Sycamore Ridge—that's Watts McHurdie's town, who wrote—" but people from the Ridge let the inquirers get no farther; they say: "Exactly—it's Watts McHurdie's town—and you ought to see him ride in the open hack with the proprietor of a circus when it comes to the Ridge and all the bands and the calliope are playing Watts' song. The way the people cheer shows that it is really Watts McHurdie's town." So when Colonel Martin Culpepper wrote the "Biography of Watts McHurdie" which was published together with McHurdie's "Complete Poetical and Philosophical Works," there was naturally much discussion, and the town was more or less divided as to what part of the book was the best. But the old settlers,—those who, during the drouth of '60, ate mince pies with pumpkins as the fruit and rabbit meat as the filling and New Orleans black-strap as the sweetening, the old settlers who knew Watts before he became famous,—they like best of all the chapters in the colonel's Biography the one entitled "At Hymen's Altar." And here is a curious thing about it: in that chapter there is really less of Watts and considerably more of Colonel Martin Culpepper than in any other chapter.

But the newcomers, those who came in the prosperous days of the 70's or 80's, never could understand the partiality of the old settlers for the "Hymen's Altar" chapter. Lycurgus Mason also always took the view that the "Hymen" chapter was drivel.

"Now, John, be sensible—" Lycurgus insisted one night in 1903 when the two were eating supper in Barclay's private car on a side-track in Arizona; "don't be like my wife—she always drools over that chapter, too. But you know my wife—" Lycurgus always referred to Mrs. Mason with a grand gesture as to his dog or his horse, which were especially desirable chattels. "My wife,—it's just like a woman,—she sits and reads that, and laughs and weeps, and giggles and sniffs, and I say, 'What's the matter with you, anyway?'"

John Barclay pushed a button. To the porter he said, "Bring me that little red book in my satchel." The book had been published but a few weeks, and John always carried a copy around with him in those days to give to a friend. When the porter brought the book, Barclay read aloud, "Ah, truly hath the poet said, 'Marriages are made in heaven.'"

But Lycurgus Mason pulled his napkin from under his chin and moved back from the table, dusting the crumbs from his obviously Sunday clothes. "There you go—that's it; 'as the poet says.' John, if you heard that 'as the poet says' as often as I do—" He could not finish the figure. But he sniffed out his disgust with "as the poet says." "It wasn't so bad when we were in the hotel, and she was busy with something else. But now—but now—" he repeated it the third time, "but now—honest, every time that woman goes to get up a paper for the Hypatia Club, she gets me in the parlour, and rehearses it to me, and the dad-binged thing is simply packed full of 'as the poet sayses.' And about that marriages being made in heaven, I tell my wife this: I say, 'Maybe so, but if they are, I know one that was made on a busy day when the angels were thinking of something else.'"

And John Barclay, who knew Mrs. Mason and knew Lycurgus, knew that he would as soon think of throwing a bomb at the President as to say such a thing to her; so John asked credulously: "You did? Well, well! Say, what did she say to that?"

"That's it—" responded Lycurgus. "That's it. What could she say? I had her." He walked the length of the room proudly, with his hands thrust into his pockets.

Barclay moved his chair to the rear of the car, where he sat smoking and looking into the clear star-lit heavens above the desert. And his mind went back thirty years to the twilight in June after he had set off the powder keg in the culvert under Main Street in Sycamore Ridge, and he tried to remember how Jane Mason got over from Minneola—did he bring her over the day before, or was she visiting at the Culpeppers', or did she come over that day? It puzzled him, but he remembered well that in the Congregational choir he and Jane sang a duet in an anthem, "He giveth his beloved sleep." And he hummed the old aria, a rather melancholy tune, as he sat on the car platform in Arizona that night, and her voice came back—a deep sweet contralto that took "G" below middle "C" as clearly as a tenor, and in her lower register there was a passion and a fire that did not blaze in the higher notes. For those notes were merely girlish and untrained. That June night in '73 was the first night that he and Jane Mason ever had lagged behind as they walked up the hill with Bob and Molly. And what curious things stick in the memory! The man on the rear of the car remembered that as they left the business part of Main Street behind and walked up the hill, they came to a narrow cross-walk, a single stone in width, and that they tried to walk upon it together, and that his limp made him jostle her, and she said, "We mustn't do that."

"What?" he inquired.

"Oh—you know—walk on one stone. You know what it's a sign of."

"Do you believe in signs?" he asked. She kept hold of his arm, and kept him from leaving the stone. She was taller than he by a head, and he hated himself for it. They managed to keep together until they crossed the street and came into the broader walk. Then she drew a relieved breath and answered: "Oh, I don't know. Sometimes I do." They were lagging far behind their friends, and the girl hummed a tune, then she said, "You know I've always believed in my 'Star light—star bright—first star I've seen to-night,' just as I believe in my prayers." And she looked up and said, "Oh, I haven't said it yet." She picked out her star and said the rhyme, closing with, "I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish to-night."

And sitting on the car end in Arizona thirty years after, he tried to find her star in the firmament above him. He was a man in his fifties then, and the night she showed him her star was more than thirty years gone by. But he remembered. We are curious creatures, we men, and we remember much more than we pretend to. For our mothers in many cases were women, and we take after them.

As Barclay stood in the door of his car debating whether or not to go in, the light from the chimney of the sawmill on the hill attracted his attention, and because he was in a mood for it, the flying sparks trailing across the night sky reminded him of the fireworks that Fourth of July in 1873, when he and Jane Mason and Bob and Molly spent the day together, picnicking down in the timber and coming home to dance on the platform under the cottonwood-bough pavilion in the evening. It was a riotous day, and Bob and Molly being lovers of long acceptance assumed a paternal attitude to John and Jane that was charming in the main, but sometimes embarrassing. And of all the chatter he only remembered that Jane said: "Think how many years these old woods have been here—how many hundred years—maybe when the mound-builders were here! Don't you suppose that they are used to—to young people—oh, maybe Indian lovers, and all that, and don't you suppose the trees see these young people loving and marrying, and growing old and ugly and unhappy, and that they some way feel that they are just a little tired of it all?"

If any one replied to her, he had no recollection of it, for after that he saw the dance and heard the music, and then events seemed to slip along without registering in his memory. There must have been the fifth and the sixth of July in 1873, for certainly there was the seventh, and that was Sunday; he remembered that well enough, for in the morning there was a council in his office to discuss ways and means for the week's work in the county-seat trouble. Tuesday was the day which the new law designated as the one when the levy must be made for the court-house improvements that would hold the county-seat in Sycamore Ridge. At four o'clock, after the Sunday council, John and Bob drove out of Sheriff Jake Dolan's stable with his best two-seated buggy, and told him they would be back from Minneola at midnight or thereabout after taking Jane Mason home, and the two boys drove down Main Street with the girls, waving to every one with their hats, while the girls waved their parasols, and the town smiled; for though all the world loves a lover, in Sycamore Ridge it has been the custom, since the days when Philemon Ward first took Miss Lucy out to drive, for all the town to jeer at lovers as they pass down street in buggies and carriages! And so thirty years slipped from Barclay as he stood in the doorway of his car looking at the Arizona stars. A flicker of light high up in the sky-line seemed to move. It was the headlight of a train coming over the mountain. A switchman with a lantern was passing near the car, and Barclay called to him, "Is that headlight No. 2?" And when the man affirmed Barclay's theory, he asked, "How long does it take it to get down here?"