"Oh, she comes a-humming," replied the man. "If she doesn't jump the track, she'll be down in eight minutes."

Inside the car Barclay heard a watch snap, and knew that Lycurgus Mason didn't believe anything of the kind and proposed to get at the facts. So Barclay sat down on the platform; but his mind went back to the old days, and the ride through the woods along the Sycamore that Sunday night in July came to him, with all its fragrance and stillness and sweetness. He recalled that they came into the prairie just as the meadow-lark was crying its last plaintive twilight trill, and the western sky was glowing with a rim of gold upon the tips of the clouds. The beauty of the prairie and the sky and the calm of the evening entered into their hearts, and they were silent. Then they left the prairie and went into the woods again, on the river road. And before they came out of that road into the upland, Fate turned a screw that changed the lives of all of them. For in a turn of the road, in a deep cut made by a ravine, Gabriel Carnine, making the last stand for Minneola, stepped into the path and took the horses by the bridles. The shock that John felt that night when he realized what had happened came back even across the years. And as the headlight far up in the mountain above the desert slipped into a tunnel, though it flashed out again in a few seconds, while it was gone, all the details of the kidnapping of the young people in the buggy hurried across his mind. Even the old anxiety that he felt lest Sycamore Ridge would think him a traitor to their cause, when they should find that he was not there to sign the tax levy and save the court-house and the county-seat, came back to him as he gazed at the mountain, waiting for the headlight, and he remembered how he made a paper trail of torn bits from a Congregational hymn-book, left in Bob's pocket from the morning service, dropping the bits under the buggy wheels in the dust so that the men from the Ridge would see the trail and follow the captives. In his memory he saw Jake Dolan, who had followed the trail where it led to Carnine's farm, come stumbling into the farm-house Tuesday where they were hidden, and John, in memory, heard Jake whisper that he had left his dog with the rescuing party to lead the rescuers to him if he was on the right trail and did not return.

And then as Barclay's mind went back to the long Tuesday, when he should have been at the Ridge to sign the tax levy, the headlight flashed out of the tunnel. But these were fading pictures. The one image that was in his mind—clear through all the years—was of a wood and a tree,—a great, spreading, low-boughed elm, near Carnine's house where the young people were held prisoners, and Jane Mason sitting with her back against the tree, and lying on the dry grass at her feet his own slight figure; sometimes he was looking up at her over his brow, and sometimes his head rested on the roots of the tree beside her, and she looked down at him and they talked, and no one was near. For through youth into middle life, and into the dawn of old age, That Day was marked in his life. The day of the month—he forgot which it was. The day of the week—that also left him, and there came a time when he had to figure back to recall the year; but for all that, there was a radiance in his life, an hour of calm joy that never left him, and he called it only—That Day. That Day is in every heart; in yours, my dear fat Mr. Jones, and in yours, my good dried-up Mrs. Smith; and in yours, Mrs. Goodman, and in yours, Mr. Badman; maybe it is upon the sea, or in the woods, or among the noises of some great city—but it is That Day. And no other day of all the thousands that have come to you is like it.

Why should he remember the ugly farm-yard, the hard faces of the men, the straw-covered frame they called a barn, and the unpainted house? All these things passed by him unrecorded, as did the miserable fare of the table, the hard bed at night, and the worry that must have gnawed at his nerves to know that perhaps the town was thinking him false to it, or that his mother, guessing the truth, was in pain with terror, or to feel that a rescuing party coming at the wrong time would bring on a fight in which the girls would be killed. Only the picture of Jane Mason, fine and lithe and strong, with the pink cheeks of twenty, and the soft curves of childhood still playing about her chin and throat as he saw it from the ground at her feet,—that picture was etched into his heart, and with it the recollection of her eyes when she said, "John,—you don't think I—I knew of this—beforehand, do you?" Just that sentence—those were the only words left in his memory of a day's happiness. And he never heard a locust whirring in a tree that it did not bring back the memory of the spreading tree and the touch—the soft, quick, shy touch of her fingers in his hair, and the fire that was in her eyes.

It was in the dusk of Tuesday evening that Jake Dolan's dog came into the yard where the captives were, and Jake disowned him, and joined the men who stoned the faithful creature out to the main road. But the prisoners knew that their rescuers would follow the dog, so at supper the three men from the Ridge sat together on a bench at the table while Mrs. Carnine and the girls waited on the men—after the fashion of country places in those days. Dolan managed to say under his breath to Barclay, "It's all right—but the girls must stay in the house to-night." And John knew that if he and Bob escaped with horses before ten o'clock, they could reach the Ridge in time to sign the levy before midnight. Darkness fell at eight, and a screech-owl in the wood complained to the night. Dolan rose and stretched and yawned, and then began to talk of going to bed, and Gabriel Carnine, whose turn it was to sleep because he had been up two nights, shuffled off to the straw-covered stable to lie down with the Texan who was his bunk mate, leaving half a dozen men to guard the prisoners. An hour later the screech-owl in the wood murmured again, this time much closer, and Dolan rose and took off his hat and threw it in the straw beside him. He was looking at the time anxiously toward the wood. But the next moment from behind the barn in the opposite direction something attracted them. It was a glare of light, and the guards noticed it at the same time. A last year's straw stack next to the barn was afire. Jane Mason was standing in the back door of the house, and in the hurried blur of moving events John divined that she had slipped out and fired the stack. In an instant there was confusion. The men were on their feet. They must fight fire, or the barn would go. Dolan ran with the men to the straw stack. "We'll help you," he cried. "I'll wake Gabe." There was hurrrying for water pails. The women appeared, crying shrilly, and in the glare that reddened the sky the yard seemed, full of mad men racing heedlessly.

"John," whispered Jane, coming up to him as he drew water from the well, "let me do this. There are two horses in the pasture. You and Bob go—fly—fly." The Texan came running from the barn, which was beginning to blaze. Dolan and Carnine still were in it. Then from the wood back of the camp fifty men appeared, riding at a gallop. Lige Bemis and General Ward rode in front of the troop of horsemen. Carnine was still in the burning barn asleep, and there was no leader to give command to the dazed guards. Ward and Bemis ran up, motioning the men back, and Ward cried, "Shall we help you save your stock and barn, or must we fight?" It was addressed to the crowd, but before they could answer, Dolan stumbled out of the barn through the smoke and flames crying, "Boys,—boys,—I can't find him." He saw the rescuing party and shouted, "Boys,—Gabe's in there asleep and I can't find him." The wind had suddenly veered, and the crackling flames had reached the straw roof of the barn. The fire was gaining headway, and the three buckets that were coming from the well had no effect on it. As the last horse was pulled out of the door, one side of the straw wall of the barn fell away on fire and showed Gabriel Carnine sleeping not ten feet from the flames. Lige Bemis soused his handkerchief in water, tied it over his mouth, and ran in. He grabbed the sleeping man and dragged him through, the flames; but both were afire as they came into the open.

Now in this story Elijah Westlake Bemis is not shown often in a heroic light. Yet he had in his being the making of a hero, for he was brave. And heroism, after all, is only effective reliance on some virtue in a crisis, in spite of temptations to do the easy excusable thing. And when Lige Bemis sneaks through this story in unlovely guise, remember that he has a virtue that once exalted even him.

"Gabe Carnine," said Ward, as the barn fell and there was nothing more to fear, "we didn't fire your haystack; I give you my word on that. But we are going to take these boys home now. And you better let us alone."

That John Barclay remembered, and then he remembered being in the front yard of the farm-house a moment—alone with Jane Mason, his bridle rein over his arm. Her hair was down, and she looked wild and beautiful. The straw was still burning back of the house, and the glow was everywhere. He always remembered that she held his hand and would not let him go, and there two memories are different; for she always maintained that he did, right there and then, and he recollected that as he mounted his horse he tried to kiss her and failed. Perhaps both are right—who knows? But both agree that as he sat there an instant on his horse, she threw kisses at him and he threw them back. And when the men rode away, she stood in the road, and he could see her in the light of the waning fire, and thirty years passed and still he saw her.

As the headlight of the train lit up the cinder yard, and brought the glint of the rails out of the darkness, John Barclay, a thousand miles away and thirty years after, fancied he could see her there in the railroad yards beside him waving her hands at him, smiling at him with the new-found joy in her face. For there is no difference between fifty-three and twenty-three when men are in love, and if they are in love with the same woman in both years, her face will never change, her smile will always seem the same. And to John Barclay there on the rear platform of the car, with the crash of the great train in his ears, the same face looked out of the night at him that he saw back in his twenties, and he knew that the same prayer to the same God would go up that night for him that went up from the same lips so long ago. The man on the car platform rose from his chair, and went into the car.

"Well," he said to Lycurgus Mason as the old man reached for his watch, "how about it?"

Lycurgus replied as he put it back in his pocket, "Just seven minutes and a half. She's covered a lot of track in those seven minutes!"

And John Barclay looked back over the years, and saw a boy riding like the wind through the night, changing horses every half-hour, and trying to tell time from his watch by a rising moon, but the moon was blown with clouds like a woman's hair, and he could not see the hands on the watch face. So as he looked at the old man sitting crooked over in the great leather chair, John Barclay only grunted, "Yes—she's covered a long stretch of country in those seven minutes." And he picked the Biography off the table and read to himself: "I sometimes think that only that part of the soul that loves is saved. The rest is dross and perishes in the fire. Whether the love be the love of woman or the love of kind, or the love of God that embraces all, it matters not. That sanctifies; that purifies—that marks the way of the only salvation the soul can know, and he who does not love with the fervour of a passionate heart some of God's creatures, cannot love God, and not loving Him, is lost in spite of all his prayers, in spite of all his aspirations. Therefore, if you would live you must love, for when love dies the soul shrivels. And if God takes what you love—love on; for only love will make you immortal, only love will cheat death of its victory."

And looking at Lycurgus Mason fidgeting in his chair, John Barclay wondered when he would die the kind of a death that had come to the little old man before him, and then he felt the car move under him, and knew they were going back to Sycamore Ridge.

"Day after to-morrow," said Barclay, meditatively, as he heard the first faint screaming of the heavily laden wheels under him, "day after to-morrow, Daddy Mason, we will be home with Colonel Culpepper and his large white plumes."



CHAPTER VIII

This chapter might have had in it "all the quality, pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war" if it had not been for the matters that came up for discussion at the meeting of the Garrison County Old Settlers' Association this year of our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Eight. For until that meeting the legend of the last hour of the County-seat War of '73 had flourished unmolested; but there General Philemon Ward rose and laid an axe at the root of the legend, and while of course he did not destroy it entirely, he left it scarred and withered on one side and therefore entirely unfitted for historical purposes. It seems that Gabriel Carnine was assigned by President John Barclay of the Association to prepare and read a paper on "The Rise, Decline, and Fall of Minneola." Certainly that was a proper subject considering the fact that corn has been growing over the site of Minneola for twenty years. And surely Gabriel Carnine, whose black beard has whitened in thirty years' faithful service to Sycamore Ridge, whose wife lies buried on the Hill, and whose children read the Sycamore Ridge Banner in the uttermost parts of the earth,—surely Gabriel Carnine might have been trusted to tell the truth of the conflict waged between the towns a generation ago. But men have curious works in them, and unless one has that faith in God that gives him unbounded faith in the goodness of man, one should not open men up in the back and watch the wheels go 'round. For though men are good, and in the long run what they do is God's work and is therefore acceptable, no man is perfect. There goes Lige Bemis past the post-office, now, for instance; when he was in the legislature in the late sixties, every one knows that Minneola raised twenty thousand dollars in cash and offered it to Lige if he would pretend to be sick and quit work on the Sycamore Ridge county-seat bill. He could have fooled us, and could have taken the money, which was certainly more than he could expect to get from Sycamore Ridge. Did he take it? Not at all. A million would not have tempted him. He was in that game; yet ten days after he refused the offer of Minneola, he tried to blackmail his United States senator out of fifty dollars, and sold his vote to a candidate for state printer for one hundred dollars and flashed the bill around Sycamore Ridge proudly for a week before spending it.

So Gabriel Carnine must not be blamed if in that paper on Minneola, before the Old Settlers' Association, he let out the pent-up wrath of thirty years; and also if in the discussion General Ward unsealed his lips for the first time and blighted the myth that told how a hundred Minneola men had captured the court-house yard on the night that John Barclay and Bob Hendricks rode home from their captivity to sign the tax levy. Legend has always said that Lige Bemis, riding half a mile ahead of the others that night, came to the courtyard; found it guarded by Minneola men, rode back, met John and Bob and the general crossing the bridge over the old ford of the Sycamore, and told them that they could not get into the court-house until the men came up who had ridden out to rescue the commissioners,—perhaps a quarter of an hour behind the others,—and that even then there must be a fight of doubtful issue; and further that it was after eleven o'clock, and soon would be too late to sign the levy. The forty thousand people in Garrison County have believed for thirty years that finding the court-house yard in possession of the enemy, Bemis suggested going through the cave by the Barclays' home, which had its west opening in the wall of the basement of the court-house; and furthermore, tradition has said that Bemis led John and Bob through the cave, and with crowbars and hammers they made a man-sized hole in the wall, crawled through it, mounted the basement stairs, unlocked the commissioners' room, held their meeting in darkness, and five minutes before twelve o'clock astonished the invading forces by lighting a lamp in their room, signing the levy that Bemis, as county attorney, had prepared the Sunday before, and slipping with it into the basement, through the cave and back to the troop of horsemen as they were jogging across the bridge on their way back from Carnine's farm. And here are the marks of General Ward's axe—verified by Gabriel Carnine: first, that there were no Minneola invaders in possession of the court-house, but only a dozen visitors loafing about town that night to watch developments; second, that the regular pickets were out as usual, and an invading force could not have stolen in; and third, that Bemis knew it, but as his political fortunes were low, he rode ahead of the others, hatched up the cock-and-bull story about the guarded court-house, and persuaded the boys to let him lead them into a romantic adventure that would sound well in the campaign and help to insure his reelection the following year. In view of the general's remarks and Gabriel Carnine's corroborative statement, and in view of the bitterness with which Carnine assailed the whole Sycamore Ridge campaign, how can a truthful chronicler use the episode at all? History is a fickle goddess, and perhaps Pontius Pilate, being human and used to human errors and human weakness, is not so much to blame for asking, "What is truth?" and then turning away before he had the answer.

Walking home from the meeting through Mary Barclay Park, Barclay's mind wandered back to the days when he won his first important lawsuit—the suit brought by Minneola to prevent the collection of taxes under the midnight levy to build the court-house. It was that lawsuit which brought him to the attention of the legal department of the Fifth Parallel Railroad Company, and his employment by that company to defeat the bonds of its narrow-gauged competitor, that was seeking entrance into Garrison County, was the beginning of his career. And in that fight to defeat the narrow-gauged railroad, the people of Garrison County learned something of Barclay as well. He and Bemis went over the county together,—the little fox and the old coyote, the people called them,—and where men were for sale, Bemis bought them, and where they were timid, John threatened them, and where they were neither, both John and Bemis fought with a ferocity that made men hate but respect the pair. And so though the Fifth Parallel Railroad never came to the Ridge, its successor, the Corn Belt Road, did come, and in '74 John spoke in every schoolhouse in the county, urging the people to vote the bonds for the Corn Belt Road, and his employment as local attorney for the company marked his first step into the field of state politics. For it gave him a railroad pass, and brought him into relations with the men who manipulated state affairs; also it made him a silent partner of Lige Bemis in Garrison County politics.

But even when he was county commissioner, less than two dozen years old, he was a force in Sycamore Ridge, and there were days when he had four or five thousand dollars to his credit in General Hendricks' bank. The general used to look over the daily balances and stroke his iron-gray beard and say: "Robert, John is doing well to-day. Son, I wish you had the acquisitive faculty. Why don't you invest something and make something?" But Bob Hendricks was content to do his work in the bank, and read at home one night and slip over to the Culpeppers' the next night, and so long as the boy was steady and industrious and careful, his father had no real cause for complaint, and he knew it. But the town knew that John was getting on in the world. He owned half of Culpepper's second addition, and his interest in College Heights was clear; he never dealt in equities, but paid cash and gave warranty deeds for what he sold. It was believed around the Ridge that he could "clean up," for fifteen or twenty thousand dollars, and when he called Mrs. Mason of the Mason House, Minneola, into the dining room one afternoon to talk over a little matter with her, he found her most willing. It was a short session. After listening and punctuating his remarks with "of courses" and "yeses" and "so's," Mrs. Mason's reply was:—

"Of course, Mr. Barclay,"—the Mr. Barclay he remembered as the only time in his life he ever had it from her,—"of course, Mr. Barclay, that is a matter rather for you and Mr. Mason to settle. You know," she added, folding her hands across her ample waist, "Mr. Mason is the head of the house!" Then she lifted her voice, perhaps fearing that matters might be delayed. "Oh, pa!" she cried. "Pa! Come in here, please. There's a gentleman to see you."

Lycurgus Mason came in with a tea towel in his hands and an apron on. He heard John through in a dazed way, his hollow eyes blinking with evident uncertainty as to what was expected of him. When Barclay was through, the father looked at the mother for his cue, and did not speak for a moment. Then he faltered: "Why, yes,—yes,—I see! Well, ma, what—" And at the cloud on her brow Lycurgus hesitated again, and rolled his apron about his hands nervously and finally said, "Oh—well—whatever you and her ma think will be all right with me, I guess." And having been dismissed telepathically, Lycurgus hurried back to his work.

It was when John Barclay was elected President of the Corn Belt Railway, in the early nineties, that Lycurgus told McHurdie and Ward and Culpepper and Frye, as the graybeards wagged around the big brown stove in the harness shop one winter day: "You know ma, she never saw much in him, and when I came in the room she was about to tell him he couldn't have her. Now, isn't that like a woman?—no sense about men. But I says: 'Ma, John Barclay's got good blood in him. His grandpa died worth a million,—and that was a pile of money for them days;' so I says, 'If Jane Mason wants him, ma,' I says, 'let her have him. Remember what a fuss your folks made over me getting you,' I says; 'and see how it's turned out.' Then I turned to John—I can see the little chap now a-standing there with his dicky hat in his hand and his pipe-stem legs no bigger than his cane, and his gray eyes lookin' as wistful as a dog's when you got a bone in your hand, and I says, 'Take her along, John; take her along and good luck go with you,' I says; 'but,' I says, 'John Barclay, I want you always to remember Jane Mason has got a father.' Just that way I says. I tell you, gentlemen, there's nothing like having a wife that respects you." The crowd in the harness shop wagged their heads, and Lycurgus went on: "Now, they ain't many women that would just let a man stand up like that and, as you may say, give her daughter right away under her nose. But my wife, she's been well trained."

In the pause that followed, Watts McHurdie's creaking lever was the only sound that broke the silence. Then Watts, who had been sewing away at his work with waving arms, spoke, after clearing his throat, "I've heard many say that she was sich." And the old man cackled, and it became a saying-among them and in the town.

One who goes back over the fifty years that have passed since Sycamore Ridge became a local habitation and a name finds it difficult to realize that one-third of its life was passed before the panic of '78, which closed the Hendricks' bank. For those first nineteen years passed as the life of a child passes, so that they seem only sketched in; yet to those who lived at all, to those like Watts McHurdie and Philemon Ward, who now pass their happiest moments mooning over tilted headstones in the cemetery on the Hill, those first nineteen years seem the longest and the best. And that fateful year of '73 to them seems the most portentous. For then, perhaps for the first time, they realized the cruel uncertainty of the struggle for existence. With the terrible drouth of '60 this realization did not come; for the town was young, and the people were young; only Ezra Lane was a graybeard in all the town in the sixties; and youth is so sure; there is no hazard under thirty. In the war they fought and marched and sang and starved and died, and were still young. But when the financial panic of '73 spread its dread and its trouble over the land, youth in Sycamore Ridge was gone; it was manhood that faced these things in the Ridge, and manhood had cares, had given hostages to fortune, and life was serious and hard; and big on the horizon was the fear of failure. General Hendricks swayed in the panic of '73; and the time marked him, took the best of the light from his eye, and put the slightest perceptible hobble on his feet. To Martin Culpepper and Watts McHurdie and Philemon Ward and Jacob Dolan and Oscar Fernald, the panic came in their late thirties and early forties, a flash of lightning that prophesied the coming of the storm and stress of an inexorable fate.

The wedding of John Barclay and Jane Mason occurred in September, 1873, two days after he had stood on the high stone steps of the Exchange National Bank and made a speech to the crowd, telling them he was the largest depositor in the bank, and begging them to stop the run. But the run did not stop, and the day before John's wedding the bank did not open; the short crop and the panic in the East were more than Garrison County people could stand. But all the first day of the bank's closing and all the next day John worked among the people, reassuring them. So that it was five o'clock in the evening before he could start to Minneola for his wedding.

And such a wedding! One would say that when hard times were staring every one in the face, social forms would be observed most simply. But one would say so without reckoning with Mrs. Lycurgus Mason. As the groom and the bridesmaid and best man rode up from Sycamore Valley, two miles from Minneola, in the early falling dusk that night, the Mason House loomed through the darkness, lighted up like a steamboat. "You'll have to move along, John," said Bob Hendricks; "I think I heard her whistle."

On the sidewalk in front of the hotel they met Mrs. Mason in her black silk with a hemstitched linen apron over it. She ushered them into the house, took them to their rooms, and whirled John around on a pivot, it seemed to him, with her interminable directions. His mother, who had come over to Minneola the day before, came to his room and quieted her son, and as he got ready for what he called the "ordeal," he could hear Mrs. Mason swinging doors below stairs, walking on her heels through the house, receiving belated guests from Sycamore Ridge and the country,—for the whole county had been invited,—and he heard her carrying out a dog that had sneaked into the dining room.

The groom missed the bride, and as he was tying his necktie,—which reminded him of General Ward by its whiteness,—he wondered why she did not come to him. He did not know that she was a prisoner in her room, while all the young girls in Sycamore Ridge and Minneola were looking for pins and hooking her up and stepping on each other's skirts. For one wedding is like all weddings—whether it be in the Mason House, Minneola, or in Buckingham Palace. And some there are who marry for love in Minneola, and some for money, and some for a home, and some for Heaven only knows what, just as they do in the chateaux and palaces and mansions. And the groom is nobody and the bride is everything, as it was in the beginning and as it shall be ever after. Probably poor Adam had to stand behind a tree neglected and alone, while Lilith and girls from the land of Nod bedecked Eve for the festivities. Men are not made for ceremonies. And so at all the formal occasions of this life—whether it be among the great or among the lowly, in the East or the West, at weddings, christenings, and funerals—man hides in shame and leaves the affairs to woman, who leads him as an ox, even a muzzled ox, that treadeth out the corn. "The doomed man," whispered John to Bob as the two in their black clothes stood at the head of the stair that led into the parlour of the Mason House that night, waiting for the wedding march to begin on the cabinet organ, "ate a hearty supper, consisting of beefsteak and eggs, and after shaking hands with his friends he mounted the gallows with a firm step!"

Then he heard the thud of the music book on the organ, the creak of the treadle,—and when he returned to consciousness he was Mrs. Mason's son-in-law, and proud of it. And she,—bless her heart and the hearts of all good women who give up the joy of their lives to us poor unworthy creatures,—she stood by the wax-flower wreath under the glass case on the whatnot in the corner, and wept into her real lace handkerchief, and wished with all the earnestness of her soul that she could think of some way to let John know that his trousers leg was wrinkled over his left shoe top. But she could not solve the problem, so she gave herself up to the consolation of her tears. Yet it should be set down to her credit that when the preacher's amen was said, hers was the first head up, and while the others were rushing for the happy pair she was in the kitchen with her apron on dishing up the wedding supper. Well might the Sycamore Ridge Weekly Banner declare that the "tables groaned with good things." There were not merely a little piddling dish of salad, a bite of cake, and a dab of ice-cream. There were turkey and potatoes and vegetables and fruit and bread and cake and pudding and pie—four kinds of pie, mark you—and preserves, and "Won't you please, Mrs. Culpepper, try some of that piccalilli?" and "Oh, Mrs. Ward, if you just would have a slice of that fruit cake," and "Now, General,—a little more of the gravy for that turkey dressing—it is such a long ride home," or "Colonel, I know you like corn bread, and I made this myself as a special compliment to Virginia."

And through it all the bride sat watching the door—looking always through the crowd for some one. Her face was anxious and her heart was clouded, and when the guests had gone and the house was empty, she left her husband and slipped out of the back door. There, after the glare of the lamps had left her eyes, she saw a little man walking with his head down, out near the barn, and she ran to him and threw her arms about him and kissed him, and when she led Lycurgus Mason, who was all washed and dressed, back through the kitchen to her husband, John saw that the man's eyelids were red, and that on the starched cuffs were the marks of tears. For to him she was only his little girl, and John afterward knew that she was the only friend he had in the world. "Oh, father, why didn't you come in?" cried the daughter. "I missed you so!" The man blinked a moment at the lights and looked toward his wife, who was busy at a table, as he said: "Who? Me?" and then added: "I was just lookin' after their horses. I was coming in pretty soon. You oughtn't to bother about me. Well, John," he smiled, as he put out his hand, "the seegars seems to be on you—as the feller says." And John put his arm about Lycurgus Mason, as they walked out of the kitchen, and Jane reached for her gingham apron. Then life began for Mr. and Mrs. John Barclay in earnest.



CHAPTER IX

Forty thousand words—and that is the number we have piled up in this story—is a large number of words to string together without a heroine. That is almost as bad as the dictionary, in which He and She are always hundreds of pages apart and never meet,—not even in the "Z's" at the end,—which is why the dictionary is so unpopular, perhaps. But this is the story of a man, and naturally it must have many heroines. For you know men—they are all alike! First, Mrs. Mary Barclay was a heroine—you saw her face, strong and clean and sharply chiselled with a great purpose; then Miss Lucy—black-eyed, red-cheeked, slender little Miss Lucy—was a heroine, but she married General Ward; and then Ellen Culpepper was a heroine, but she fluttered out of the book into the sunlight, and was gone; and then came Jane Mason,—and you have seen her girlish beauty, and you will see it develop into gentle womanhood; but the real heroine,—of the real story,—you have not seen her face. You have heard her name, and have seen her moving through these pages with her back consciously turned to you—for being a shy minx, she had no desire to intrude until she was properly introduced. And now we will whirl her around that you may have a good look at her.

Let us begin at the ground: as to feet—they are not too small—say three and a half in size. And they support rather short legs—my goodness, of course she has legs—did you think her shoes were pinned to her over-skirt? Her legs carry around a plump body,—not fat—why, certainly not—who ever heard of a fat heroine (the very best a heroine can do for comfort is to be plump)—and so beginning the sentence over again, being a plump little body, there is a neck to account for—a neck which we may look at, but which is so exquisite that it would be hardly polite to consider it in terms of language. Only when we come to the chin that tips the oval of the face may we descend to language, and even then we must rise and flick the red mouth with, but a passing word. But this much must be plainly spoken. The nose does turn up—not much—but a little (Bob used to say, just to be good and out of the way)! That, however, is mere personal opinion, and of little importance here. But the eyes are brown—reddish brown, with enough white at the corners to make them seem liquid; only liquid is not the word. For they are radiant—remember that word, for we may come back to it, after we are done with the brow—a wide brow—low enough for Dickens and Thackeray and Charlotte Bronte, and for Longfellow and Whittier and Will Carleton in his day, and high enough for Tennyson at the temples, but not so high but that the gate of the eyes has to shut wearily when Browning would sail through the current of her soul. As to hair—Heaven knows there is plenty of that, but it had rather a checkered career. As she clung to her mother's apron and waved her father away to war, she was a tow-headed little tot, and when he came back from the field of glory he thought he could detect a tendency to red in it, but the fire smouldered and went out, and the hair turned brown—a dark brown with the glint of the quenched fires in it when it blew in the sun. Now frame a glowing young face in that soft waving hair, and you have a picture that will speak, and if the picture should come to life and speak as it was in the year of our Lord 1873, the first word of all the words in the big fat dictionary it would utter would be Bob. And so you may lift up your face and take your name and place in this story—Molly Culpepper, heroine. And when you lift your face, we may see something more than its pretty features: we shall see a radiant soul. For scientists have found out that every material thing in this universe gives off atomic particles of itself, and some elements are more radiant than others. And there is a paralleling quality in the spiritual world, and some souls give off more of their colour and substance than others, though what it is they radiate we do not know. Even the scientists do not know the material things that the atoms radiate, so why should we be asked to define the essence of souls? Yet from the soul of Molly Culpepper, in joy and in sorrow, in her moments of usefulness and in her deepest woe, her soul glowed and shed its glory, and she grew even as she gave her substance to the world about her. For that is the magic of God's mystery of life.

And now having for the moment finished our discussion on the radio-activity of souls, let us go back to the story.

Mary Barclay rode home from her son's wedding that night with Bob Hendricks and Molly Culpepper. They were in a long line of buggies that began to scatter out and roam across fields to escape the dust of the roads. "Well," said Mrs. Barclay, as they pulled up the bank of the Sycamore for home, "I suppose it will be you and Molly next, Bob?"

It was Molly who replied: "Yes. It is going to be Thanksgiving."

"Well, why not?" asked Mrs. Barclay.

"Oh—they all seem to think we shouldn't, don't you know, Mrs. Barclay—with all this hard times—and the bank closing. And hasn't John told you of the plan he's worked out for Bob to go to New York this winter?"

The buggy was nearing the Barclay home. Mrs. Barclay answered, "No," and the girl went on.

"Well, it's a big wheat land scheme—and Bob's to go East and sell the stock. They worked it out last night after the bank closed. He'll tell you all about it."

Mrs. Barclay was standing by the buggy when the girl finished. The elder woman bade the young people good night, and turned and went into the yard and stood a moment looking at the stars before going into her lonely house. The lovers let the tired horses lag up the hill, and as they turned into Lincoln Avenue the girl was saying: "A year's so long, Bob,—so long. And you'll be away, and I'm afraid." He tried to reassure her; but she protested: "You are all my life,—big boy,—all my life. I was only fourteen, just a little girl, when you came into my life, and all these long seven years you are the only human being that has been always in my heart. Oh, Bob, Bob,—always."

What a man says to his sweetheart is of no importance. Men are so circumscribed in their utterances—so tongue-tied in love. They all say one thing; so it need not be set down here what Bob Hendricks said. It was what the king said to the queen, the prince to the princess, the duke to the lady, the gardener to the maid, the troubadour to his dulcinea. And Molly Culpepper replied, "When are you going, Bob?"

The young man picked up the sagging lines to turn out for Watts McHurdie's buggy. He had just let Nellie Logan out at the Wards', where she lived. After a "Hello, Watts; getting pretty late for an old man like you," Hendricks answered: "Well, you know John—when he gets a thing in his head he's a regular tornado. There was an immense crowd in town to-day—depositors and all that. And do you know, John went out this afternoon with a paper in his hand, and five hundred dollars he dug out of his safe over in the office, and he got options to lease their land for a year signed up by the owners of five thousand acres of the best wheat land in Garrison County. He wants twenty thousand acres, and pretty well bunched down in Pleasant and Spring townships, and I'm going in four days." The young man was full of the scheme. He went on: "John's a wonder, Molly,—a perfect wonder. He's got grit. Father wouldn't have been able to stand up under this—but John has braced him, and has cheered up the people, and I believe, before the week is out, we will be able to get nearly all the depositors to agree to leave their money alone for a year, and then only take it out on thirty days' notice. And if we can get that, we can open up by the first of the month. But I've got to go on to Washington to see if I can arrange that with the comptroller of the currency."

They were standing at the Culpepper gate as he spoke. A light in the upper windows showed that the parents were in. Buchanan came ambling along the walk and went through the gate between them without speaking. When he had closed the door, the girl came close to her lover. He took her in his arms, and cried, "Oh, darling,—only four more days together." He paused, and in the starlight she saw on his face more than words could have told her of his love for her. He was a silent youth; the spoken word came haltingly to his lips, and as often happens, words were superfluous to him in his moments of great emotion. He put her hands to his lips, and moaned, for the hour of parting seemed to be hurrying down upon him. Finally his tongue found liberty. "Oh, sweetheart—sweetheart," he cried, "always remember that you are bound in my soul with the iron of youth's first love—my only love. Oh, I never could again, dear,—only you—only you. After this it would be a sacrilege."

They stood silent in the joy of their ecstacy for a long minute, then he asked gently: "Do you understand, Molly,—do you understand? this is forever for us, Molly,—forever. When one loves as we love—with our childhood and youth welded into it all—whom God hath joined—" he stammered; "oh, Molly, whom God hath joined," he whispered, and his voice trembled as he sighed again, and kissed her, "whom God hath joined. Oh, God—God, God!" cried the lover, as he closed his eyes with his lips against her hair.

The restless horses recalled the lovers to the earth. It was Molly who spoke. "Bob—Bob—I can't let you go!"

Molly Culpepper had no reserves with her lover. She went on whispering, with, her face against his heart: "Bob—Bob, big boy, I am going to tell you something truthy true, that I never breathed to any one. At night—to-night, in just a few minutes—when I go up to my room—all alone—I get your picture and hold it to me close, and holding it right next to my very heart, Bob, I pray for you." She paused a moment, and then continued, "Oh, and—I pray for us—Bob—I pray for us." Then she ran up the stone walk, and on the steps she turned to throw kisses at him, but he did not move until he heard the lock click in the front door.

At the livery-stable he found Watts McHurdie bending over some break in his buggy. They walked up the street together. At the corner where they were about to part the little man said, as he looked into the rapturous face of the lanky boy, "Well, Bob,—it's good-by, John, for you, I suppose?"

"Oh—I don't know," replied the other from his enchanted world and then asked absently, "Why?"

"Well, it's nature, I guess. She'll take all his time now." He rubbed his chin reflectively, and as Bob turned to go Watts said: "My Heavens, how time does fly! It just seems like yesterday that all you boys were raking over the scrap-pile back of my shop, and slipping in and nipping leather strands and braiding them into whips, and I'd have to douse you with water to get rid of you. I got a quirt hanging up in the shop now that Johnnie Barclay dropped one day when I got after him with a pan of water. It's a six-sided one, with eight strands down in the round part. I taught him how to braid it." He chewed a moment and spat before going on: "And now look at him. He's little, but oh my." Something was working under McHurdie's belt, for Bob could hear it chuckling as he chewed: "Wasn't she a buster? It's funny, ain't it—the way we all pick big ones—we sawed-offs"? The laugh came—a quiet, repressed gurgle, and he added: "Yes—by hen, and you long-shanks always pick little dominickers. Eh?" He chewed a meditative cud before venturing, "That's what I told her comin' home to-night." Bob knew whom he meant. The man went on: "But when she saw them—him so little she'll have to shake the sheet to find him—and her so big and busting, I seen her—you know," he nodded his head wisely to indicate which "her" he meant. "I saw her a-eying me, out of the corner of her eye, and looking at him, and then looking at the girl, and looking at herself, and on the way home to-night I'm damned if I didn't have to put off asking her another six months." He sighed and continued, "And the first thing I know the drummer or the preacher'll get her." He chewed for a minute in peace and chuckled, "Well—Bob, I suppose you'll be next?" He did not wait for an answer, but spoke up quickly, "Well, Bob, good night—good night," and hurried to his shop.

The next day the people that blackened Main Street in Sycamore Ridge talked of two things—the bank failure and the new Golden Belt Wheat Company. Barclay enlisted Colonel Culpepper, and promised him two dollars for every hundred-acre option to lease that he secured at three dollars an acre—the cash on the lease to be paid March first. Barclay's plan was to organize a stock company and to sell his stock in the East for enough to raise eight dollars an acre for every acre he secured, and to use the five dollars for making the crop. He believed that with a good wheat crop the next year he could make money and buy as much land as he needed. But that year of the panic John capitalized the hardship of his people, and made terms for them, which they could not refuse. He literally sold them their own want. For the fact that he had a little ready money and could promise more before harvest upon which the people might live—however miserably was no concern of his—made it possible for him to drive a bargain little short of robbery. It was Bob's part of the business to float the stock company in the East among his father's rich friends. John was to furnish the money to keep Bob in New York, and the Hendricks' connections in banking circles were to furnish the cash to float the proposition, and the Hendricks' bank—if John could get it opened again—was to guarantee that the stock subscribed would pay six per cent interest. So there was no honeymoon for John Barclay. When he dropped the reins and helped his bride out of the buggy the next morning in front of the Thayer House, he hustled General Ward's little boy into the seat, told him to drive the team to Dolan's stable, and waving the new Mrs. Barclay good-by, limped in a trot over to the bank. In five minutes he was working in the crowd, and by night had the required number of the depositors ready to agree to let their money lie a year on deposit, and that matter was closed. He was a solemn-faced youth in those days, with a serious air about him, and something of that superabundance of dignity little men often think they must assume to hold their own. The town knew him as a trim little man in a three-buttoned tail-coat, with rather extraordinary neckties, a well-brushed hat, and shiny shoes. To the country people he was "limping Johnnie," and General Ward, watching Barclay hustle his way down Main Street Saturday afternoons, when the sidewalk and the streets were full of people, used to say, "Busier 'n a tin pedler." And he said to Mrs. Ward, "Lucy, if it's true that old Grandpa Barclay got his start carrying a pack, you can see him cropping out in John, bigger than a wolf."

But the general had little time to devote to John, for he was state organizer of a movement that had for its object the abolition of middlemen in trade, and he was travelling most of the time. The dust gathered on his law-books, and his Sunday suit grew frayed at the edges and shiny at the elbows, but his heart was in the cause, and his blue eyes burned with joy when he talked, and he was happy, and had to travel two days and nights when the fourth baby came, and then was too late to serve on the committee on reception, and had to be satisfied with a minor place on the committee on entertainment and amusements of which Mrs. Culpepper was chairman. But John turned in half of a fee that came from the East for a lawsuit that both he and Ward had forgotten, and Miss Lucy would have named the new baby Mary Ward, but the general stood firm for Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Sitting at Sunday dinner with the Wards on the occasion of Elizabeth Cady Stanton Ward's first monthly birthday, John listened to the general's remarks on the iniquity of the money power, and the wickedness of the national banks, and kept respectful and attentive silence. The worst the young man did was to wink swiftly across the table at Watts McHurdie, who had been invited by Mrs. Ward with malice prepense and seated by Nellie Logan. The wink came just as the general, waving the carving knife, was saying: "Gentlemen, it's the world-old fight—the fight of might against right. When I was a boy like you, John, the fight was between brute strength and the oppressed; between slaves and masters. Now it is between weakness and cunning, between those who would be slaveholders if they could be, and those who are fighting the shackles." And Mrs. Ward saw the wink, and John saw that she saw it, and he was ashamed.

So before the afternoon was over, Mr. and Mrs. John Barclay went over to Hendricks's, picking up Molly Culpepper on the way, and the three spent the evening with the general and Miss Hendricks—a faded mousy little woman in despairing thirties; and before the open fire they sat and talked, and John played the piano for an hour, and thought out an extra kink for the Golden Belt Wheat Company's charter. He jabbered about it to Jane as they walked home, and the next day it became a fact.

"That boy," said the colonel to his assembled family one evening as they dined on mush and dried peaches, and coffee made of parched corn, "that John Barclay certainly and surely is a marvel. Talk about drawing blood from a turnip,—why, he can strike an artery in a pumpkin." The colonel smiled reflectively as he proceeded: "Chicago lawyer came in on the stage this afternoon,—kinder getting uneasy about a little interest I owed to an Ohio man on that College Heights property, and John took that Chicago lawyer up to his office, and talked him into putting the interest in a second mortgage with all the interest that will fall due till next spring, and then traded him Golden Belt Wheat Company stock for the mortgage and a thousand dollars besides."

"Well, did John give you back the mortgage, father?" asked Molly.

"No, sis,—that wouldn't be business," replied the colonel, as he stirred his dried peaches into his third dish of mush for dessert; "business is business, you know. John took the mortgage over to the bank and discounted it for some money to buy more options with. John surely does make things hum."

"Yes, and he's made Bob resign from the board of commissioners, and won't let him come home Christmas, and keeps him on fifty dollars a month there in New York—all the same," returned the girl.

The colonel looked at his daughter a moment in sympathetic silence; then he put his thumbs in the armholes of his vest and tilted back in his chair and answered: "Oh, well, my dear,—when you are living in a brown-stone house on Fifth Avenue down in New York, stepping on a nigger every which way you turn, you'll thank John that he did keep Bob at work, and not bring him back here to pin on a buffalo tail, drink crick water, eat tumble weeds, and run wild. I say, and I fear no contradiction when I say it, that John Barclay is a marvel—a living wonder in point of fact. And if Bob Hendricks wants to come back here and live on the succulent and classic bean and the luscious, and I may say tempting, flapjack, let him come, Molly Farquhar Culpepper, let him come." The colonel, proud of his language, looked around the family circle. "And we at our humble board, with our plain though—shall I say nutritive—yes, nutritive and wholesome fare, should thank our lucky stars that John Barclay keeps the Golden Belt Wheat Company going, and your husband and father can make a more or less honest dollar now and then to supply your simple wants."

The colonel had more in his mind, for he rose and began to pace the floor in a fine frenzy. But Mrs. Culpepper looked up for an instant from her tea, and said, "You know you forgot the mail to-day, father," and he replied, "Yes, that's so." Then added: "Molly dear, will you bring me my overcoat—please?"

The girl bundled her father into his threadbare blue army overcoat with the cape. He stood for a moment absently rattling some dimes in his pocket. Then the faintness of their jingle must have appealed to him, for he drew a long breath and walked majestically away. He was a tall stout man in the midst of his forties, with a military goatee and black flowing mustaches, and he wore his campaign hat pinned up at the side with the brass military pin and swayed with some show of swagger as he walked. His gift of oratory he did not bring to the flower of its perfection except at lodge. He was always sent as a delegate to Grand Lodge, and when he came home men came from all over the county to see the colonel exemplify the work. But as he marched to funerals under his large white plume and with his sword dangling at his side, Colonel Martin Culpepper, six feet four one way and four feet two the other, was a regal spectacle, and it will be many years before the town will see his like again.

The colonel walked over to the post-office box and got his mail, then took a backless chair and drew it up to the sand box in which the stove sat, and the conversation became general in its nature, ranging from Emerson's theory of the cosmos and the whiskey ring to the efficacy of a potato in the pocket for rheumatism. Finally when they had come to their "don't you remembers" about the battle of Wilson's Creek, General Ward, with his long coat buttoned closely about him, came shivering into the store to get some camphor gum and stood rubbing his cold hands by the stove while the clerk was wrapping up the package. His thin nose was red and his eyes watered, and he had little to say. When he went out the colonel said, "What's he going to run for this year?"

"Haven't you heard?" replied McHurdie, and to the colonel's negative Watts replied, "Governor—the uprising's going to nominate him."

"Yes," said Frye, "and he'll go off following that foolishness and leave his wife and children to John or the neighbours."

"Do you suppose he thinks he'll win?" asked the Colonel.

"Naw," put in McHurdie; "I was talking to him only last week in the shop, and he says, 'Watts, you boys don't understand me.' He says, 'I don't want their offices. What I want is to make them think. I'm sowing seed. Some day it will come to a harvest—maybe long after I'm dead and gone.' I asked him if a little seed wouldn't help out some for breakfast, and he didn't answer. Then he said: 'Watts—what you need is faith—faith in God and not in money. There are no Christians; they don't believe in God, or they'd trust Him more. They don't trust God; they trust money. Yet I tell you it will work. Go ahead—do your work in the world, and you won't starve nor your children beg in the streets.'" McHurdie stopped a moment to gnaw his plug of tobacco. "The general's gitting kind of a crank—and I told him so."

"What did he say?" inquired the colonel.

"Oh, he just laughed," replied McHurdie; "he just laughed and said if he was a crank I was a poet, and neither was much good at the note window of the bank, and we kind of made it up."

And so the winter evening grew old, and one by one the cronies rose and yawned and went their way. Evening after evening went thus, and was it strange that in the years that came, when the sunset of life was gilding things for Watts McHurdie, he looked through the golden haze and saw not the sand in the pit under the stove, not the rows of drugs on the wall, not the patent medicine bottles in their faded wrappers, but as he wrote many years after in "Autumn Musing":—

"Those nights when Wisdom was our guide And Friendship was the glow, That warmed our souls like living coals, Those nights of long ago."

Nor is it strange that Martin Culpepper, his commentator, conning those lines through the snows of many winters, should be a little misty as to details, and having taken his pen in hand to write, should set down this note:—

"These lines probably refer to the evenings which the poet passed in a goodly company of choice spirits during the early seventies. E'en as I write, Memory, with tender hand, pushes back the sombre curtain, and I see them now—that charmed circle; the poet with the brow of Jove and Minerva's lips; the rugged warrior at his side, with the dignity of Mars himself; perhaps some Croesus with his gold, drawn by the spell of Wisdom's enchantment into the magic circle; and this your humble disciple of Thucydides, sitting spellbound under the drippings of the sacred font, getting the material for these pages. That was the Golden Age; there were giants in those days."

And so there were, Colonel Martin Culpepper of the Great Heart and the "large white plumes"—so there were.



CHAPTER X

It was a cold raw day in March, 1874. Colonel Culpepper was sitting in the office of Ward and Barclay over the Exchange National Bank waiting for the junior member of the firm to come in; the senior member of the firm, who had just brought up an arm load of green hickory and dry hackberry stove wood, was standing beside the box-shaped stove, abstractedly brushing the sawdust and wormwood from his sleeves and coat front. The colonel was whistling and whittling, and the general kept on brushing after the last speck of dust had gone from his shiny coat. He walked to the window and stared into the ugly brown street.

Two or three minutes passed, and Colonel Culpepper, anxious for the society of his kind, spoke. "Well, General, what's the trouble?"

"Nothing in particular, Martin. I was just questioning the reality of matter and the existence of the universe as you spoke; but it's not important." The general shivered, and turned his kind blue eyes on his friend in a smile, and then bethought him to put the wood in the stove.

While he was jamming in a final stick, Colonel Culpepper inquired, "Well, am I an appearance or an entity?"

The general put the smoking poker on the floor, and turned the damper in the pipe as he answered: "That's what I can't seem to make out. You know old Emerson says a man doesn't amount to much as a thinker until he has doubted the existence of matter. And I just got to thinking about it, and wondering if this was a real world after all—or just my idea of one." The two men smiled at the notion, and Ward went on: "All right, laugh if you want to, but if this is a real world, whose world is it, your world or my world? Here is John Barclay, for instance. Sometimes I get a peek at his world." Ward picked up the poker and sat down and hammered the toe of a boot with it as he went on: "John's world is the Golden Belt Wheat Company, wheat pouring a steady stream into boundless bins, and money flowing in golden ripples over it all. Sometimes Bob Hendricks' head rises above the tide long enough to gasp or cry for help and beg to come home, but John's golden flood sweeps over him again, and he's gone. And here's your world, Martin, wherein every one is kind and careless, and generous and good, and full of smiles and gayety. And there's Lige Bemis' world, full of cunning and hypocrisy, and meanness and treachery and plotting—a hell of a world it is, with its foundations on hate and deceit—but it's his world, and he has the same right to it that I have to mine. And there's old Watts' world—" The general sighted along the poker over his toe to the stove side whereon a cornucopia wriggled out of nothing and poured its richness of fruit and grain into nothing. "There's Watts' world, full of stuffed Personifications, Virtue, Pleasure, Happiness, Sin, Sorrow, and God knows what of demigods, with the hay of his philosophy sticking out of their eyeholes. You know about his maxims, Mart; he actually lives by 'em, and no matter how common sense yells at him to get off the track, old Watts just goes on following his maxims, and gets butted into the middle of next week."

The colonel was making a hole in the stick in his hands, and his attention was fixed on the whittling, but he added, "And your own world, General—how about your own world?"

"My world," replied the general, as he pulled at the bows of his rather soiled white tie, and evened them, "My world—" the general jabbed the poker spear-like into the floor, "I guess I'm a kind of a transcendentalist!"

The colonel blew the chips through the hole in his stick; he bored it round in the pause that followed before he spoke.

"A transcendentalist, eh? Well, pintedly, General, that is what I may call a soft impeachment, as the poet says—a mighty soft impeachment. I've heard you called a lot worse names than that—and I may say," here the crow's-feet began scratching for a smile around the colonel's eyes, "proved, sir, with you as the prosecuting witness."

The two men chuckled. Then the general, balancing himself, with the poker point on the floor, as he tilted back went on: "My world, Mart Culpepper, is a world in which the ideal is real—a world in a state of flux with thoughts of to-day the matter of to-morrow; my world is a world of faith that God will crystallize to-day's aspirations into to-morrow's justice; my world," the general rose and waved his poker as if to beat down the forces of materialism about him, "my world is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen." He paused. "As I was saying," he continued at last, "if this is a real world, if matter actually exists and this world is not a dream of my consciousness, whose world is it, my world, your world, Watts McHurdie's world, Lige's world, or John's world? It can't be all of 'em." He put the poker across the stove hearth, and sank his hands deeply into his pockets as he continued: "The question that philosophy never has answered is this: Am I a spectre and you an essence, or are you a spectre and am I an essence? Is it your world or mine?"

The two men looked instinctively at the rattling doorknob, and John Barclay limped into the room. His face was red with the cold and the driving mist. He walked to the stove and unbuttoned his ulster, while the colonel put the subject of the debate before him. The general amended the colonel's statement from time to time, but the young man only smiled tolerantly and shook his head. Then he went to his desk and pulled a letter from a drawer.

"Colonel, I've got a letter here from Bob. The thing doesn't seem to be moving. He only sold about a thousand dollars' worth of stock last month—a falling off of forty per cent, and we must have more or we can't take up our leases. He's begging like a dog to come home for a week, but I can't let him. We need that week." He limped over to the elder and put his hand on the tall man's arm as he said: "Now, Colonel, that was what I sent for you about. You kind of speak to Molly and have her write him and tell him to hold on a little while. It's business, you know, and we can't afford to have sentiment interfere with business."

The colonel, standing by the window, replied, after a pause: "I can see where you are right, John. Business is business. You got to consider that." He looked into the street below and saw General Hendricks come shuddering into the cold wind. "How's he getting on?" asked Culpepper, nodding towards Hendricks, who seemed unequal to the gale.

"Oh, I don't know, Colonel,—times are hard."

"My, how he's aging!" said the colonel, softly.

After a silence Barclay said: "There's one thing sure—I've got it into his hard old head that Bob is doing something back there, and he couldn't earn his salt here. Besides," added Barclay, as if to justify himself against an accusing conscience, "the old man does all the work in the bank now, with time to spare."

It was the day of army overcoats, and the hard times had brought hundreds of them from closets and trunks. General Hendricks, fluttering down the street in his faded blue, made a rather pathetic figure. The winter had whitened his hair and withered his ruddy face. His unequal struggle with the wind seemed some way symbolical of his life, and the two men watched him out of sight without a word. The colonel turned toward his own blue overcoat which lay sprawling in a chair, and Barclay said as he helped the elder man squeeze into it, "Don't forget to speak to Molly, Colonel," and then ushered him to the door. For a moment Colonel Culpepper stood at the bottom of the stairs, partly hesitating to go into the windy street, and partly trying to think of some way in which he could get the subject on his mind before his daughter in the right way. Then as he stood on the threshold with his nose in the storm, he recalled General Ward's discourse about the different worlds, and he thought of Molly's world of lovers' madness, and that brought up his own youth and its day-dreams, and Molly flew out of his mind and her mother came in, and he saw her blue-eyed and fair as she stood before him on their wedding-day. With that picture in his heart he breasted the storm and went home whistling cheerfully, walking through his world like a prince.

When the colonel left the office of Ward and Barclay, the partners retired into their respective worlds and went sailing through space, each world upon its own axis. The general in a desultory way began writing letters to reformers urging them to prepare for the coming struggle; but John was head over heels in the business of the Golden Belt Wheat Company, and in an hour had covered two sheets of foolscap with figures and had written a dozen letters. The scratch, scratch of his pen was as regular as the swish of a piston. On the other hand, the general often stopped and looked off into space, and three times he got up to mend the fire. At the end of the afternoon Mrs. Ward came in, her cheeks pink with the cold; she had left the seven-year-old to care for the one-year-old, and the five-year-old to look after the three-year-old, and had come scurrying through the streets in a brown alpaca dress with a waterproof cape over her shoulders. She and the general spoke for a few moments in their corner, and she hurried out again. The general finished the letter he was writing and wrote another, and then backed up to the stove with his coat tails in front of him and stood benignly watching Barclay work. Barclay felt the man's attention, and whirling about in his chair licking an envelope flap, he said, "Well, General—what's on your mind?"

"I was just thinking of Lucy—that's all," replied the general. Barclay knew that the Wards had gone through the winter on less than one hundred dollars, and it occurred to the younger man that times might be rather hard in the Ward household. So he asked, "Are you worried about money matters, General?"

The general's smile broadened to a grin. "Well, to be exact, Lucy and I just counted cash—it's in her pocketbook, and we find our total cash assets are eight dollars and thirty-nine cents, and it's got to tide us over till grass." He stroked his lean chin, and ran his hands through his iron-gray hair and went on, "That's plenty, the way we've figured it out—Lucy and I only eat one meal a day anyway, and the children seem to eat all the time and that averages it up." He smiled deprecatingly and added: "But Lucy's got her heart set on a little matter, and we've decided to spend eighty-seven cents, as you might say riotously, and get it. That's what we were talking about."

Barclay entered into the spirit of Ward's remarks and put in: "But the National debt, General—if you have all that money to spare, why don't you pay it off? Practise what you preach, General."

The smile faded from Ward's face. He was not a man to joke on what he regarded as sacred things. He replied: "Yes, yes, that's just it. My share of the interest on that debt this winter was just seventy-five cents, and if it wasn't for that, we would have had enough to get them; as it is, we are going to cut out meat for a week—we figured it all out just now—and get them anyway. She's down at the store buying them."

"Buying what?" asked Barclay.

The general's face lighted up again with a grin, and he replied: "Now laugh—dog-gone you—buying flower seeds!" They heard a step at the bottom of the stairs, and the general strode to the door, opened it, and called down, "All right, Lucy—I'm coming," and buttoning up his coat, he whisked himself from the room, and Barclay, looking out of the window, watched the two forms as they disappeared in the dusk. But appearances are so deceptive. The truth is that what he saw was not there at all, but only appeared on his retina; the two forms that he seemed to see were not shivering through the twilight, but were walking among dahlias and coxcombs and four-o'clocks and petunias and poppies and hollyhocks on a wide lawn whereon newly set elm trees were fluttering their faint green foliage in the summer breeze. Yet John Barclay would have sworn he saw them there in the cold street, with the mist beating upon them, and curiously corroborative of this impression is a memory he retained of reflecting that since the general's blue overcoat had disappeared the winter before, he had noticed that little Thayer had a blue Sunday suit and little Elizabeth Cady Stanton had appeared wrapped in a blue baby coat. But that only shows how these matter-of-fact people are fooled. For though the little Wards were caparisoned in blue, and though the general's blue overcoat did disappear about that time, the general and Lucy Ward have no recollection of shivering home that night, but instead they know that they walked among the flowers.

And John, looking into the darkening street, must have seen something besides the commonplace couple that he thought he saw; for as he turned away to light his lamp and go to work again, he smiled. Surely there was nothing to smile at in the thing he saw. Perhaps God was trying to make him see the flowers. But he did not see them, and as it was nearly an hour before six o'clock, he turned to his work under the lamp and finished his letter to Bob Hendricks. When it was written, he read it over carefully, crossing his "t's" and dotting his "i's," and as no one was in the room he mumbled it aloud, thus:—

"DEAR BOB:—Don't get blue; it will be all right. Stick to it. I am laying a wire that will get you an audience with Jay Gould. Make the talk of your life there. You may be able to interest him—if just for a few dollars. Offer him anything. Give him the stock if he will let us use his name.

"Don't get uneasy about Molly, Bob. Jane and I see that she goes to everything, and we've scared her up a kind of brevet beau—an old rooster named Brownwell—Adrian Pericles Brownwell, who has blown in here and bought the Banner from Ezra Lane. Brownwell is from Alabama. Do you remember, Bob, that day at Wilson's Creek after we got separated in the Battle I ran into a pile of cavalry writhing in a road? Well, there was one face in that awful struggling mass that I always remembered—and I never expect to see such a look of fear on a man's face again—he was a young fellow then, but now he's thirty-five or so. Well—that was this man Brownwell. I asked him about it the other day. How he ever got out alive, I don't know; but the fact that he should turn up here proves that this is a small world. Brownwell also is a writer from Writersville. You should see the way he paints the lily in the Banner every week. You remember old Cap Lee—J. Lord Lee of the Red Legs—and Lady Lee, as they called her when she was a sagebrush siren with the 'Army of the Border' before the War? Well, read this clipping from the Banner of this week: 'The wealth, beauty, and fashion of Minneola—fairest village of the plain—were agog this week over the birth of a daughter to Lord and Lady Lee, whose prominence in our social circles makes the event one of first importance in our week's annals. Little Beatrix, for so they have decided to christen her, will some day be a notable addition to our refined and gracious circles. Welcome to you, little stranger.'

"Now you know the man! You needn't be jealous of him. However, he has frozen to the Culpeppers because they are from the South, and clearly he thinks they are the only persons of consequence in town. So he beaus Molly around with Jane and me to the concerts and sociables and things. He is easily thirty-five, walks with a cane, struts like a peacock, and Molly and Jane are having great sport with him. Also he is the only man in town with any money. He brought five thousand dollars in gold, real money,—his people made it on contraband cotton contracts during the War, they say,—and he has been the only visible means of support the town has had for three months. But in the meantime don't worry about Molly, Bob, she's all right, and business is business, you know, and you shouldn't let such things interfere with it. But in another six months we'll be out of the woods and on our way to big money."

Now another strange thing happened to John Barclay that evening, and this time it was what he saw, not what he failed to see, that puzzled him. For just as he sealed the letter to his friend, and thumped his lean fist on it to blot the address on the envelope and press the mucilage down, he looked around suddenly, though he never knew why, and there, just outside the rim of light from his lampshade, trembled the image of Ellen Culpepper with her red and black checked flannel dress at her shoe tops and his rubber button ring upon her finger. She smiled at him sweetly for a moment and shook her head sadly, and her curls fluttered upon her shoulders, and then she seemed to fade into the general's desk by the opposite wall. John was pallid and frightened for a moment; then as he looked at the great pile of letters before him he realized how tired and worn he was. But the face and the eyes haunted him and brought back old memories, and that night he and Jane and Molly Culpepper went to Hendricks', and he played the piano for an hour in the firelight, and dreamed old dreams. And his hands fell into the chords of a song that he sang as a boy, and Molly came from the fire and stood beside him while they hummed the words in a low duet:—

"Let me believe that you love as you loved Long, long ago—long ago."

But when he went out into the drizzling night, and he and Jane left Molly at home, he stepped into the whirling yellow world of gold and grain, and drafts and checks, and leases and mortgages, and Heaven knows what of plots and schemes and plans. So he did not heed Jane when she said, "Poor—poor little Molly," but replied as he latched the Culpepper gate, "Oh, Molly'll be all right. You can't mix business and pleasure, you know. Bob must stay."

And when Molly went into the house, she found her mother waiting for her. The colonel's courage had failed him. The mother took her daughter's hand, and the two walked up the broad stairs together.

"Molly," said the mother, as the girl listlessly went about her preparations for bed, "don't grieve so about Bob. Father and John need him there. It's business, you know."

The daughter answered, "Yes, I know, but I'm so lonesome—so lonesome." Then she sobbed, "You know he hasn't written for a whole week, and I'm afraid—afraid!"

When the paroxysm had passed, the mother said: "You know, my dear, they need him there a little longer, and he wants to come back. Your father told me that John sent word to-day that you must not let him come." The girl's face looked the pain that struck her heart, and she did not answer. "Molly dear," began the mother again, "can't you write to Bob to-morrow and urge him to stay—for me? For all of us? It is so much to us now—for a little while—to have Bob there, sending back money for the company. I don't know what father would do if it wasn't for the company—and John."

The daughter held her mother's hand, and after gasping down a sob, promised, and then as the sob kept tilting back in her throat, she cried: "But oh, mother, it's such a big world—so wide, and I am so afraid—so afraid of something—I don't know what—only that I'm afraid."

But the mother soothed her daughter, and they talked of other things until she was quiet and drowsy.

But when she went to sleep, she dreamed a strange dream. The next day she could not untangle it, save that with her for hours as she went about her duties was the odour of lilacs, and the face of her lover, now a young eager face in pain, and then, by the miracle of dreams, grown old, bald at the temples and brow, but fine and strong and clean—like a boy's face. The face soon left her, but the smell of the lilacs was in her heart for days—they were her lilacs, from the bushes in the garden. As days and weeks passed, the dream blurred into the gray of her humdrum life and was gone. And so that day and that night dropped from time into eternity, and who knows of all the millions of stars that swarmed the heavens, what ones held the wandering souls of the simple people of that bleak Western town as they lay on their pillows and dreamed. For if our waking hours are passed in worlds so wide apart, who shall know where we walk in dreams?

It is thirty years and more now since John Barclay dreamed of himself as the Wheat King of the Sycamore Valley, and in that thirty years he had considerable time to reflect upon the reasons why pride always goeth before destruction. And he figured it out that in his particular case he was so deeply engrossed in the money he was going to make that first year, that he did not study the simple problem of wheat-growing as he should have studied it. In those days wheat-growing upon the plains had not yet become the science it is to-day, and many Sycamore Valley farmers planted their wheat in the fall, and failed to make it pay, and many other Sycamore Valley farmers planted their wheat in the spring, and failed, while many others succeeded. The land had not been definitely staked off and set apart by experience as a winter wheat country, and so the farmers operating under the Golden Belt Wheat Company, in the spring of 1874, planted their wheat in March.

That was a beautiful season on the plains. April rains came, and the great fields glowed green under the mild spring sun. And Bob Hendricks, collecting the money from his stock subscriptions, poured it into the treasury of the company, and John Barclay spent the money for seed and land and men to work the land, and so confident was he of the success of the plan that he borrowed every dollar he could lay his hands on, and got leases on more land and bought more seed and hired more men, in the belief that during the summer Hendricks could sell stock enough to pay back the loans. To Colonel Culpepper, Barclay gave a block of five thousand dollars' worth of the stock as a bonus in addition to his commission for his work in securing options, and the colonel, feeling himself something of a capitalist, and being in funds from the spring sale of lots in College Heights addition, invested in new clothes, bought some farm products in Missouri, and went up and down the earth proclaiming the glories of the Sycamore Valley, and in May brought two car-loads of land seekers by stages and wagons and buggies to Sycamore Ridge, and located them in Garrison County. And in his mail when he came home he found a notice indicating that he had overdrawn his account in the bank five hundred dollars, and that his note was due for five hundred more on the second mortgage which he had given the previous fall.

For two days he was plunged in gloom, and Barclay, observing his depression and worming out of the colonel the cause, persuaded General Hendricks to put the overdraft and the second mortgage note into one note for a thousand dollars plus the interest for sixty days until the colonel could make a turn, and after that the colonel was happy again. He forgot for a moment the responsibility of wealth and engaged himself in the task of making the Memorial Day celebration in Sycamore Ridge the greatest event in the history of the town. Though there were only five soldiers' graves to decorate, the longest procession Garrison County had ever known wound up the hill to the cemetery, and Colonel Martin Culpepper in his red sash, with his Knights Templar hat on, riding up and down the line on an iron-gray stallion, was easily the most notable figure in the spectacle. Even General Hendricks, revived by the pomp of the occasion, heading the troop of ten veterans of the Mexican War, and General Ward, in his regimentals, were inconsequential compared with the colonel. And his oration at the graves, after the bugles had blown taps, kept the multitude in tears for half an hour. John Barclay's address at the Opera House that afternoon—the address on "The Soldier and the Scholar"—was so completely overshadowed by the colonel's oratorical flight that Jane teased her husband about the eclipse for a month, and never could make him laugh. Moreover, the Banner that week printed the colonel's oration in full and referred to John's address as "a few sensible remarks by Hon. John Barclay on the duty of scholarship in times of peace." But here is the strange thing about it—those who read the colonel's oration were not moved by it; the charm of the voice and the spell of the tall, handsome, vigorous man and the emotion of the occasion were needed to make the colonel's oratory move one. Still, opinions differ even about so palpable a proposition as the ephemeral nature of the colonel's oratory. For the Banner that week pronounced it one of the classic oratorical gems of American eloquence, and the editor thereof brought a dozen copies of the paper under his arm when he climbed the hill to Lincoln Avenue the following Sunday night, and presented them to the women of the Culpepper household, whom he was punctilious to call "the ladies," and he assured Miss Molly and Mistress Culpepper—he was nice about those titles also—that their father and husband had a great future before him in the forum.

It may be well to pause here and present so punctilious a gentleman as Adrian Pericles Brownwell to the reader somewhat more formally than he has been introduced. For he will appear in this story many times. In the first place he wore mustaches—chestnut-coloured mustaches—that drooped rather gracefully from his lip to his jaw, and thence over his coat lapels; in the second place he always wore gloves, and never was without a flower in his long frock-coat; and thirdly he clicked his cane on the sidewalk so regularly that his approach was heralded, and the company was prepared for the coming of a serious, rather nervous, fiery man, a stickler for his social dues; and finally in those days, those sombre days of Sycamore Ridge after the panic of '73, when men had to go to the post-office to get their ten-dollar bills changed, Brownwell had the money to support the character he assumed. He had come to the Ridge from the South,—from that part of the South that carried its pistol in its hip pocket and made a large and serious matter of its honour,—that was obvious; he had paid Ezra Lane two thousand dollars for the Banner, that was a matter of record; and he had marched with some grandeur into General Hendricks' bank one Saturday and had clinked out five thousand dollars in gold on the marble slab at the teller's window, and that was a matter attested to by a crowd of witnesses. Watts McHurdie used to say that more people saw that deposit than could be packed into the front room of the bank with a collar stuffer.

But why Adrian Brownwell had come to the Ridge, and where he had made his money—there myth and fable enter into the composition of the narrative, and one man's opinion is as good as another's. Curiously enough, all who testify claim that they speak by the authority of Mr. Brownwell himself. But he was a versatile and obliging gentleman withal, so it is not unlikely that all those who assembled him from the uttermost parts of the earth into Sycamore Ridge for all the reasons in the longer catechism, were telling the simple truth as they have reason to believe it. What men know of a certainty is that he came, that he hired the bridal chamber of the Thayer House for a year, and that he contested John Barclay's right to be known as the glass of fashion and the mould of form in Garrison County for thirty long years, and then—but that is looking in the back of the book, which is manifestly unfair.

It is enough to know now that on that Sunday evening after Memorial Day, in 1874, Adrian P. Brownwell sat on the veranda of the Culpepper home slapping his lavender gloves on his knee by way of emphasis, and told the company what he told General Beauregard and what General Beauregard told him, at the battle of Shiloh; also what his maternal grandfather, Governor Papin, had said to General Jackson, when his grandmother, then Mademoiselle Dulangpre, youngest daughter of the refugee duke of that house, had volunteered to nurse the American soldiers in Jackson's hospital after the battle of New Orleans; also, and with detail, what his father, Congressman Brownwell, had said on the capitol steps in December, 1860, before leaving for Washington to resign his seat in Congress; and also with much greater detail he recounted the size of his ancestral domain, the number of the ancestral slaves and the royal state of the ancestral household, and then with a grand wave of his gloves, and a shrug of which Madam Papin might well have been proud, "But 'tis all over; and we are brothers—one country, one flag, one God, one very kind but very busy God!" And he smiled so graciously through his great mustaches, showing his fine even teeth, that Mrs. Culpepper, Methodist to the heart, smiled back and was not so badly shocked as she knew she should have been.

"Is it not so?" he asked with his voice and his hands at once. "Ah," he exclaimed, addressing Mrs. Culpepper dramatically, "what better proof would you have of our brotherhood than our common bondage to you? However dark the night of our national discord—to-day, North, South, East, West, we bask in the sunrise of some woman's eyes." He fluttered his gloves gayly toward Molly and continued:—

"'O when did morning ever break, And find such beaming eyes awake.'"

And so he rattled on, and the colonel had to poke his words into the conversation in wedge-shaped queries, and Mrs. Culpepper, being in due and proper awe of so much family and such apparent consequence, spoke little and smiled many times. And if it was "Miss Molly" this and "Miss Molly" that, when the colonel went into the house to lock the back doors, and "Miss Molly" the other when Mrs. Culpepper went in to open the west bedroom windows; and even if it was "Miss Molly, shall we go down town and refresh ourselves with a dish of ice-cream?" and even if still further a full-grown man standing at the gate under the May moon deftly nips a rose from Miss Molly's hair and holds the rose in both hands to his lips as he bows a good night—what then? What were roses made for and brown eyes and long lashes and moons and May winds heavy with the odour of flowers and laden with the faint sounds of distant herd bells tinkling upon the hills? For men are bold at thirty-five, and maidens, the best and sweetest, truest, gentlest maidens in all the world, are shy at twenty-one, and polite to their elders and betters of thirty-five—even when those elders and betters forget their years!