"And so you put up Molly to bail you out." Barclay did not answer and Hendricks went on bitterly: "Oh, you're a friend, John Barclay, you're a loyal friend. You've sold me out like a dog, John—like a dog!"

Barclay, sitting at his desk, playing with a paper-weight, snarled back: "Why don't you get in the market yourself, if you think I've sold you out? Why don't you lend the old man some money?"

"And take it from the bank you've just got done robbing of everything but the wall-paper?" Hendricks retorted.

"No," cried Barclay, in a loud voice. "Come off your high horse and take the profits we'll make on our wheat, pay off old Brownwell and marry her."

"And let the bank bust and the farmers slide?" asked Hendricks, "and buy back Molly with stolen money? Is that your idea?"

"Well," Barclay snapped, "you have your choice, so if you think more of the bank and your old hayseeds than you do of Molly, don't come blubbering around me about selling her."

"John," sighed Hendricks, after a long wrestle—a final contest with his demon, "I've gone all over that. And I have decided that if I've got to swindle seventy-five or a hundred farmers—most of them old soldiers on their homesteads—out of their little all, and cheat five hundred depositors out of their money to get Molly, she and I wouldn't be very happy when we thought of the price, and we'd always think of the price." His demon was limp in the background of his soul as he added: "Here are some papers I brought over. Let's get back to the settlement—fix them up and bring them over to the bank this morning, will you?" And laying a package carefully on the table, Hendricks turned and went quickly out of the room.

After Hendricks left the office that May morning, Barclay sat whistling the air of the song of the "Evening Star," looking blankly at a picture of Wagner hanging beside a picture of Jay Gould. The tune seemed to restore his soul. When he had been whistling softly for five minutes or so, the idea flashed across his mind that flour was the one thing used in America more than any other food product and that if a man had his money invested in the manufacture and sale of flour, he would have an investment that would weather any panic. The idea overcame him, and he shut his eyes and his ears and gripped his chair and whistled and saw visions. Molly Culpepper came into the room, and paused a moment on the threshold as one afraid to interrupt a sleeper. She saw the dapper little man kicking the chair rounds with his dangling heels, his flushed face reflecting a brain full of blood, his eyes shut, his head thrown far back, so that his Adam's apple stuck up irrelevantly, and she knew only by the persistence of the soft low whistle that he was awake, clutching at some day-dream. When she cleared her throat, he was startled and stared at her foolishly for a moment, with the vision still upon him. His wits came to him, and he rose to greet her.

"Well—well—why—hello, Molly—I was just figuring on a matter," he said as he put her in a chair, and then he added, "Well—I wasn't expecting you."

Even before she could speak his lips were puckering to pick up the tune he had dropped. She answered, "No, John, I wanted to see you—so I just came up."

"Oh, that's all right, Molly—what is it?" he returned.

"Well—" answered the young woman, listlessly, "it's about; father. You know he's badly in debt, and some way—of course he sells lots of land and all, but you know father, John, and he just doesn't—oh, he just keeps in debt."

Barclay had been lapsing back into his revery as she spoke, but he pulled himself out and replied: "Oh, yes, Molly—I know about father all right. Can't you make him straighten things out?"

"Well, no. John, that's just it. His money comes in so irregularly, this month a lot and next month nothing, that it just spoils him. When he gets a lot he spends it like a prince," she smiled sadly and interjected: "You know he is forever giving away—and then while he's waiting he gets in debt again. Then we are as poor as the people for whom he passes subscription papers, and that's just what I wanted to see you about."

Barclay took his eyes off Jay Gould's picture long enough to look at the brown-eyed girl with an oval face and a tip of a chin that just fitted the hollow of a man's hand; there were the smallest brown freckles in the world across the bridge of her nose, and under her eyes there was the faintest suggestion of dark shading. Youth was in her lips and cheeks, and when she smiled there were dimples. But John's eyes went back to Jay Gould's solemn black whiskers and he said from his abstraction, "Well, Molly, I wish I could help you."

"Well, I knew you would, John, some way; and oh, John, I do need help so badly." She paused a moment and gazed at him piteously and repeated, "So badly." But his eyes did not move from the sacred whiskers of his joss. The vision was flaming in his brain, and with his lips parted, he whistled "The Evening Star" to conjure it back and keep it with him. The girl went on:—

"About that money Mr. Brownwell loaned father, John." She flushed and cried, "Can't you find some way for father to borrow the money and pay Mr. Brownwell—now that your wheat is turning out so well?"

The young man pulled himself out of his day-dream and said, "Well—why—you see, Molly—I—Well now, to be entirely frank with you, Molly, I'm going into a business that will take all of my credit—and every cent of my money."

He paused a moment, and the girl asked, "Tell me, John, will the wheat straighten things up at the bank?"

"Well, it might if Bob had any sense—but he's got a fool notion of considering a straight mortgage that those farmers gave on their land as rent, and isn't going to make them redeem their land,—his share of it, I mean,—and if he doesn't do that, he'll not have a cent, and he couldn't lend your father any money." Barclay was anxious to get back to his "Evening Star" and his dream of power, so he asked, "Why, Molly, what's wrong?"

"John," she began, "this is a miserable business to talk about; but it is business, I guess." She stopped and looked at him piteously. "Well, John, father's debt to Mr. Brownwell—the ten-thousand-dollar loan on the house—will be due in August." The young man assented. And after a moment she sighed, "That is why I'm to be married in August." She stood a moment looking out of the window and cried, "Oh, John, John, isn't there some way out—isn't there, John?"

Barclay rose and limped to her and answered harshly: "Not so long as Bob is a fool—no, Molly. If he wants to go mooning around releasing those farmers from their mortgages—there's no way out. But I wouldn't care for a man who didn't think more of me than he did of a lot of old clodhoppers."

The girl looked at the hard-faced youth a moment in silence, and turned without a word and left the room. Barclay floated away on his "Evening Star" and spun out his dream as a spider spins his web, and when Hendricks came into the office for a mislaid paper half an hour later, Barclay still was figuring up profits, and making his web stronger. As Hendricks, having finished his errand, was about to go, Barclay stopped him.

"Bob, Molly's been up here. As nearly as I can get at it, Brownwell has promised to renew the colonel's mortgage in August. If he and Molly aren't married by then—no more renewals from him. Don't be a fool, Bob; let your sod-busters go hang. If you don't get their farms, some one else will!"

Hendricks looked at his partner a minute steadily, grunted, and strode out of the room. And the incident slipped from John Barclay's mind, and the web of the spider grew stronger and stronger in his brain, but it cast a shadow that was to reach across his life.

After Hendricks went from his office that morning, Barclay bounded back, like a boy at play, to the vision of controlling the flour market. He saw the waving wheat of Garrison County coming to the railroad, and he knew that his railroad rates were so low that the miller on the Sycamore could not ship a pound of flour profitably, and Barclay's mind gradually comprehended that through railroad rates he controlled the mill, and could buy it at his leisure, upon his own terms. Then the whole scheme unfolded itself before his closed eyes as he sat with his head tilted back and pillowed in his hands. If his railroad concession made it possible for him to underbid the miller at the Ridge, why could he not get other railroad concessions and underbid every miller along the line of the Corn Belt road, by dividing profits with the railroad officials? As he spun out his vision, he could hear the droning voices of General Ward and Colonel Culpepper in the next room; but he did not heed them.

They were discussing the things of the day,—indeed, the things of a fortnight before, to be precise,—the reception given by the Culpeppers to celebrate their silver wedding anniversary. The windows were open, and Barclay could hear the men's voices, and he knew vaguely that they were talking of Lige Bemis. For Barclay had tactfully asked the colonel as a favour to invite Mr. and Mrs. Bemis to the silver wedding reception. So the Bemises came. Mrs. Bemis, who was rather stout, even for a woman in her early forties, wore black satin and jet ornaments, including black jet ear bobs of tremendous size. And Watts McHurdie was so touched by the way ten years under a roof had tamed the woman whom he had known of old as "Happy Hallie," that he wrote a poem for the Banner about the return of the "Prodigal Daughter," which may be found in Garrison County scrap-books of that period. As for Mr. Bemis, he went slinking about the outskirts of the crowd, showing his teeth considerably, and making it obvious that he was there.

So as John Barclay rode his "Evening Star" to glory, in the next room General Ward turned to the colonel, who stood puffing in the doorway of the general's law-office. "Martin, did John Barclay make you invite that woman to your house—that Bemis woman?"

The colonel got his breath slowly after climbing the stair, and he did not reply at once. But he smiled, and stood with his arms akimbo a few seconds before he spoke. "Well now, General—since you ask it, I may as well confess it pointedly—I am ashamed to say he did!"

Ward motioned the colonel to a seat and asked impatiently, "Ashamed?"

"Well," responded Culpepper, as he put his feet in the window ledge, "she's as good as I am—if you come down to that! Why shouldn't I, who pretend to be a gentleman,—a Virginia gentleman, I may say, sir,—why shouldn't I be ashamed, disgraced, sir, disgraced in point of fact, that I had to be forced to invite any person in all God's beautiful world to my home?"

Ward looked at the colonel coldly a moment and then blurted out: "Ah, shucks, sir—stuff and nonsense! You know what she was before the war—Happy Hally! My gracious, Martin, how could you?"

Martin Culpepper brought his chair down with a bang and turned squarely to Ward. "General, the war's over now. I knew Happy Hally—and I knew the Red Legs she trained with. And we're making senators and governors and state officers and indeed, I may say, prominent citizens out of them. Why not give Hally her show? You damn cold-nosed Yankee Brahmins—you have Faith and you have Hope, but you have no more Charity than a sausage-grinder." The colonel rose, and cried with some asperity, "General, if you'd preach about the poor less, and pray with 'em more, you'd know more about your fellow-men, sir!"

Perhaps this conversation should not have been set down here; for it has no direct relation to the movement of this narrative. The narrative at this point should be hurrying along to tell how John Barclay and Bob Hendricks cleared up a small fortune on their wheat deal, and how that autumn Barclay bought the mill at Sycamore Ridge by squeezing its owner out, and then set about to establish four branches of the Golden Belt Wheat Company's elevator service along the line of the new railroad, and how he controlled the wheat output of three counties the next year through his enterprise. These facts carry John Barclay forward toward his life's goal. And while these two middle-aged gentlemen—the general and the colonel—were in the next room wrangling over the youthful love affairs of a middle-aged lady, a great dream was shaping in Barclay's head, and he did not heed them. He was dreaming of controlling the wheat market of the Golden Belt Railroad, through railroad-rate privileges, and his fancy was feeling its way into flour, and comprehending what might be done with wheat products.

It was a crude dream, but he was aflame with it, and yet—John Barclay, aged twenty-five, was a young man with curly hair and flattered himself that he could sing. And there was always in him that side of his nature, so the reader must know that when Nellie Logan came to his office that bright summer morning and found him wrapped in his day-dream of power, she addressed herself not to the Thane of Wheat who should be King hereafter, but to the baritone singer in the Congregational choir, and the wheat king scampered back to the dream world when John replied to Nellie's question.

"So it's your wedding, is it, Nellie—your wedding," he repeated. "Well, where does Watts come in?" And then, before she answered, he went on, "You bet I'll sing at your wedding, and what's more, I'll bring along my limping Congregational foot, and I'll dance at your wedding."

"Well, I just knew you would," said the young woman.

"So old Watts thought I wouldn't, did he?" asked Barclay. "The old skeezicks—Well, well! Nellie, you tell him that the fellow who was with Watts when he was shot ten miles from Springfield isn't going to desert him when he gets a mortal wound in the heart." Then Barclay added: "You get the music and take it down to Jane, and tell her to teach me, and I'll be there. Jane says you're going to put old Watts through all the gaits."

He leaned back in his swivel chair and smiled at his visitor. He had a slow drawl that he used in teasing, and one who heard that voice and afterward heard the harsh bark of the man in driving a bargain or browbeating an adversary would have to look twice to realize that the same man was talking. A little over an hour before in that very room he had looked at Bob Hendricks from under wrinkled brows with the vertical line creased between his eyes and snarled, "Well, then, if you think she's going to marry that fellow because I got him to lend the colonel some money, why don't you go and lend the colonel some more money and get her back?"

But there was not a muscle twitching in his face as he talked to Nellie Logan, not a break in his voice, not a ruffle of a hair, to tell her that John Barclay had broken with the friend of his boyhood and the partner of his youth, and that he had closed and bolted the Door of Hope on Molly Culpepper. He drawled on: "Jane was saying that you were going to have Bob and Molly for best man and bridesmaid. Ought you to do that? You know they—"

He did not finish the sentence, but she replied: "Oh, yes, I know about that. I told Watts he ought to have Mr. Brownwell; but he's as stubborn as a mule about just that one thing. Everything else—the flower girls and the procession and the ring service and all—he's so nice about. And you know I just had to have Molly."

John slapped the arms of his chair and laughed. "As old Daddy Mason says, 'Now hain't that just like a woman!' Well, Nellie, it's your wedding, and a woman is generally not married more than once, so it's all right. Go it while you're young."

And so he teased her out of the room, and when Sycamore Ridge packed itself into the Congregational Church one June night, to witness the most gorgeous church wedding the town ever had seen, John opened the ceremonies by singing the "Voice that breathed o'er Eden" most effectively, and Sycamore Ridge in its best clothes, rather stuffed and uncomfortable thereby, was in that unnatural attitude toward the world where it thought John Barclay's voice, a throaty baritone, with much affectation in the middle register, a tendency to flat in the upper register, and thick fuzz below "C," was beautiful, though John often remembered that night with unalloyed shame. He saw himself as he stood there, primped to kill, like a prize bull at a fair, bellowing out a mawkish sentiment in a stilted voice, and he wondered how the Ridge ever managed to endure him afterwards.

But this is a charitable world, and his temperament was such that he did not realize that no one paid much attention to him, after the real ceremony started. When the bride and the bridesmaid came down the aisle, Nellie Logan radiant in the gown which every woman in the church knew had come from Chicago and had been bought of the drummer at wholesale cost, saving the bride over fifteen dollars on the regular price—what did the guests care for a dapper little man singing a hymn tune through his nose, even if he was the richest young man in town? And when Molly Culpepper—dear little Molly Culpepper—came after the bride, blushing through her powder, and looking straight at the floor for fear her eyes would wander after her heart and wondering if the people knew—it was of no consequence that John Barclay's voice frazzled on "F"; for if the town wished to notice a man at that wedding, there was Watts McHurdie in a paper collar, with a white embroidered bow tie and the first starched shirt the town had ever seen him wear, badly out of step with the procession, while the best man dragged him like an unwilling victim to the altar; and of course there was the best man,—and a handsome best man as men go,—fair-skinned, light-haired, blue-eyed, with a good glow on his immobile face and rather sad eyes that, being in a man's head, went boldly where they chose and where all the women in the town could see them go. So there were other things to remember that night besides John Barclay's singing and the festive figure he cut at that wedding: there was the wedding supper at the Wards', and the wedding reception at the Culpeppers', and after it all the dance in Culpepper Hall. And all the town remembers these things, but only two people remember a moment after the reception when every one was hurrying away to the dance and when the bridesmaid—such a sweet, pretty little bridesmaid—was standing alone in a deserted room with a tall groomsman—just for a moment—just for a moment before Adrian Brownwell came up bustling and bristling, but long enough to say, "Bob—did you take my gloves there in the carriage as we were coming home from the church?" and long enough for him to answer, "Why, did you lose them?" and then to get a good square look into her eyes. It was only a few seconds in the long evening—less than a second that their eyes met; but it was enough to be remembered forever; though why—you say! It was all so commonplace; there was nothing in it that you would have thought worth remembering for a moment. "Bob, did you take my gloves?" "Why, did you lose them?" and then a glance of the eyes. Surely there are more romantic words than these. But when a man and a woman go in for collecting antiques in their dialogues, Heaven only knows what old rubbish you will find in their attics, scoured off and rebuilt and polished with secret tears until the old stuff glows like embers.

And that is why, when the music was silent in Culpepper Hall, and the tall young man walked slowly home alone, as he clicked his own gate behind him, he brought from his pocket two little white gloves,—just two ordinary white gloves,—and held them to his lips and lifted his arms in despair once and let them drop as he stood before his doorstep. And that is why a girl, a little girl with the weariest face in the town, looked out of her bedroom window that night and whispered over and over to herself the name she dared not speak. And all this was going on while the town was turning over in its bed, listening to the most tumultuous charivari that Sycamore Ridge has ever known.

Night after night that summer faithful Jake Dolan walked the streets of Sycamore Ridge with Bob Hendricks. By day they lived apart, but at night the young man often would look up the elder, and they would walk and walk together, but never once did Hendricks mention Molly's name nor refer to her in any way; yet Jake Dolan knew why they walked abroad. How did he know? How do we know so many things in this world that are neither seen nor heard? And the Irish—they have the drop of blood that defies mathematics; the Irish are the only people in the world whom kind Providence permits to add two and two together to make six. "You say 'tis four," said Dolan, one night, as he and Hendricks stood on the bridge listening to the roar from the dam. "I say 'tis six. There is this and there is that and you say they make the other. Not at all; they make something else entirely different. You take your two and your two and make your four and try your four on the world, and it works—yes, it works up to a point; but there is something left over, something unexplained; you don't know what. I do. It's the other two. Therefore I say to you, Mr. Robert Hendricks, that two and two make six, because God loves the Irish, and for no other reason on earth."

So much for the dreams of Molly, the memories of Bob, and the vagaries of Mr. Dolan. They were as light as air. But in John Barclay's life a vision was rising—a vision that was real, palpable, and vital; a vision of wealth and power,—and as the days and the months passed, the shadow of that vision grew big and black and real in a score of lives.



CHAPTER XV

As June burned itself gloriously into July, Robert Hendricks no longer counted the weeks until Molly Culpepper should be married, but counted the days. So three weeks and two days, from the first of July, became three weeks, then two weeks and six days, and then one week and six days, and then six days, five days, four days, three days; and then it became seventy-two hours. And the three threshing machines of the Golden Belt Wheat Company were pouring their ceaseless stream into the company's great bins. The railroad was only five miles away, and Hendricks was sitting in his office in the bank going over and over his estimates of the year's crop which was still lying in the field,—save the crop from less than two thousand acres that was harvested and threshed. From that he judged that there would be enough to redeem his share of the farmers' mortgages, which in Hendricks' mind could be nothing but rent for the land, and to pay his share of the bank's fraudulent loans to the company—and leave nothing more.

The fact that John expected to buy back the mortgages from Eastern investors who had bought them, and then squeeze the farmers out of their land by the option to buy hidden in the contract, did not move Hendricks. He saw his duty in the matter, but as the golden flood rose higher in the bins, and as hour after hour rolled by bringing him nearer and nearer to the time when Molly Culpepper should marry Adrian Brownwell, a temptation came to him, and he dallied with it as he sat figuring at his desk. The bank was a husk. Its real resources had been sold, and a lot of bogus notes—accommodation paper, they called it—had taken the place of real assets. For Hendricks to borrow money of any other institution as the officer of the Exchange National Bank of Sycamore Ridge would be a crime. And yet he knew that ten thousand dollars would save her, and his brain was wrought with a madness. And so he sat figuring while the hours slipped by, trying to discount his future income from the wheat to justify himself in taking the money from the bank's vaults. His figures did not encourage him. They showed him that to be honest with the farmers he might hope for no profit from that year's crop, and with two years of failure behind him, he knew that to discount the next year's crop would be nothing less than stealing. Then, strong and compelling, came the temptation to let the farmers fight it out with the Eastern investors. The temptation rocked the foundations of his soul. He knew it was wrong; he knew he would be a thief, if he did it, no matter what the law might say, no matter what the courts might adjudge. To Barclay what was legal was right, and what the courts had passed upon—that was legal. But Hendricks sat with his pencil in his hand, going over and over his figures, trying to silence his conscience.

It was a hot afternoon that he sat there, and idly through his mind went the computation that he had but sixty-six more hours of hope, and as he looked at the clock he added, "and thirty-eight minutes and twenty-seven seconds," when Martin Culpepper came ambling into the back room of the bank.

"Robert," began the colonel, with his eyes on the floor and his hands deep in his trousers pockets, "I've just been talking to John." The colonel rubbed his neck absent-mindedly and went on, "John's a Yankee, Robert—the blue stripe on his belly is fast blue, sir; it won't fade, change colour, or crock, in point of fact, not a damned bit, sir, not till the devil covers it with a griddle stripe, sir, I may say." The colonel slouched into a chair and looked into Hendricks' face with a troubled expression and continued, "That John certainly is Yankee, Robert, and he's too many for me. Yes, sir, certainly he's got me up in the air, sir—up in the air, and as I may say a mile west, on that wheat deal." Hendricks leaned forward unconsciously, and the colonel dropped both hands to his knees and leaned toward Hendricks. "Robert Hendricks," asked the colonel, as he bored his deep black eyes into the younger man, "did you know about that option in the wheat land mortgage? Answer me, sir!"

"Not at the time, Colonel," returned Hendricks, and began, "but I—"

"Well, neither did I. And I got half of those mortgages myself. Lige and I did it all, sir. And Lige knew—Lige, he says it's legal, but I say it's just common stealing." Hendricks moistened his lips and sat with mute face gazing at the colonel. The colonel went on, "And now the farmers have found it out, and the devil's to pay, sir, with no pitch hot!"

Hendricks cleared his throat and began, "Well, Colonel—I don't know; of course I—"

The elder man rose to his full height and glared at the younger, and cried, "Ah, Robert, Robert, fire in the mountain, snakes in the grass—you do know—you do know, sir. You know that to hold up the farmers of this county in the midst of what amounted to a famine, not to let them borrow a dollar in the county except on a gouging mortgage, and then to slip into that mortgage a blind option to sell for ten dollars an acre land that is worth three times that, is stealing, and so does John Barclay know that, and, worst of all, so does Martin Culpepper know that, and the farmers are finding it out—my neighbours and comrades that I helped to swindle, sir—to rob, I may say—they know what it is."

The colonel's voice was rising, and he stood glaring and puffing before the young man, shaking his head furiously. Young Hendricks was engaged in swallowing his Adam's apple and blinking unsteadily, and just as he started to reply, the colonel, who had caught his temper by the horn and was shaking it into submission, cried: "Yes, sir, Robert, that's what I said, sir; those were my very words in point of fact. And," he began as he sat down and sighed, "what galls me most of all, Robert, is that John laughs at me. Here you've been gagging and gulping and sputtering, boy, to keep down your conscience, and so I know—yes, Robert, I'm dead sure, I may say, that you're all right; but John giggles—giggles, sir, snickers in point of fact, as though he had done something smart in getting me to go out among my old soldier friends and rob 'em of their homesteads. He doesn't care for my good name any more than for his own."

Hendricks drummed with his fingers on the desk before him. His blue eyes looked into nothing, and his mind's eye saw the house of cards he had been dallying with totter and fall. He drew a deep breath before he looked up at the colonel, and said rather sadly: "Well, Colonel, you're right. I told John the day after I came home that I wouldn't stand it." He drummed with his fingers for a moment before continuing, "I suppose you got about half of those contracts, didn't you?"

The colonel pulled from his pocket a crumpled paper and handed it to Hendricks, "Here they are, sir—and every one from a soldier or a soldier's widow, every one a homestead, sir."

Hendricks walked to the window, and stood looking out with his eyes cast down. He fumbled his Masonic watch-charm a moment, and then glancing at it, caught the colonel's eye and smiled as he said: "I'm on the square, Colonel, in this matter. I'll protect you." He went to the elder man and put his hands on his shoulder as he said: "You go to your comrades and tell them this, Colonel, that between now and snowfall every man will have his land clear. But," he added, picking up the list of the colonel's contracts, "don't mention me in the matter." He paused and continued, "It might hurt the bank. Just tell them you'll see that it's taken care of."

The colonel put out his hand as he rose. When their hands met he was saying: "Blood tells, Robert Hendricks, blood tells. Wasn't your sainted father a Democrat, boy, a Democrat like me, sir,—a Union Democrat in point of fact?" The colonel squeezed the younger man's hand as he cried: "A Union Democrat, sir, who could shoot at his party, sir, but never could bring himself to vote against it—not once, sir—not once. And Robert Hendricks, when I see you acting as you've acted just now, sir, this very minute in point of fact, I may say, sir, that you're almost honest enough to be a Democrat, sir—like your sainted father." The colonel held the young man's hand affectionately for a time and then dropped it, sighing, "Ah, sir—if it wasn't for your damned Yankee free schools and your damned Yankee surroundings, what a Democrat you would have made, Robert—what a grand Democrat!" The colonel waved his silver tobacco box proudly and made for the door and left Hendricks sitting at his desk, drumming on the board with one hand, and resting his head in the other, looking longingly into the abyss from which he had escaped; for the lure of the danger still fluttered his soul.

Strength had come to him in that hour to resist the temptation. But the temptation still was there. For he was a young man, giving up for an intangible thing called justice the dearest thing in his life. He had opened the door of his life's despair and had walked in, as much like a man as he could, but he kept looking back with a heavy heart, hungering with his whole body and most of his soul for all that he had renounced. And so, staring at the light of other days, and across the shadow of what might have been, he let ten long minutes tick past toward the inevitable hour, and then he rose and put his hand to the plough for the long furrow.

They are all off the stage now, as Bob Hendricks is standing in the front door of the bank that August night with his watch in his hand reckoning the minutes—some four thousand three hundred of them—until Molly Culpepper will pass from him forever, and as the stage is almost deserted, we may peep under the rear curtain for a minute. Observe Sycamore Ridge in the eighties, with Hendricks its moving spirit, controlling its politics, dominating its business,—for John Barclay's business has moved to the City and Bob Hendricks has become the material embodiment of the town. And the town there on the canvas is a busy town of twenty thousand people. Just back of that scene we find a convention spread on the canvas, a political convention wherein Robert Hendricks is struggling for good government and clean politics. Observe him a taciturn, forceful man, with his hands on the machinery of his party in the state, shaping its destinies, directing its politics, seeking no office, keeping himself in the background, desiring only to serve, and not to advertise his power. So more and more power comes to him, greater and wider opportunities to serve his state. His business grows and multiplies, and he becomes a strong man among men; always reserved, always cautious, a man whose self-poise makes people take him for a cynic, though his heart is full of hope and of the joy of life to the very last. Let us lift up one more rag—one more painted rag in the scenery of his life—and see him a reformer of national fame; see him with an unflinching hand pull the wires that control a great national policy of his party, and watch in that scene wherein he names a president—even against the power and the money and the organization of rich men, brutally rich men like John Barclay. Hendricks' thin hair is growing gray in this scene, and his skin is no longer fresh and white; but his eyes have a twinkle in them, and the ardour of his soul glows in a glad countenance. And as he sits alone in his room long after midnight while the bands are roaring and the processions cheering and the great city is ablaze with excitement, Robert Hendricks, turning fifty, winds his watch—the same watch that he holds in his hand here while we pause to peek under the canvas behind the scenes—and wonders if Molly will be glad that his side won. He has not seen her for months, nor talked with her for years, and yet as he sits there winding his watch after his great strategic victory in national politics, he hopes fondly that perhaps Molly will know that he played a clean hand and won a fair game.

Now let us crawl out from under this rubbish of the coming years, back into Sycamore Ridge. And while the street is deserted, let us turn the film of events forward, letting them flit by unnoticed past the wedding of Molly Culpepper and Adrian Brownwell until we come to the August day when the railroad came to Sycamore Ridge.

Jacob Dolan, sheriff in and for Garrison County for four years, beginning with 1873, remembered the summer of 1875 to his dying day, as the year when he tore his blue soldier coat, and for twenty-five years, after the fight in which the coat was torn, Dolan never put it on for a funeral or a state occasion, that he did not smooth out the seam that Nellie Logan McHurdie made in mending the rent place, and recall the exigencies of the public service which made it necessary to tear one's clothes to keep the peace.

"You may state to the court in your own way," said the judge at the trial of the sheriff for assault, "just how the difficulty began."

"Well, sir," answered Dolan, "there was a bit of a celebration in town, on August 30, it being the day the railroad came in, and in honour of the occasion I put on my regimentals, and along about—say eleven o'clock—as the crowd began to thicken up around the bank corner, and in front of the hardware store, I was walking along, kind of shoving the way clear for the ladies to pass, when some one behind me says, 'General Hendricks was an old thief, and his son is no better,' and I turned around and clapt my eye on this gentleman here. I'd never seen him before in my whole life, but I knew by the bold free gay way he had with his tongue that he was from Minneola and bent on trouble. 'Keep still,' says I, calm and dignified like, bent on preserving the peace, as was my duty. 'I'll not,' says he. 'You will,' says I. 'Tis a free country,' says he, coming toward me with one shoulder wiggling. 'But not for cowards who malign the dead,' says I. 'Well, they were thieves,' says he, shaking his fist and getting more and more into contempt of court every minute. 'You're a liar,' says I, maintaining the dignity of my office. 'And you're a thief too,' says he. 'A what?' says I. 'A thief,' says he. 'Whack,' says I, with my stick across his head, upholding the dignity of the court. 'Biff,' says he, with a brick that was handy, more and more contemptuous. 'You dirty, mangy cur,' says I, grabbing him by the ears and pounding his head against the wall as I spoke, hoping to get some idea of the dignity of the court into his rebellious head. 'Whoop,' says he, and, as he tore my coat, 'Yip yip,' says I, and may it please the court it was shortly thereafter that the real trouble started, though I misremember just how at this time." And as there were three "E" Company men on the jury, they acquitted Dolan and advised the court to assess a fine on the prosecuting witness for contributory negligence in resisting an officer.

But the coat—the blue coat with brass buttons, with the straps of a lieutenant on the shoulders, was mended and even in that same summer did active service many times. For that was a busy summer for Sycamore Ridge, and holidays came faster than the months. When the supreme court decided the Minneola suit to enjoin the building of the court-house, in favour of Syeamore Ridge, there was another holiday, and men drew John Barclay around in the new hack with the top down, and there were fireworks in the evening. For it was John Barclay's lawsuit. Lige Bemis, who was county attorney, did not try to claim credit for the work, and when the last acre of the great wheat crop of the Golden Belt Wheat Company was cut, and threshed, there was a big celebration and the elevator of the Golden Belt Wheat Company was formally turned over to the company, and John Barclay was the hero of another happy occasion. For the elevator, standing on a switch by the railroad track, was his "proposition." And every one in town knew that the railroad company had made a rate of wheat to Barclay and his associates, so low that Minneola could not compete, even if she hauled her wheat to another station on the road, so Minneola teams lined up at Barclay's elevator. That autumn Minneola, without a railroad, without a chance for the county-seat, and without a grain market, began to fag, and during the last of September, the Mason House came moving out over the hill road, from Minneola to Sycamore Ridge, surrounded by a great crowd of enthusiastic men from the Ridge. Every evening, of the two weeks in which the house was moving, people drove out from Sycamore Ridge to see it, and Lycurgus Mason, sitting on the back step smoking,—he could not get into the habit of using the front steps even in his day of triumph,—was a person of considerable importance.

Money was plentiful, and the Exchange National Bank grew with the country. The procession of covered wagons, that had straggled and failed the year before, began to close ranks in the spring; and in place of "Buck" and "Ball" and "Star," and "Bright" and "Tom" and "Jerry," who used to groan under the yoke, horses were hitched to the wagons, and stock followed after them, and thus Garrison County was settled, and Sycamore Ridge grew from three to five thousand people in three years. In the spring of '75 the Banner began to publish a daily edition, and Editor Brownwell went up and down the railroad on his pass, attending conventions and making himself a familiar figure in the state. Times were so prosperous that the people lost interest in the crime of '73, and General Ward had to stay in his law-office, but he joined the teetotalers and helped to organize the Good Templars and the state temperance society. Colonel Culpepper in his prosperity took to fancy vests, cut extremely low, and the Culpepper women became the nucleus of organized polite society in the Ridge.

The money that John Barclay made in that first wheat transaction was the foundation of his fortune. For that money gave him two important things needed in making money—confidence in himself, and prestige. He was twenty-five years old then, and he had demonstrated to his community thoroughly that he had courage, that he was crafty, and that he went to his end and got results, without stopping for overnice scruples of honour. Sycamore Ridge and Garrison County, excepting a few men like General Ward, who were known as cranks, regarded John as the smartest man in the county—smarter even than Lige Bemis. And the whole community, including some of the injured farmers themselves, considered Hendricks a sissy for his scruples, and thought Barclay a shrewd financier for claiming all that he could get. Barclay got hold of eight thousand acres of wheat land, in adjacent tracts, and went ahead with his business. In August he ploughed the ground for another crop. Also he persuaded his mother to let him build a new home on the site of the Barclay home by the Sycamore tree under the ridge, and when it was done that winter Mr. and Mrs. John Barclay moved out of their rooms at the Thayer House and lived with John's mother. The house they built cost ten thousand dollars when it was finished, and it may still be seen as part of the great rambling structure that he built in the nineties. John put five hundred dollars' worth of books into the new house—sets of books, which strangely enough he forced himself to wade through laboriously, and thus he cultivated a habit of reading that always remained with him. In those days the books with cracked backs in his library were Emerson, Browning, and Tennyson. And after a hard day's work he would come home to his poets and his piano. He thought out the whole plan of the Barclay Economy Car Door Strip about midnight, sitting in his night clothes at the piano after reading "Abt Vogler," and the central idea for the address on the "Practical Transcendentalist," which he delivered at the opening of the state university the next year, came to him one winter night after he had tried to compose a clanging march as an air to fit Emerson's "The Sphinx." After almost a quarter of a century that address became the first chapter of Barclay's famous book, which created such ribaldry in the newspapers, entitled "The Obligations of Wealth."

It was in 1879 that Barclay patented his Economy Door Strip, and put it in his grain cars. It saved loss of grain in shipping, and Barclay, being on terms of business intimacy with the railroad men, sold the Economy Strip to the railroads to use on every car of grain or flour he shipped. And Lycurgus Mason, taken from the kitchen of the Mason House, hired a room over McHurdie's harness shop, and made the strips there. His first day in his new shop is impressed upon his memory by an incident that is the seed of a considerable part of this story.

He always remembers that day, because, when he got to the Thayer House, he found John there in the buggy waiting for him, and a crowd of men sitting around smoking cigars. In the seat by Barclay was a cigar-box, and Lycurgus cut in, before John could speak, with, "Well, which is it?"

And John returned, "A girl—get in; Mother Mason needs you."

Lycurgus fumbled under the box lid for a cigar as he got into the buggy, and repeated: "Mother needs me, eh? Well, now, ain't that just like a woman, taking a man from his work in the middle of the day? What are you going to name her?"

"How do you like Jeanette?" asked Barclay, as he turned the horse. "You know we can't have two Janes," he explained.

"Well," asked the elder man, tentatively, "how does mother stand on Jeanette?"

"Mother Mason," answered Barclay, "is against it."

"All right," replied Lycurgus, "I vote aye. What does she want?" he asked.

"Susan B.," returned Barclay.

"Susan B. Anthony?" queried the new grandfather.

"Exactly," replied the new father.

The two rode down the street in silence; as they turned into the Barclay driveway Lycurgus chuckled, "Well—well—Susan B. Wants to put breeches on that child before she gets her eyes open." Then he turned on Barclay with a broad grin of fellowship, as he pinched the young man's leg and laughed, "Say—John—honest, ain't that just like a woman?"

And so Jeanette Thatcher Barclay came into this world, and what with her Grandmother Barclay uncovering her to look at the Thatcher nose, and her Grandmother Mason taking her to the attic so that she could go upstairs before she went down, that she might never come down in the world, and what with her Grandfather Mason rubbing her almost raw with his fuzzy beard before the women could scream at him, and what with her father trying to jostle her on his knee, and what with all the different things Mrs. Ward, the mother of six, would have done to her, and all the things Mrs. Culpepper, mother of three, would have done to her, and Mrs. McHurdie, mother of none, prevented the others from doing, Jeanette had rather an exciting birthday. And Jeanette Barclay as a young woman often looks at the scrap-book with its crinkly leaves and reads this item from the Daily Banner: "The angels visited our prosperous city again last Thursday, June 12, and left a little one named Jeanette at the home of our honoured townsman, John Barclay. Mother and child progressing nicely." But under this item is a long poem clipped from a paper printed a week later,—Jeanette has counted the stanzas many times and knows there are seventeen, and each one ends with "when the angels brought Jeanette." Her father used to read the verses to her to tease her when she was in her teens, and once when she was in her twenties, and Jeanette had the lonely poet out to dinner one Sunday, she sat with him on the sofa in the library, looking at the old scrap-book. Their eyes fell upon the verses about the angels bringing Jeanette, and the girl noticed the old man mumming it over and smiling.

"Tell me, Uncle Watts," she asked, "why did you make such a long poem about such a short girl?"

The poet ran his fingers through his rough gray beard, and went on droning off the lines, and grinning as he read. When he had finished, he took her pretty hand in his gnarly, bony one and patted the white firm flesh tenderly as he peered back through the years. "U-h-m, that was years and years ago, Jeanette—years and years ago, and Nellie had just bought me my rhyming dictionary. It was the first time I had a chance to use it." The lyrical artist drummed with his fingers on the mahogany arm of the sofa. "My goodness, child—what a long column there was of words rhyming with 'ette.'" He laughed to himself as he mused: "You know, my dear, I had to let 'brevet' and 'fret' and 'roulette' go, because I couldn't think of anything to say about them. You don't know how that worries a poet." He looked at the verses in the book before him and then shook his head sadly: "I was young then—it seems strange to think I could write that. Youth, youth," he sighed as he patted the fresh young hand beside him, "it is not by chance you rhyme with truth."

His eyes glistened, and the girl put her cheek against his and squeezed the thin, trembling hand as she cried, "Oh, Uncle Watts, Uncle Watts, you're a dear—a regular dear!"

"In his latter days," writes Colonel Culpepper, in the second edition of the Biography, "those subterranean fires of life that flowed so fervently in his youth and manhood smouldered, and he did not write often. But on occasion the flames would rise and burn for a moment with their old-time ardour. The poem 'After Glow' was penned one night just following a visit with a young woman, Jeanette, only daughter of Honourable and Mrs. John Barclay, whose birth is celebrated elsewhere in this volume under the title 'When the Angels brought Jeanette.' The day after the poem 'After Glow' was composed I was sitting in the harness shop with the poet when the conversation turned upon the compensations of age. I said: 'Sir, do you not think that one of our compensations is that found in the freedom and the rare intimacy with which we are treated by the young women? They no longer seem to fear us. Is it not sweet?' I asked. Our hero turned from his bench with a smile and a deprecating gesture as he replied softly, 'Ah, Colonel—that's just it; that's just the trouble.' And then he took from a box near by this poem, 'The After Glow,' and read it to me. And I knew the meaning of the line—

"'Oh, drowsy blood that tosses in its sleep.'

"And so we fell to talking of other days. And until the twilight came we sat together, dreaming of faded moons."



CHAPTER XVI

Colonel Martin Culpepper was standing with, one foot on the window ledge in the office of Philemon R. Ward one bright spring morning watching the procession of humanity file into the post-office and out into the street upon the regular business of life. Mrs. Watts McHurdie, a bride of five years and obviously proud of it, hurried by, and Mrs. John Barclay drove down the street in her phaeton; Oscar Fernald, with a pencil behind his ear, came out of his office licking an envelope and loped into the post-office and out like a dog looking for his bone; and then a lank figure sauntered down the street, stopping here and there to talk with a passerby, stepping into a stairway to light a cigar, and betimes leaning languidly against an awning post in the sun and overhauling farmers passing down Main Street in their wagons.

"He's certainly a gallus-looking slink," ejaculated the colonel.

The general, writing at his desk, asked, "Who?"

"Our old friend and comrade in arms, Lige Bemis." At the blank look on the general's face the colonel shook his head wearily. "Don't know what a gallus-looking slink is, do you? General, the more I live with you damn Yankees and fight for your flag and die for your country, sir, the more astonished I am at your limited and provincial knowledge of the United States language. Here you are, a Harvard graduate, with the Harvard pickle dripping off your ears, confessing such ignorance of your mother-tongue. General, a gallus-looking slink is four hoss thieves, three revenue officers, a tin pedler, and a sheep-killing dog, all rolled into one man. And as I before remarked, our beloved comrade, Lige Bemis, is certainly a gallus-looking slink."

"Far be it from me," continued the colonel, "residing as I may say in a rather open and somewhat exposed domicile—a glass house in fact—to throw stones at Elijah Westlake Bemis,—far be it." The colonel patted himself heroically on the stomach and laughed. "Doubtless, while I haven't been a professional horse thief, nor a cattle rustler, still, probably, if the truth was known, I've done a number of things equally distasteful—I was going to say obnoxious—in the sight of Mr. Bemis, so we'll let that pass." The colonel stretched his suspenders out and let them flap against the plaits of his immaculate shirt. "But I will say, General, that as I see it, it will be a heap handier for me to explain to St. Peter at the gate the things I've done than if he'd ask me about Lige's record."

The general scratched along, without answering, and the colonel looked meditatively into the street; then he began to smile, and the smile glowed into a beam that bespread his countenance and sank into a mood that set his vest to shaking "like a bowl full of jelly." "I was just thinking," he said to nobody in particular, "that if Lige was jumped out of his grave right quick by Gabriel and hauled up before St. Peter and asked to justify my record, he'd have some trouble too—considerable difficulty, I may say. I reckon it's all a matter of having to live with your sins till you get a good excuse thought up."

The general pushed aside his work impatiently and tilted back in his chair. "Come, Martin Culpepper, come, come! That won't do. You know better than that. What's the use of your pretending to be as bad as Lige Bemis? You know better and I know better and the whole town knows better. He's little, and he's mean, and snooping, and crooked as a dog's hind leg. Why, he was in here yesterday—actually in here to see me. Yes, sir—what do you think of that? Wants to be state senator."

"So I hear," smiled the colonel.

"Well," continued the general, "he came in here yesterday as pious as a deacon, and he said that his friends were insisting on his running because his enemies were bringing up that 'old trouble' on him. He calls his horse stealing and cattle rustling 'that old trouble.' Honestly, Martin, you'd think he was being persecuted. It was all I could do to keep from sympathizing with him. He said he couldn't afford to retreat under fire, and then he told me how he had been trying to be a better man, and win the respect of the people—and I couldn't stand it any longer, and I rose up and shook my fist in his face and said: 'Lige Bemis, you disreputable, horse-stealing cow thief, what right have you to ask my help? What right have you got to run for state senator, anyway?' And, Martin, the brazen whelp reared back and looked me squarely in the eye and answered without blinking, 'Because, Phil Ward, I want the job.' What do you think of that for brass?"

The colonel slapped his campaign hat on his leg and laughed. There was always, even to the last, something feminine in Martin Culpepper's face when he laughed—a kind of alternating personality of the other sex seemed to tiptoe up to his consciousness and peek out of his kind eyes. As he laughed with Ward the colonel spoke: "Criminy, but that's like him. He's over there talking to Gabe Carnine on the corner now. I know what he's saying. He has only one speech, and he gets it off to all of us. He's got his cigar chawed down to a rag, stuck in one corner of his mouth, and he's saying, 'Gabe—this is the fight of my life. This is the last time I'm going to ask my friends for help.' General, I've heard that now, off and on, first and last, from old Lige at every city, state, county, and lodge election since the war closed, and I can see how Gabe is twisting and wiggling trying to get away from it. He's heard it too. Now Lige is saying: 'Gabe, I ain't going to lie to you; you know me, and you know I've made mistakes—but they were errors of judgment, and I want to get a chance to live 'em down. I want to show the young men of this state that Lige Bemis of the Red Legs is a man—even if he was wild as a young fellow; it'll prove that a man can rise.' Poor old Gabe—Lige has got him by the coat front, now. That's the third degree. When he gets him by the neck and begins to whisper, he's giving him the work in the uniform rank. He's saying: 'Gabe, I've got to have you with me. I can't win without you, and I would rather lose than win with you against me. You stand for all that's upright in this county, and if you'll come to my aid, I can win.' Here, General—look—Lige's got him by the neck and the hand. Now for the password right from the grand lodge, 'Gabe, you'd make a fine state treasurer—I can land it for you. Make me state senator, and with my state acquaintance, added to the prestige of this office, I can make a deal that will land you.' Oh, I know his whole speech," laughed the colonel. "Bob Hendricks is to be secretary of state, John Barclay is to be governor, Oscar Fernald is to be state auditor, and the boys say that Lycurgus Mason has the refusal of warden of the Penitentiary." The colonel chuckled as he added: "So far as the boys have been able to learn, Lige still has United States senator, president, and five places in the cabinet to go on, but Minneola township returns ain't all in yet, and they may change the result. By the way, General, what did you get?"

The general flushed and replied, "Well, to be perfectly honest with you, Mart—he did promise me to vote for the dram-shop law."

And in the convention that summer Lige Bemis strode with his ragged cigar sticking from the corner of his mouth, with his black eyes blazing, and his shock of black hair on end, begging, bulldozing, and buying delegates to vote for him. He had the river wards behind him to a man, and he had the upland townships where the farmers needed a second name on their notes at the bank; and in the gentleman's ward—the silk-stocking ward—he had Gabriel Carnine, chairman of the first ward delegation, casting the solid vote of that ward for Bemis ballot after ballot. And when Bemis got Minneola township for fifty dollars,—and everybody in the convention knew it,—he was declared the nominee of the party with a whoop.

But behind Bemis was the sinister figure of young John Barclay working for his Elevator Company. He needed Bemis in politics, and Bemis needed Barclay in business. And there the alliance between Barclay and Bemis was cemented, to last for a quarter of a century. Barclay and Bemis went into the campaign together and asked the people to rally to the support of the party that had put down the rebellion, that had freed four million slaves, and had put the names of Lincoln and of Grant and Garfield as stars in the world's firmament of heroes. And the people of Garrison County responded, and State Senator Elijah Westlake Bemis did for Barclay in the legislature the things that Barclay would have preferred not to do for himself, and the Golden Belt Elevator Company throve and waxed fat. And Lige Bemis, its attorney, put himself in the way of becoming a "general counsel," with his name on an opaque glass door. For as Barclay rose in the world, he found the need of Bemis more and more pressing every year. In politics the favours a man does for others are his capital, and Barclay's deposit grew large. He was forever helping some one. His standing with the powers in the state was good. He was a local railroad attorney, and knew the men who had passes to give, and who were responsible for the direction which legislation took during the session. Barclay saw that they put Bemis on the judiciary committee, and by manipulating the judiciary committee he controlled a dozen votes through Bemis. He changed a railroad assessment law, secured the passage of a law permitting his Elevator Company to cheat the farmers by falsely grading their wheat, and prevented the passage of half a dozen laws restricting the powers of railroads. So at the close of the legislative session his name appeared under a wood-cut picture in the Commonwealth newspaper, and in the article thereunto appended Barclay was referred to as one of the "money kings of our young state." That summer he turned his wheat into his elevator early and at a low price, and borrowed money on it, and bought five new elevators and strained his credit to the limit, and before the fall closed he had ten more, and controlled the wheat in twenty counties. Strangers riding through the state on the Corn Belt Railroad saw the words, "The Golden Belt Elevator Company" on elevators all along the line. But few people knew then that the "Company" had become a partnership between John Barclay of Sycamore Ridge and less than half a dozen railroad men, with Barclay owning seventy-five per cent of the partnership and with State Senator Bemis the attorney for the company.

That year the railroad officials who were making money out of the Golden Belt Elevator Company were obliging, and Barclay made a contract with them to ship all grain from the Golden Belt Company's elevators in cars equipped with the Barclay Economy Rubber Strip, and he sold these strips to the railroads for four dollars apiece and put them on at the elevators. He shipped ten thousand cars that year, and Lycurgus Mason hired two men to help him in the strip factory. And John Barclay, in addition to the regular rebate, made forty thousand dollars that he did not have to divide. The next year he leased three large mills and took over a score of elevators and paid Lycurgus twenty dollars a week, and Lycurgus deposited money in the bank in his own name for the first time in his life.

As the century clanged noisily into its busy eighties, Adrian P. Brownwell creaked stiffly into his forties. And while all the world about him was growing rich,—or thought it was, which is the same thing,—Brownwell seemed to be struggling to keep barely even with the score of life. The Banner of course ran as a daily, but it was a miserable, half-starved little sheet, badly printed, and edited, as the printers used to say, with a pitchfork. It looked shiftless and dirty-faced long before Brownwell began to look seedy. Editor Brownwell was forever going on excursions—editorial excursions, land-buyers' excursions, corn trains, fruit trains, trade trains, political junkets, tours of inspection of new towns and new fields, and for consideration he was forever writing grandiloquent accounts of his adventures home to the Banner. But from the very first he ostentatiously left Molly, his wife, at home. "The place for a woman," said Brownwell to the assembled company on the Barclay veranda one evening, when Jane had asked him why he did not take Molly to the opening of the new hotel at Garden City, "the place for woman is in the sacred precincts of home, 'far from the madding crowd's ignoble throng.' The madame and I," with a flourish of his cane, "came to that agreement early, eh, my dear, eh?" he asked, poking her masterfully with his cane. And Molly Brownwell, wistful-eyed and fading, smiled and assented, and the incident passed as dozens of other incidents passed in the Ridge, which made the women wish they had Adrian Brownwell, to handle for just one day. But the angels in that department of heaven where the marriages are made are exceedingly careful not to give to that particular kind of women the Adrian Brownwell kind of men, so the experiment which every one on earth for thousands of years has longed to witness, still remains a theory, and Adrian Brownwell traipsed up and down the earth, in his lavender gloves, his long coat and mouse-coloured trousers, his high hat, with his twirling cane, and the everlasting red carnation in his buttonhole. His absence made it necessary for Molly Brownwell to leave the sacred precincts of the home many and many a Saturday afternoon, to go over the books at the Banner office, make out bills, take them out, and collect the money due upon them and pay off the printers who got out the paper. But Adrian Brownwell ostentatiously ignored such services and kept up the fiction about the sacred precincts, and often wrote scorching editorials about the "encroachment of women" and grew indignant editorially at the growth of sentiment for woman's suffrage. On one occasion he left on the copy-hook a fervid appeal for women to repulse the commercialism which "was sullying the fair rose of womanhood," and taking "from woman the rare perfume of her chiefest charm," and then he went away on a ten days' journey, and the foreman of the Banner had to ask Mrs. Brownwell to collect enough money from the sheriff and a delinquent livery-stable keeper to pay the freight charges on the paper stock needed for that week's issue of the paper.

The town came to know these things, and so when Brownwell, who, since his marriage, had taken up his abode at the Culpeppers', hinted at his "extravagant family," the town refused to take him seriously. And the strutting, pompous little man, who referred grandly to "my wife," and then to "the madame," and finally to "my landlady," in a rather elaborate attempt at jocularity, laughed alone at his merriment along this line, and never knew that no one cared for his humour.

So in his early forties Editor Brownwell dried up and grew yellow and began to dye his mustaches and his eyebrows, and to devote much time to considering his own importance. "Throw it out," said Brownwell to the foreman, "not a line of it shall go!" He had just come home from a trip and had happened to glance over the proof of the article describing the laying of the corner-stone of Ward University.

"But that's the only thing that happened in town this week, and Mrs. Brownwell wrote it herself."

"Cut it out, I say," insisted Brownwell, and then threw back his shoulders and marched to his desk, snapping his eyes, and demonstrating to the printers that he was a man of consequence. "I'll teach 'em," he roared. "I'll teach 'em to make up their committees and leave me out."

He raged about the office, and finally wrote the name of Philemon R. Ward in large letters on the office blacklist hanging above his desk. This list contained the names which under no circumstances were to appear in the paper. But it was a flexible list. The next day John Barclay, who desired to have his speech on the laying of the corner-stone printed in full, gave Brownwell twenty dollars, and a most glowing account of the event in question appeared in the Banner, and eloquence staggered under the burden of praise which Brownwell's language loaded upon the shoulders of General Ward.

It is now nearly a generation since that corner-stone was laid. Boys and girls who then were children have children in the university, and its alumni include a brigadier in the army, a poet, a preacher of national renown, two college presidents, an authority upon the dynamics of living matter, and two men who died in the American mission at Foo Chow during the uprising in 1900. When General Ward was running for President of the United States on one of the various seceding branches of the prohibition party, while Jeanette Barclay was a little girl, he found the money for it; two maiden great-aunts on his mother's side of the family had half a million dollars to leave to something, and the general got it. They willed it to him to hold in trust during his lifetime, but the day after the check came for it, he had transferred the money to a university fund, and had borrowed fifty dollars of Bob Hendricks to clean up his grocery bills and tide him over until his pension came. But he was a practical old fox. He announced that he would give the money to a college only if the town would give a similar sum, and what with John Barclay's hundred-thousand-dollar donation, and Bob Hendricks' ten thousand, and what with the subscription paper carried around by Colonel Culpepper, who proudly headed it with five thousand dollars, and after the figure wrote in red ink "in real estate," much to the town's merriment, and what with public meetings and exhortations in the churches, and what with voting one hundred thousand dollars in bonds by Garrison County for the privilege of sending students to the college without tuition, the amount was raised; and as the procession wheeled out of Main Street to attend the ceremonies incident to laying the corner-stone that beautiful October day, it is doubtful which was the prouder man—Martin Culpepper, the master of ceremonies, in his plumed hat, flashing sword, and red sash, or General Philemon Ward, who for the first time in a dozen years heard the crowd cheer his name when the governor in his speech pointed at the general's picture—his campaign picture that had been hooted with derision and spattered with filth on so many different occasions in the town. The governor's remarks were of course perfunctory; he devoted five or ten minutes to the praise of General Ward, of Sycamore Ridge, of John Barclay, and of education in general, and then made his regular speech that he used for college commencements, for addresses of welcome to church conferences, synods, and assemblies, and for conclaves of the grand lodge. General Ward spoke poorly, which was to his credit, considering the occasion, and Watts McHurdie's poem got entangled with Juno and Hermes and Minerva and a number of scandalous heathen gods,—who were no friends of Watts,—and the crowd tired before he finished the second canto. But many discriminating persons think that John Barclay's address, "The Time of True Romance," was the best thing he ever wrote. It may be found in his book as Chapter XI. "The Goths," he said, "came out of the woods, pulled the beards of the senators, destroyed the Roman state, murdered and pillaged the Roman people, and left the world the Gothic arch; the Vikings came over the sea, roaring their sagas of rapine and slaughter; the conquerors came to Europe with spear and sword and torch and left the outlines of the map, the boundaries of states. Luther married his nun, and set Christendom to fighting over it for a hundred years, but he left a free conscience. Cromwell thrust his pikes into the noble heads of England, snapped his fingers at law, and left civil liberty. Organized murder reached its sublimity in the war that Lincoln waged, and in that murdering and pillage true romance came to mankind in its flower. Murder for the moment in these piping times has become impolite. But true romance is here. Our heroes rob and plunder, and build cities, and swing gayly around the curves of the railroads they have stolen, and swagger through the cities they have levied upon the people to build. Do we care to-day whether Charlemagne murdered his enemies with a sword or an axe; do we ask if King Arthur used painless assassination or burned his foes at the stake? Who cares to know that Caesar was a rake, and that William the Conqueror was a robber? They did their work and did it well, and are snugly sitting on their monuments where no moralist can reach them. So those searching for true romance to-day, who regard the decalogue as mere persiflage, and the moral code as a thing of archaic interest, will get their day's work done and strut into posterity in bronze and marble. They will cheat and rob and oppress and grind the faces off the poor, and do their work and follow their visions, and live the romance in their hearts. To-morrow we will take their work, disinfect it, and dedicate it to God's uses."

There was more of it—four thousand words more, to be exact, and when General Ward went home that night he prayed his Unitarian God to forgive John Barclay for his blasphemy. And for years the general shuddered when his memory brought back the picture of the little man, with his hard tanned face, his glaring green eyes, his brazen voice trumpeting the doctrine of materialism to the people.

"John," said the general, the next day, as he sat in the mill, going over the plans of the college buildings with Barclay, who was chairman of the board of directors, "John, why are you so crass, so gross a materialist? You have enough money—why don't you stop getting it and do something with it worth while?"

"Because, General, I'm not making money—that's only an incident of my day's work. I'm organizing the grain industry of this country as it is organized in no other country on this planet." Barclay rose as he spoke and began limping the length of the room. It was his habit to walk when he talked, and he knew the general had come to catechize him.

"Yes, but then, John—what then?"

"What then?" repeated Barclay, with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the floor. "Coffee, maybe—perhaps sugar, or tobacco. Or why not the whole food supply of the people—let me have meat and sugar where I will have flour and grain, and in ten years no man in America can open his grocery store in the morning until he has asked John Barclay for the key." He snapped his eyes good-naturedly at the general, challenging the man's approval.

The general smiled and replied: "No, John, you'll get the social bug and go around in knee-breeches, riding a horse after a scared fox, or keeping a lot of hussies on a yacht. They all get that way sooner or later."

Barclay leaned over Ward, stuck out his hard jaw and growled: "Well, I won't. I'm going to be a tourist-sleeper millionaire. I stick to Sycamore Ridge; Jeanette goes to the public schools; Jane buys her clothes at Bob Hendricks' or Dorman's, or at the most of Marshall Field in Chicago; I go fishing down at Minneola when I want rest." Ward started to protest, but Barclay headed him off. "I made a million last year. What did I do with it? See any yachts on the Sycamore? Observe any understudies for Jane around the place? Have you heard of any villas for the Barclays in Newport? No—no, you haven't, but you may like to know that I have control of a railroad that handles more wheat than any other hundred miles in the world, and it is the key to the lake situation. And I've put the price of my Economy Door Strip up to ten dollars, and they don't dare refuse it. What's more, I'm going to hire a high-priced New York sculptor to make a monument for old Henry Schnitzler, who fell at Wilson's Creek, and put it in the cemetery. But I am giving none of my hard-earned cash to cooks and florists and chorus ladies. So if I want to steal a mill or so every season, and gut a railroad, I'm going to do it, but no one can rise up and say I am squandering my substance on riotous living."

Barclay shook his head as he spoke and gesticulated with his hands, and the general, seeing that he could not get the younger man to talk of serious things, brought out the plans for the college buildings, and the men fell to the work in hand with a will.

Barclay's spirit was the spirit of his times—growing out of a condition which, as Barclay said in his speech, was like Emersonian optimism set to Wagnerian music. In Sycamore Ridge factories rose in the bottoms near the creek, and shop hands appeared on the streets at night; new people invaded Lincoln Avenue, and the Culpeppers, to maintain their social supremacy, had to hire a coloured man to open the door for an afternoon party, and for an evening reception it took two, one for the door and one to stand at the top of the stairs.

Those were the palmy days of the colonel's life. Money came easily, and went easily. The Culpepper Mortgage Company employed fifty men, who handled money all over the West, and one of the coloured men who opened the door at the annual social affair at the Culpepper home also took care of the horses, and drove the colonel down to his office in the Barclay block every morning, and drove him home in the evening.

"Well," said Watts McHurdie to Gabriel Carnine as the two walked down the hill into the business section of the town, a few days after the corner-stone of Ward College was laid, "old Phil has got his college started and Mart's got his church a-going."

"You mean the East End Mission? Yes, and I don't know which, of 'em is happier over his work," replied Carnine.

"Well, Mart certainly is proud; he's been too busy to loaf in the shop for six months," said McHurdie.

Carnine smiled, and stroked his chestnut beard reflectively before he added: "Probably that's why he hasn't been in to renew his last two notes. But I guess he does a lot of good to the poor people over there along the river. Though I shouldn't wonder if he was encouraging them to be paupers." Carnine paused a moment and then added, "Good old Mart—he's got a heart just like a woman's."

They were passing the court-house square, and Bailiff Jacob Dolan, with a fist full of legal papers, caught step with Carnine and McHurdie. "We were talking about Mart Culpepper and his Mission Church," said Carnine. "Don't you suppose, Jake, that Mart, by circulating down there with his basket so much, encourages the people to be shiftless? We were just wondering."

"Oh, you were, were you?" snapped Dolan. "There you go, Gabe Carnine; since you've moved to town and got to be president of a bank, you're mighty damn scared about making paupers. When Christ told the young man to sell his goods and give them to the poor, He didn't tell him to be careful about making them paupers. And Mr. Gabriel Carnine, Esquire, having the aroma of one large morning's drink on my breath emboldens me to say, that if you rich men will do your part in giving, the Lord will manage to keep His side of the traces from scraping on the wheel. And if I had one more good nip, I'd say, which Heaven forbid, that you fellows are asking more of the Lord by expecting Him to save your shrivelled selfish little souls from hell-fire because of your squeeze-penny charities, than you would be asking by expecting Him to keep the poor from becoming paupers by the dribs you give them. And if Mart Culpepper can give his time and his money every day helping them poor devils down by the track, niggers and whites, good and bad, male and female, I guess the Lord will put in lick for lick with Mart and see that his helping doesn't hurt them." Dolan shook his head at the banker, and then smiled at him good-naturedly as he finished, "Put that in your knapsack, you son of a gun, and chew on it till I see you again." Whereupon he turned a corner and went his way.

Carnine laughed rather unnaturally and said to McHurdie, "That's why he's never got on like the other boys. Whiskey's a bad partner."

McHurdie agreed, and went chuckling to his work, when Carnine turned into the bank. Later in the forenoon Bailiff Dolan came in grinning, and took a seat by the stove in McHurdie's shop and said as he reached into the waste-basket for a scrap of harness leather, and began whittling it, "What did Gabe say when I left you this morning?" and without waiting for a reply, went on, "I've thought for some time Gabe needed a little something for what ails him, and I gave it to him, out of the goodness of my heart."

McHurdie looked at Dolan over his glasses and replied, "Speech is silver, but silence is golden."

"The same," answered Dolan, "the same it is, and by the same authority apples of gold in pictures of silver is a word fitly spoken to a man like Gabe Gamine." He whittled for a few minutes while the harness maker worked, and then sticking his pocket-knife into the chair between his legs, said: "But what I came in to tell you was about Lige Bemis; did you know he's in town? Well, he is. Johnnie Barclay wired him to leave the dump up in the City and come down here, and what for, do you think? 'Tis this. The council was going to change the name of Ellen Avenue out by the college to Garfield, and because it was named for that little girl of Mart's that died right after the war, don't you think Johnnie's out raising hell about it, and brought Lige down here to beat the game. He'll be spending a lot of money if he has to. Now you wouldn't think he'd do that for old Mart, would you? He's too many for me—that Johnny boy is. I can't make him out." The Irishman played with his knife, sticking it in the chair and pulling it out for a while, and then continued: "Oh, yes, what I was going to tell you was the little spat me and Lige had over Johnnie. Lige was in my room in the court-house waiting to see a man in the court, and was bragging to me about how smart John was, and says Lige, 'He's found some earth over in Missouri—yellow clay,' he says, 'that's just as good as oatmeal, and he ships it all over the country to his oatmeal mills and mixes it with the real stuff and sells it.' I says: 'He does, does he? Sells mud mixed with oatmeal?' and Lige says, 'Yes, sir, he's got a whole mountain of it, and he's getting ten dollars a ton net for it, which is better than a gold mine.' 'And you call that smart?' says I. 'Yes,' says he, 'yes, sir, that's commercial instinct; it's perfectly clean mud, and our chemist says it won't harm any one,' says he. 'And him president of the Golden Belt Elevator Co.?' says I. 'He is,' says Lige. 'And don't need the money at all?' says I. 'Not a penny of it,' says he. 'Well,' says I, 'Lige Bemis,' says I, 'when Johnnie gets to hell,—and he'll get there as sure as it doesn't freeze over,' says I, 'may the devil put him under that mountain of mud and keep his railroad running night and day dumping more mud on while he eats his way out as a penance,' says I. And you orto heard 'em laugh." Dolan went on cutting curly-cues from the leather, and McHurdie kept on sewing at his bench. "It is a queer world—a queer world; and that Johnnie Barclay is a queer duck. Bringing Lige Bemis clear down here to help old Mart out of a little trouble there ain't a dollar in; and then turning around and feeding the American people a mountain of mud. Giving the town a park with his mother's name on it, and selling little tin strips for ten dollars apiece to pay for it. He's a queer duck. I'll bet it will keep the recording angel busy keeping books on Johnnie Barclay."

"Oh, well, Jake," replied McHurdie, after a silence, "maybe the angels will just drop a tear and wipe much of the evil off."

"Maybe so, Watts McHurdie, maybe so," returned Dolan, "but there won't be a dry eye in the house, as the papers say, if they keep up with him." And after delivering himself of this, Dolan rose and yawned, and went out of the shop singing an old tune which recited the fact that he had "a job to do down in the boulevard."

Looking over the years that have passed since John Barclay and Sycamore Ridge were coming out of raw adolescence into maturity, one sees that there was a miracle of change in them both, but where it was and just how it came, one may not say. The town had no special advantages. It might have been one of a thousand dreary brown unpainted villages that dot the wind-swept plain to-day, instead of the bright, prosperous, elm-shaded town that it is. John Barclay in those days of his early thirties might have become a penny-pinching dull-witted "prominent citizen" of the Ridge, with no wider sphere of influence than the Sycamore Valley, or at most the Corn Belt Railroad. But he and the town grew, and whether it was destiny that guided them, or whether they made their own destiny, one cannot say. The town seemed to be struggling and fighting its way to supremacy in the Sycamore Valley; and the colonel and the general and Watts McHurdie, sitting in the harness shop a score of years after those days of the seventies, used to try to remember some episode or event that would tell them how John fought his way up. But they could not do so. It was a fight in his soul. Every time his hand reached out to steal a mill or crush an opponent with the weapon of his secret railroad rebates, something caught his hand and held it for a moment, and he had to fight his way free. At first he had to learn to hate the man he was about to ruin, and to pretend that he thought the man was about to ruin him. Then he could justify himself in his greedy game. But at last he worked almost merrily. He came to enjoy the combat for its own sake. And sometimes he would play with a victim cat-wise, and after a victory in which the mouse fought well, John would lick his chops with some satisfaction at his business prowess. Mill after mill along the valley and through the West came under his control. And his skin grew leathery, and the brass lustre in his eyes grew hard and metallic. When he knew that he was the richest man in Garrison County, he saw that there were richer men in the state, and in after years when he was the richest man in the state, and in the Missouri Valley, the rich men in other states moved him by their wealth to work harder. But before he was thirty, his laugh had become a cackle, and Colonel Martin Culpepper, who would saunter along when Barclay would limp by on Main Street, would call out after him, "Slow down, Johnnie, slow down, boy, or you'll bust a biler." And then the colonel would pause and gaze benignly after the limping figure bobbing along in the next block, and if there was a bystander to address, the colonel would say, "For a flat-wheel he does certainly make good time." And then if the bystander looked worth the while, the colonel, in seven cases out of ten, would pull out a subscription paper for some new church building, or for some charitable purpose, and proceed to solicit the needed funds.



BOOK II

BEING NO CHAPTER AT ALL, BUT AN INTERLUDE FOR THE ORCHESTRA

And so the years slipped by—monotonous years they seem now, so far as this story goes. Because little happened worth the telling; for growth is so still and so dull and so undramatic that it escapes interest and climax; yet it is all there is in life. For the roots of events in the ground of the past are like the crowded moments of our passing lives that are recorded only in our under-consciousnesses, to rise in other years in character formed, in traits established, in events fructified. And in the years when the evil days came not, John Barclay's tragedy was stirring in the soil of his soul.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the management, let us thank you for your kind attention, during the tedious act which has closed. We have done our best to please you with the puppets and have cracked their heads together in fine fashion, and they have danced and cried and crackled, while we pulled the strings as our mummers mumbled. But now they must have new clothes on. Time, the great costumer, must change their make-up. So we will fold down the curtain. John Barclay, a Gentleman, must be painted yellow with gold. Philemon Ward, a Patriot, must be sprinkled with gray. Martin Culpepper's Large White Plumes must be towsled. Watts McHurdie, a Poet, must be bent a little at the hips and shoulders. Adrian Brownwell, a Gallant, must creak as he struts. Neal Dow Ward, an Infant, must put on long trousers. E. W. Bemis, a Lawyer, must be dignified; Jacob Dolan, an Irishman and a Soldier, must grow unkempt and frowsy. Robert Hendricks, Fellow Fine, must have his blond hair rubbed off at the temples, and his face marked with maturity. Lycurgus Mason, a Woman Tamer, must get used to wearing white shirts. Gabriel Carnine, a Money Changer, must feel his importance; and Oscar Fernald, a Tavern Keeper, must be hobbled by the years. All but the shades must be refurbished. General Hendricks and Elmer, his son, must fade farther into the mists of the past, while Henry Schnitzler settles comfortably down in storied urn and animated bust.

There they hang together on the line, these basswood folk, and beside them wave their womankind. These also must be repaired and refitted throughout, as Oscar Fernald's letter-heads used to say of the Thayer House. Jane Barclay, Wife of John, must have the "star light, star bright" wiped out of her eyes. Mary Barclay, Mother of the Same, must have her limbs trimmed gaunt, and her face chiselled strong and indomitable. Jeanette Barclay, a Toddler, must grow into dresses. Molly Culpepper, a Dear, must have her heart taken out, and her face show the shock of the operation. Nellie Logan, a poet's Wife, must join all the lodges in the Ridge to help her husband in politics. Trixie Lee, little Beatrix Lee, daughter of J. Lord and Lady Lee, must have her childish face scarred and her eyes glazed. Mrs. Hally Bemis, a Prodigal, must be swathed in silk. Elizabeth Cady Stanton Ward and all her sisters must be put in the simple garb of school-teachers. Miss Hendricks, a Mouse, must hide in the dusky places; and Ellen Culpepper, a Memory, must come to life.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, while we have been diverting you, Time has been at work on the little people of the passing show, and now before we draw back the curtain to let them caper across your hearts, let us again thank you one and all for your courtesy in staying, and hope that what you see and hear may make you wiser and kinder and braver; for this is a moral entertainment, good people, planned to show you that yesterday makes to-day and they both make to-morrow, and so the world spins round the sun.



CHAPTER XVII

The rumble of the wheels in the great stone mill across the Sycamore and the roar of the waters over the dam seem to have been in Jeanette Barclay's ears from the day of her birth; for she was but a baby when the stone mill rose where the little red mill had stood, and beside the stone mill there had grown up the long stone factory wherein Lycurgus Mason was a man of consequence. As the trains whirled by strangers could see the signs in mammoth letters, "The Golden Belt Mills" on the larger building and on the smaller, "The Barclay Economy Door Strip Factory." Standing on the stone steps of her father's house the child could read these signs clear across the mill-pond, and from these signs she learned her letters. For her father had more pride in that one mill on the Sycamore than in the scores of other mills that he controlled. And even in after years, when he controlled mills all over the West, and owned railroads upon which to take his flour to the sea, and ships in which to carry his flour all over the world, the Golden Belt Mill at Sycamore Ridge was his chief pride. The rumble of the wheels and the hoarse voice of the dam that seemed to Jeanette like the call of the sea, were so sweet to her father's ears that when he wearied of the work of the National Provisions Company, with its two floors of busy offices in the Corn Exchange Building in the great city, he would come home to Sycamore Ridge, and go to his private office in the mill. The child remembers what seemed like endless days, but what in truth were only a few hours in a few days in a few years, when Daddy Barclay carried her on his shoulders across the bridge and sat her down barefooted and bareheaded to play upon the dam, while he in his old clothes prodded among the great wheels near by or sat beside her telling her where he caught this fish or that fish or a turtle or a water moccasin when he was a little boy. At low water, she remembers that he sometimes let her wade in the clear stream, while he sat in his office near by watching her from the window. That was when she was only four years old, and she always had the strangest memory of a playfellow on the dam, a big girl, who fluttered in and out of the shadows on the stones. Jeanette talked with her, but no one else could see her, and once the big girl, who could not talk herself, stamped her feet and beckoned Jeanette to come away from a rock on which she was playing, and her father, looking out of a window, turned white when he saw a snake coiled beside the rock. But Jeanette saw the snake and was frightened, and told her father that Ellen saw it too, and she could not make him understand who Ellen was. So he only trembled and hugged his little girl to him tightly, and mother would not let the child play on the dam again all that summer.

She made songs to fit the rhythmic murmur of the wheels. And always she remembered the days she had spent with Daddy Mason in the factory where the machines thumped and creaked, and where the long rubber sheets were cut and sewed, and the clanking rolls of tin and zinc curled into strips, and Daddy Mason made her a little set of dishes and all the things she needed in her playhouse from the scraps of tin and rubber, and she learned to twist the little tin strips on a stick and make the prettiest bright shiny tin curls for her dolls that a little girl ever saw in all the world. And once Ellen came from among the moving shadows of the wheels and drew Jeanette from beneath a great knife that fell at her feet, and when Daddy Mason saw what had happened he fainted, poor man, and made her promise never, never, so long as she lived, to tell Grandma Mason. And then he drove her up town, and they had some ice-cream, and she was sent to bed without her lunch because she would not tell Grandma Mason why grandpa bought ice-cream for her.

It was such a beautiful life, so natural and so exactly what a little girl should have, that even though she went to the ocean and crossed it as a child with her mother and grandmother, and even though she went to the mountains many times, her childish heart always was homesick for the mill, and at night in her dreams her ears were filled with the murmur of waters and the wordless song of ceaseless wheels. And once when she came back a big girl,—an exceedingly big girl with braids down her back, a girl in the third reader in fact, who could read everything in the fourth reader, because she had already done so, and who could read Eugene Aram in the back of the sixth, only she never did find out what "gyves upon his wrists" meant,—once when she came back to the dam and was sitting there looking at the sunset reflected in the bubbling, froth-flecked water at her feet, Ellen came suddenly, under the noise of the roaring water, and frightened Jeanette so that she screamed and jumped; and Ellen, who was much older than Jeanette—four or five and maybe six years older—ran right over the slippery, moss-covered ridge of the dam, and was gone before Jeanette could call her back. The child never saw her playmate again, though often Jeanette would wonder where Ellen lived and who she was. As the years went by, Jeanette came to remember her playmate as her dream child, and once when she was a young miss of eighteen, and something in her hurt to be said, she tried to make a little poem about her dream-child playmate, but all she ever got was:—

"O eyes, so brown and clear like water sparkling over mossy stones."

So she gave it up and wrote a poem about a prince who carried away a maiden, and then she tore up the prince and the maiden, and if it were not for that line about the eyes in the back of her trigonometry, with a long list of words under it rhyming with "stones," she would have forgotten about her playfellow, and much of the memory of the dam and the pride she took as a child in the great letters upon the high stone walls of the mills, and of the word "Barclay" on the long low walls of the factory, might have passed from her consciousness altogether. By such frail links does memory bind us to our past; and yet, once formed, how like steel they hold us! What we will be, grows from what we are, and what we are has grown from what we were. If Jeanette Barclay, the only child of a man who, when she was in her twenties, was to be one of the hundred richest men in his country,—so far as mere money goes,—had been brought up with a governess and a maid, and with frills and furbelows and tucks and Heaven knows what of silly kinks and fluffy stuff in her childish head, instead of being brought up in the Sycamore Ridge public schools, with Grandmother Barclay to teach her the things that a little girl in the fourth reader should know, and with a whole community of honest, hard-working men and women about her to teach her what life really is, indeed she would have lived a different life, and when she was ready to marry—But there we go looking in the back of the book again, and that will not do at all; and besides, a little blue-eyed girl in gingham aprons, sitting on a cool stone with moss on its north side, watching the bass play among the rocks in a clear, deep, sun-mottled pool under a great elm tree, has a right to the illusions of her childhood and should not be hustled into long dresses and love affairs until her time has come.