A Certain Rich Man.
by William Allen White.
BOOK I
A CERTAIN RICH MAN
CHAPTER I
The woods were as the Indians had left them, but the boys who were playing there did not realize, until many years afterwards, that they had moved in as the Indians moved out. Perhaps, if these boys had known that they were the first white boys to use the Indians"
playgrounds, the realization might have added zest to the make-believe of their games; but probably boys between seven and fourteen, when they play at all, play with their fancies strained, and very likely these little boys, keeping their stick-horse livery-stable in a wild-grape arbour in the thicket, needed no verisimilitude. The long straight hickory switches--which served as horses--were arranged with their b.u.t.ts on a rotting log, whereon some gra.s.s was spread for their feed. Their string bridles hung loosely over the log. The hors.e.m.e.n swinging in the vines above, or in the elm tree near by, were preparing a raid on the stables of other boys, either in the native lumber town a rifle-shot away or in distant parts of the woods. When the youngsters climbed down, they straddled their hickory steeds and galloped friskily away to the creek and drank; this was part of the rites, for tradition in the town of their elders said that whoever drank of Sycamore Creek water immediately turned horse thief. Having drunk their fill at the ford, they waded it and left the stumpy road, plunging into the underbrush, snorting and puffing and giggling and fussing and complaining--the big ones at the little ones and the little ones at the big ones--after the manner of mankind.
When they had gone perhaps a half-mile from the ford, one of the little boys, feeling the rag on his sore heel slipping and letting the rough woods gra.s.s scratch his raw flesh, stopped to tie up the rag. He was far in the rear of the pack when he stopped, and the boys, not heeding his blat, rushed on and left him at the edge of a thicket near a deep-rutted road. His cry became a whimper and his whimper a sniffle as he worked with the rag; but the little fingers were clumsy, and a heel is a hard place to cover, and the sun was hot on his back; so he took the rag in one hand and his bridle in the other, and limped on his stick horse into the thick shade of a lone oak tree that stood beside the wide dusty road. His sore did not bother him, and he sat with his back against the tree for a while, flipping the rag and making figures in the dust with the p.r.o.nged tail of his horse. Then his hands were still, and as he ran from tune to tune with improvised interludes, he droned a song of his prowess. Sometimes he sang words and sometimes he sang thoughts. He sank farther and farther down and looked up into the tree and ceased his song, chirping instead a stuttering falsetto trill, not unlike a cricket"s, holding his breath as long as he could to draw it out to its finest strand; and thus with his head on his arm and his arm on the tree root, he fell asleep.
The noon sun was on his legs when he awoke, and a strange dog was sniffing at him. As he started up, he heard the clatter of a horse"s feet in the road, and saw an Indian woman trotting toward him on a pony. In an instant he was a-wing with terror, scooting toward the thick of the woods. He screamed as he ran, for his head was full of Indian stories, and he knew that the only use Indians had for little boys was to steal them and adopt them into the tribe. He heard the brush crackling behind him, and he knew that the woman had turned off the road to follow him. A hundred yards is a long way for a terror-stricken little boy to run through tangled underbrush, and when he had come to the high bank of the stream, he slipped down among the tree roots and tried to hide. His little heart beat so fast that he could not keep from panting, and the sound of breaking brush came nearer and then stopped, and in a moment he looked up and saw the squaw leaning over the bank, holding to the tree above him. She smiled kindly at him and said:--
"Come on, boy--I won"t hurt you. I as scared of you as you are of me."
She bent over and took him by the arm and lifted him to her. She got on her pony and put him on before her and soothed his fright, as they rode slowly through the wood to the road, where they came to a great band of Indians, all riding ponies.
It seemed to the boy that he had never imagined there were so many people in the whole world; there was some parley among them, and the band set out on the road again, with the squaw in advance. They were but a few yards from the forks of the road, and as they came to it she said:--
"Boy--which way to town?"
He pointed the way and she turned into it, and the band followed. They crossed the ford, climbed the steep red clay bank of the creek, and filed up the hill into the unpainted group of cabins and shanties cluttered around a well that men, in 1857, knew as Sycamore Ridge. The Indians filled the dusty area between the two rows of gray houses on either side of the street, and the town flocked from its ten front doors before half the train had arrived. The last door of them all to open was in a slab house, nearly half a mile from the street. A washing fluttered on the clothes-line, and the woman who came out of the door carried a round-bottomed hickory-bark basket, such as might hold clothes-pins. Seeing the invasion, she hurried across the prairie, toward the town. She was a tall thin woman, not yet thirty, brown and tanned, with a strong masculine face, and as she came nearer one could see that she had a square firm jaw, and great kind gray eyes that lighted her countenance from a serene soul. Her sleeves rolled far above her elbows revealed arms used to rough hard work, and her hands were red from the wash-tub. As she came into the street, she saw the little boy sitting on the horse in front of the squaw. Walking to them quickly, and lifting her arms, as she neared the squaw"s pony, the white woman said:--
"Why, Johnnie Barclay, where have you been?"
The boy climbed from the pony, and the two women smiled at each other, but exchanged no words. And as his feet touched the ground, he became conscious of the rag in his hand, of his bleeding heel, of his cramped legs being "asleep"--all in one instant, and went limping and whining toward home with his mother, while the Indians traded in the store and tried to steal from the other houses, and in a score of peaceful ways diverted the town"s attention from the departing figures down the path.
That was the first adventure that impressed itself upon the memory of John Barclay. All his life he remembered the covered wagon in which the Barclays crossed the Mississippi; but it is only a curious memory of seeing the posts of the bed, lying flat beside him in the wagon, and of fingering the palm leaves cut in the wood. He was four years old then, and as a man he remembered only as a tale that is told the fight at Westport Landing, where his father was killed for preaching an abolition sermon from the wagon tongue. The man remembered nothing of the long ride that the child and the mother took with the father"s body to Lawrence, where they buried it in a free-state cemetery. But he always remembered something of their westward ride, after the funeral of his father. The boy carried a child"s memory of the prairie--probably his first sight of the prairie, with the vacant horizon circling around and around him, and the monotonous rattle of the wagon on the level prairie road, for hours keeping the same rhythm and fitting the same tune. Then there was a mottled memory of the woods--woods with sunshine in them, and of a prairie flooded with sunshine on which he played, now picking flowers, now playing house under the limestone ledges, now, after a rain, following little rivers down rocky draws, and finding sunfish and silversides in the deeper pools. But always his memory was of the sunshine, and the open sky, or the deep wide woods all unexplored, save by himself.
The great road that widened to make the prairie street, and wormed over the hill into the sunset, always seemed dusty to the boy, and although in after years he followed that road, over the hills and far away, when it was rutty and full of clods, as a child he recalled it only as a great bed of dust, wherein he and other boys played, now battling with handfuls of dust, and now running races on some level stretch of it, and now standing beside the road while a pa.s.sing movers" wagon delayed their play. The movers" wagon was never absent from the boy"s picture of that time and place. Either the canvas-covered wagon was coming from the ford of Sycamore Creek, or disappearing over the hill beyond the town, or was pa.s.sing in front of the boys as they stopped their play. Being a boy, he could not know, nor would he care if he did know, that he was seeing one of G.o.d"s miracles--the migration of a people, blind but instinctive as that of birds or buffalo, from old pastures into new ones. All over the plains in those days, on a hundred roads like that which ran through Sycamore Ridge, men and women were moving from east to west, and, as often has happened since the beginning of time, when men have migrated, a great ethical principle was stirring in them. The pioneers do not go to the wilderness always in l.u.s.t of land, but sometimes they go to satisfy their souls. The spirit of G.o.d moves in the hearts of men as it moves on the face of the waters.
Something of this moving spirit was in John Barclay"s mother. For often she paused at her work, looking up from her wash-tub toward the highway, when a prairie schooner sailed by, and lifting her face skyward for an instant, as her lips moved in silence. As a man the boy knew she was thinking of her long journey, of the tragedy that came of it, and praying for those who pa.s.sed into the West. Then she would bend to her work again; and the washerwoman"s child who took the clothes she washed in his little wagon with the cottonwood log wheels, across the commons into the town, was not made to feel an inferior place in the social system until he was in his early teens. For all the Sycamore Ridge women worked hard in those days. But there were Sundays when the boy and his mother walked over the wide prairies together, and she told him stories of Haverhill--of the wonderful people who lived there, of the great college, of the beautiful women and wise men, and best of all of his father, who was a student in the college, and they dreamed together--mother and child--about how he would board at Uncle Union"s and work in the store for Uncle Abner--when the boy went back to Haverhill to school when he grew up.
On these excursions the mother sometimes tried to interest him in Mr.
Beecher"s sermons which she read to him, but his eyes followed the bees and the birds and the b.u.t.terflies and the shadows trailing across the hillside; so the seed fell on stony ground. One fine fall day they went up the ridge far above the town where the court-house stands now, and there under a lone elm tree just above a limestone ledge, they spread their lunch, and the mother sat on the hillside, almost hidden by the rippling prairie gra.s.s, reading the first number of the _Atlantic Monthly_, while the boy cleared out a spring that bubbled from beneath a rock in the shade, and after running for a few feet sank under a great stone and did not appear again. As the mother read, the afternoon waned, and when she looked up, she was astonished to see John standing beside the rock, waist deep in a hole, trying to back down into it. His face was covered with dirt, and his clothes were wet from the falling water of the spring that was flowing into the hole he had opened. In a jiffy she pulled him out, and looking into the hole, saw by the failing sunlight which shone directly into the place that the child had uncovered the opening of a cave. But they did not explore it, for the mother was afraid, and the two came down the hill, the child"s head full of visions of a pirate"s treasure, and the mother"s full of the whims of the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.
The next day school began in Sycamore Ridge,--for the school and the church came with the newspaper, _Freedom"s Banner_,--and a new world opened to the boy, and he forgot the cave, and became interested in Webster"s blue-backed speller. And thus another grown-up person, "Miss Lucy," came into his world. For with children, men and women generically are of another order of beings. But Miss Lucy, being John Barclay"s teacher, grew into his daily life on an equality with his dog and the Hendricks boys, and took a place somewhat lower than his mother in his list of saints. For Miss Lucy came from Sangamon County, Illinois, and her father had fought the Indians, and she told the school as many strange and wonderful things about Illinois as John had learned from his mother about Haverhill. But his allegiance to the teacher was only lip service. For at night when he sat digging the gravel and dirt from the holes in the heels of his copper-toed boots, that he might wad them with paper to be ready for his skates on the morrow, or when he sat by the wide fireplace oiling the runners with the steel curly-cues curving over the toes, or filing a groove in the blades, the boy"s greatest joy was with his mother. Sometimes as she ironed she told him stories of his father, or when the child was sick and nervous, as a special favour, on his promise to take the medicine and not ask for a drink, she would bring her guitar from under the bed and tune it up and play with a curious little mouse-like touch. And on rare occasions she would sing to her own shy maidenly accompaniment, her voice rising scarcely higher than the wind in the sycamore at the spring outside. The boy remembered only one line of an old song she sometimes tried to sing: "Sleeping, I dream, love, dream, love, of thee," but what the rest of it was, and what it was all about, he never knew; for when she got that far, she always stopped and came to the bed and lay beside him, and they both cried, though as a child he did not know why.
So the winter of 1857 wore away at Sycamore Ridge, and with the coming of the spring of "58, when the town was formally incorporated, even into the boy world there came the murmurs of strife and alarms. The games the boys played were war games. They had battles in the woods, between the free-state and the pro-slavery men, and once--twice--three times there marched by on the road real soldiers, and it was no unusual thing to see a dragoon dismount at the town well and water his horse. The big boys in school affected spurs, and Miss Lucy brought to school with her one morning a long bundle, which, when it was unwrapped, disclosed the sword of her father, Captain Barnes, presented to him by his admiring soldiers at the close of the "Black Hawk War." John traded for a tin fife and learned to play "Jaybird" upon it, though he preferred the jew"s-harp, and had a more varied repertory with it. Was it an era of music, or is childhood the period of music? Perhaps this land of ours was younger than it is now and sang more l.u.s.tily, if not with great precision; for to the man who harks back over the years, those were days of song. All the world seemed singing--men in their stores and shops, women at their work, and children in their schools. And a freckled, barefooted little boy with sunburned curly hair, in home-made clothes, and with brown bare legs showing through the rips in his trousers, used to sit alone in the woods breathing his soul into a mouth-organ--a priceless treasure for which he had traded two racc.o.o.ns, an owl, and a prairie dog. But he mastered the mouth-organ,--it was called a French harp in those days,--and before he had put on his first collar, Watts McHurdie had taught the boy to play the accordion. The great heavy bellows was half as large as he was, but the little chap would sit in McHurdie"s harness shop of a summer afternoon and swing the instrument up and down as the melody swelled or died, and sway his body with the time and the tune, as Watts McHurdie, who owned the accordion, swayed and gyrated when he played. Mrs. Barclay, hearing her son, smiled and shook her head and knew him for a Thatcher; "No Barclay," she said, "ever could carry a tune." So the mother brought out from the bottom of the trunk her yellow-covered book, "Winner"s Instructor on the Guitar," and taught the child what she could of notes. Thus music found its way out of the boy"s soul.
One day in the summer of 1860, as he and his fellows were filing down the crooked dusty path that led from the swimming hole through the dry woods to the main road, they came upon a group of hors.e.m.e.n scanning the dry ford of the Sycamore. That was the first time that John Barclay met the famous Captain Lee. He was a great hulk of a man who, John thought, looked like a pirate. The boys led the men and their horses up the dry limestone bed of the stream to the swimming hole--a deep pool in the creek. The coming of the soldiers made a stir in the town. For they were not "regulars"; they were known as the Red Legs, but called themselves "The Army of the Border." Under Captain J. Lord Lee--whose life afterwards touched Barclay"s sometimes--"The Army of the Border," being about forty in number, came to Sycamore Ridge that night, and greatly to the scandal of the decent village, there appeared with the men two women in short skirts and red leggins, who were introduced at Schnitzler"s saloon as Happy Hally and Lady Lee.
"The Army of the Border," under J. Lord and Lady Lee,--as they were known,--proceeded to get bawling drunk, whereupon they introduced to the town the song which for the moment was the national hymn of Kansas:--
"Am I a soldier of the boss, A follower of Jim Lane?
Then should I fear to steal a hoss, Or blush to ride the same."
As the night deepened and Henry Schnitzler"s supply of liquor seemed exhaustless, the Army of the Border went from song to war and wandered about banging doors and demanding to know if any white-livered Missourian in the town was man enough to come out and fight. At half-past one the Army of the Border had either gone back to camp, or propped itself up against the sides of the buildings in peaceful sleep, when the screech of the brakes on the wheels of the stage was heard half a mile away as it lumbered down the steep bank of the Sycamore, and then the town woke up. As the stage rolled down Main Street, the male portion of Sycamore Ridge lined up before the Thayer House to see who would get out and to learn the news from the gathering storm in the world outside. As the crowd stood there, and while the driver was climbing from his box, little John Barclay, white-faced, clad in his night drawers, came flying into the crowd from behind a building.
"Mother--" he gasped, "mother--says--come--mother says some one come quick--there"s a man there--trying to break in!" And finding that he had made himself understood, the boy darted back across the common toward home. The little white figure kept ahead of the men, and when they arrived, they found Mrs. Barclay standing in the door of her house, with a lantern in one hand and a carbine in the crook of her arm. In the dark, somewhere over toward the highway, but in the direction of the river, the sound of a man running over the ploughed ground might be heard as he stumbled and grunted and panted in fear.
She shook her head rea.s.suringly as the men from the town came into the radius of the light from her lantern, and as they stepped on the hard clean-swept earth of her doorway, she said, smiling:
"He won"t come back. I"m sorry I bothered you. Only--I was frightened a little at first--when I sent Johnnie out of the back door." She paused a moment, and answered some one"s question about the man, and went on, "He was just drunk. He meant no harm. It was Lige Bemis--"
"Oh, yes," said Watts McHurdie, "you know--the old gang that used to be here before the town started. He"s with the Red Legs now."
"Well," continued Mrs. Barclay, "he said he wanted to come over and visit the sycamore tree by the spring."
The crowd knew Lige and laughed and turned away. The men trudged slowly back to the cl.u.s.ter of lights that marked the town, and the woman closed her door, and she and the child went to bed. Instead of sleeping, they talked over their adventure. He sat up in bed, big-eyed with excitement, while his mother told him that the drunken visitor was Lige Bemis, who had come to revisit a cave, a horse thief"s cave, he had said, back of the big rock that seemed to have slipped down from the ledge behind the house, right by the spring. She told the boy that Bemis had said that the cave contained a room wherein they used to keep their stolen horses, and that he tried to move the great slab door of stone and, being drunk, could not do so.
When the men of Sycamore Ridge who left the stage without waiting to see what human seed it would shuck out arrived at Main Street, the stage was in the barn, the driver was eating his supper, and the pa.s.senger was in bed at the Thayer House. But his name was on the dog-eared hotel register, and it gave the town something to talk about as Martin Culpepper was distributing the mail. For the name on the book was Philemon R. Ward, and the town after his name, Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts. Every man and woman and most of the children in Sycamore Ridge knew who Philemon Ward was. He had been driven out of Georgia in "58 for editing an abolition newspaper; he had been mobbed in Ohio for delivering abolition lectures; he had been led out of Missouri with a rope around his neck, and a reward was on his head in a half-dozen Southern states for inciting slaves to rebellion. His picture had been in _Harper"s Weekly_ as a General Pa.s.senger Agent of the Underground Railway. Naturally to Sycamore Ridge, where more than one night the town had sat up all night waiting for the stage to bring the _New York Tribune_, Philemon R. Ward was a hero, and his presence in the town was an event. When the little Barclay boy heard it at the store that morning before sunrise, he ran down the path toward home to tell his mother and had to go back to do the errand on which he was sent. By sunrise every one in town had the news; men were shaken out of their morning naps to hear, "Philemon Ward"s in town--wake up, man; did you hear what I say? Philemon Ward came to town last night on the stage." And before the last man was awake, the town was startled by the clatter of horses" hoofs on the gravel road over the hill south of town, and Gabriel Carnine and Lycurgus Mason of Minneola came dashing into the street and yelling, "The Missourians are coming, the Missourians are coming!"
The little boy, who had just turned into Main Street for the second time, remembered all his life how the news that the Minneola men brought, thrilled Sycamore Ridge. It seemed to the boy but an instant till the town was in the street, and then he and a group of boys were running to the swimming hole to call the Army of the Border. The horse weeds scratched his face as he plunged through the timber cross-lots with his message. He was the first boy to reach the camp. What they did or what he did, he never remembered. He has heard men say many times that he whispered his message, grabbed a carbine, and came tearing through the brush back to the town.
All that is important to know of the battle of Sycamore Ridge is that Philemon Ward, called out of bed with the town to fight that summer morning, took command before he had dressed, and when the town was threatened with a charge from a second division of the enemy, Bemis and Captain Lee of the Red Legs, Watts McHurdie, Madison Hendricks, Oscar Fernald, and Gabriel Carnine, under the command of Philemon Ward, ran to the top of the high bank of the Sycamore, and there held a deep cut made for the stage road,--held it as a pa.s.s against a half-hundred hors.e.m.e.n, floundering under the bank, in the underbrush below, who dared not file up the pa.s.s.
The little boy standing at the window of his mother"s house saw this.
But all the firing in the town, all the forming and charging and skirmishing that was done that hot August day in "60, either he did not see, or if he saw it, the memory faded under the great terror that gripped his soul when he saw his mother in danger. Ward in his undershirt was standing by a tree near the stage road above the bank.
The firing in the creek bed had stopped. His back was toward the town, and then, out of some place dim in the child"s mind--from the troop southwest of town perhaps--came a charge of galloping hors.e.m.e.n, riding down on Ward. The others with him had found cover, and he, seeing the enemy before him and behind him, pistol in hand, alone charged into the advancing hors.e.m.e.n. It was all confused in the child"s mind, though the histories say that the Sycamore Ridge people did not know Ward was in danger, and that when he fell they did not understand who had fallen. But the boy--John Barclay--saw him fall, and his mother knew who had fallen, and the wife of the Westport martyr groaned in anguish as she saw Freedom"s champion writhing in the dust of the road like a dying snake, after the troop pa.s.sed over him. And even when he was a man, the boy could remember the woe in her face, as she stooped to kiss her child, and then huddling down to avoid the bullets, ran across the field to the wounded man, with dust in his mouth, twitching in the highway. Bullets were spitting in the dust about her as the boy saw his mother roll the bleeding man over, pick him up, get him on her back with his feet trailing on the earth beside her, and then rising to her full height, stagger under her limp burden back to the house. When she came in the door, her face and shoulders were covered with blood and her skirt ripped with a bullet.
That is all of the battle that John Barclay ever remembered. After that it seemed to end, though the histories say that it lasted all the long day, and that the fire of the invaders was so heavy that no one from the Ridge dared venture to the Barclay home. The boy saw his mother lay the unconscious man on the floor, while she opened the back door, and without saying a word, stepped to the spring, which was hidden from the road. She put her knee, her broad chest, and her strong red hand to the rock and shoved until her back bowed and the cords stood out on her neck; then slowly the rock moved till she could see inside the cave, could put her leg in, could squirm her body in.
The morning light flooded in after her, and in the instant that she stood there she saw dimly a great room, through which the spring trickled. There were hay inside, and candles and saddles; in another minute she had the wounded man in the cave and was washing the dirt from him. A bullet had ploughed its way along his scalp, his body was pierced through the shoulder, and his leg was broken by a horse"s hoof. She did what she could while the shooting went on outside, and then slipped out, tugged at the great rock again until it fell back in its place, and knowing that Philemon Ward was safe from the Missourians if they should win the day, she came into the house. Then as the mocking clouds of the summer drouth rolled up at night, and belched forth their thunder in a tempest of wind, the besiegers pa.s.sed as a dream in the night. And in the morning they were not.
CHAPTER II
And so on the night of the battle of Sycamore Ridge, John Barclay closed the door of his childhood and became a boy. He did not remember how Ward"s wounds were dressed, nor how the town made a hero of the man; but he did remember Watts McHurdie and Martin Culpepper and the Hendricks boys tramping through the cave that night with torches, and he was the hero of that occasion because he was the smallest boy there and they put him up through the crack in the head of the cave, and he saw the stars under the elm tree far above the town, where he and his mother had spent a Sunday afternoon three years before. He called to the men below and told them where he was, and slipped down through, the hole again with an elm sprout in his hand to prove that he had been under the elm tree at the spring. But he remembered nothing of the night--how the men picketed the town; how he sat up with them along with the other boys; how the women, under his mother"s direction and Miss Lucy"s, cared for the wounded man, who lapsed into delirium as the night wore on, and gibbered of liberty and freedom as another man would go over his accounts in his dreams.
His mother and Miss Lucy took turns nursing Ward night after night during the hot dry summer. As the sick man grew better, many men came to the house, and great plans were afloat. Philemon Ward, sitting up in bed waiting for his leg to heal, talked much of the cave as a refuge for fugitive slaves. There was some kind of a military organization; all the men in town were enlisted, and Ward was their captain, drums were rattling and men were drilling; the dust clouds rose as they marched across the drouth-blighted fields. One night they marched up to the Barclay home, and Ward with a crutch under his arm, and with Mrs. Barclay and Miss Lucy beside him, stood in the door and made a speech to the men. And then there were songs. Watts McHurdie threw back his head and sang "Scots wha ha" wi" Wallace bled,"
following it with some words of his own denouncing slavery and calling down curses upon the slaveholders; so withal it was a martial occasion, and the boy"s heart swelled with patriotic pride. But for a vague feeling that Miss Lucy was neglecting him for her patient, John would have begun making a hero of Philemon R. Ward. As it was, the boy merely tolerated the man and silently suspected him of intentions and designs.
But when school opened, Philemon Ward left Sycamore Ridge and John Barclay made an important discovery. It was that Ellen Culpepper had eyes. In Sycamore Ridge with its three hundred souls, only fifteen of them were children, and five of them were ten years old, and John had played with those five nearly all his life. But at ten sometimes the scales drop from one"s eyes, and a ribbon or a bead or a pair of new red striped yarn stockings or any other of the embellishments which nature teaches little girls to wear casts a sheen over all the world for a boy. The magic bundle that charmed John Barclay was a scarlet dress, "made over," that came in an "aid box" from the Culpeppers in Virginia. And when the other children in Miss Lucy"s school made fun of John and his _amour_, the boy fought his way through it all--where fighting was the better part of valour--and made horsehair chains for Ellen and cut lockets for her out of coffee beans, and with a red-hot poker made a ring for her from a rubber b.u.t.ton as a return for the smile he got at the sly twist he gave her hair as he pa.s.sed her desk on his way to the spelling cla.s.s. As for Miss Lucy, who saw herself displaced, she wrote to Philemon Ward, and told him of her jilting, and railed at the fickleness and frailty of the s.e.x.
And by that token an envelope in Ward"s handwriting came to Miss Lucy every week, and Postmaster Martin Culpepper and Mrs. Martin Culpepper and all Sycamore Ridge knew it. And loyal Southerner though he was, Martin Culpepper"s interest in the affair between Ward and Miss Lucy was greater than his indignation over the fact that Ward had carried his campaign even into Virginia; nothing would have tempted him to disclose to his political friends at home the postmarks of Ward"s letters. That was the year of the great drouth of "60, remembered all over the plains. And as the winter deepened and the people of Sycamore Ridge were without crops, and without money to buy food, they bundled up Martin Culpepper and sent him back to Ohio seeking aid. He was a handsome figure the day he took the stage in his high hat and his ruffled shirt and broad coat tails, a straight lean figure of a man in his early thirties, with fine black eyes and a shocky head of hair, and when he pictured the sufferings of the Kansas pioneers to the people of the East, the state was flooded with beans and flour, and sheeted in white muslin. For Martin Culpepper was an orator, and though he is in his grave now, the picture he painted of bleeding Kansas nearly fifty years ago still hangs in many an old man"s memory.
And after all, it was only a picture. For they were all young out here then, and through all the drouth and the hardship that followed--and the hardship was real--there was always the gayety of youth. The dances on Deer Creek and at Minneola did not stop for the drouth, and many"s the night that Mrs. Mason, the tall raw-boned wife of Lycurgus, wrapped little Jane in a quilt and came over to the Ridge from Minneola to take part in some social affair. And while Martin Culpepper was telling of the anguish of the famine, Watts McHurdie and his accordion and Ezra Lane"s fiddle were agitating the heels of the populace. And even those pioneers who were moved to come into the wilderness by a great purpose--and they were moved so--to come into the new territory and make it free, nevertheless capered and romped through the drouth of "60 in the cast-off garments of their kinsmen and were happy; for there were buffalo meat and beans for the needy, the aid room had flour, and G.o.d gave them youth.
Not drouth, nor famine, nor suffering, nor zeal of a great purpose can burn out the sparkle of youth in the heart. Only time can do that, and so John Barclay remembered the famous drouth of "60, not by his mother"s tears, which came as she bent over his little clothes, before the aid box came from Haverhill, not by the long days of waiting for the rain that never came, not even by the sun that lapped up the swimming hole before fall, and left no river to freeze for their winter"s skating, not even by his mother"s anguish when she had to go to the aid store for flour and beans, though that must have been a sorry day for a Thatcher; but he remembers the great drouth by Ellen Culpepper"s party, where they had a frosted cake and played kissing games, and--well, fifty years is along time for two brown eyes to shine in the heart of a boy and a man. It is strange that they should glow there, and all memory of the runaway slaves who were sheltered in the cave by the sycamore tree should fade, and be only as a tale that is told. Yet, so memory served the boy, and he knew only at second hand how his mother gave her widow"s mite to the cause for which she had crossed the prairies as of old her "fathers crossed the sea."
Before the rain came in the spring of "61 Martin Culpepper came back from the East an orator of established reputation. The town was proud of him, and he addressed the mult.i.tude on various occasions and wept many tears over the sad state of the country. For in the nation, as well as in Sycamore Ridge, great things were stirring. Watts McHurdie filled _Freedom"s Banner_ with incendiary verse, always giving the name of the tune at the beginning of each contribution, by which it might be sung, and the way he clanked Slavery"s chains and made love to Freedom was highly disconcerting; but the town liked it.
In April Philemon R. Ward came back to Sycamore Ridge, and there was a great gathering to hear his speech. Ward"s soul was aflame with anger.
There were no Greek G.o.ds and Roman deities in what Ward said, as there were in Martin Culpepper"s addresses. Ward used no figures of speech and exercised no rhetorical charms; but he talked with pa.s.sion in his voice and the frenzy of a cause in his eyes. Martin Culpepper was in the crowd, and as Ward lashed the South, every heart turned in interrogation to Culpepper. They knew what his education had been.