But John was our first war hero. And when he brought his battle scars home that September night in "61, for hours before the stage drove across Sycamore Creek the boy was filled with a nameless dread that he might be spanked.
They carried him on a cot to his mother"s house, and put him in the great carved four-poster bed, and in the morning Miss Lucy came and hovered over him, and they talked of Captain Ward to her heart"s content, and the boy told Miss Lucy the gossip of the hospital,--that Captain Ward was to be made a major,--and she kissed him and petted him until he was glad none of the boys was around to see the sickening spectacle. And then Miss Lucy and Mrs. Barclay told the child of their plans,--that Miss Lucy was going to war as a nurse, and that Mrs.
Barclay was to teach the Sycamore Ridge school during the winter. And in a few weeks John was out of the hero business, working in Culpepper"s store after school, and getting used to a limp that stayed with him all his life.
The next spring he traded a carbine that he brought home from the army for an Indian pony, and then he began business for himself. He organized the cows of the town into a town herd and took them every morning to pasture on the prairie. All day he rode in the open air, and the town boys came out to play with him, and they explored the cave by his mother"s house, and with their sling-shots killed quails and prairie chickens and cooked them, and they played war through the long summer days. But John did not grow as the other boys grew; he remained undersized, and his limp put him at a disadvantage; so he had few fights, but he learned cunning, and got his way by strategy rather than by force--but he always had his way. He was strong; the memory of what he had seen and what he had been that one awful day in the battle made lines on his face; sometimes at night he would wake screaming, when he dreamed he was running away from the surgeon with the b.l.o.o.d.y knife in his teeth and that the man was going to throw an arm at him. And when he wished to bring Ellen Culpepper to time he would begin in a low terrorful voice, "And I saw--the man--take--a--g-r-e-a-t l-o-n-g knife d-r-i-p-p-i-n-g with r-e-d-b-l-o-o-d out of his t-e-e-t-h and go slish, k-slish," but he never got farther than this, for the girl would begin shaking, and if they were alone, would run to him and grab him and put her hand to his mouth to make him stop.
And so his twelfth year pa.s.sed under the open sky in the sunshine in summer and in winter working after school in town where men were wanting, and where a boy could always find work. He grew brown and lean, and as his voice grew squeaky and he sang alto in the school, he became more and more crafty and masterful. The fact that his mother was the teacher, did not give him more rights in school than other boys, for she was a sensible woman, but it gave him a prestige on the playground that he was not slow to take. He was a born trader; and he kept what he got and got more. His weakness was music. He kept two cows in his herd in the summer time in return for the use of the melodeon at the Thayer House, and moved it to his own home and put it in the crowded little room, and practised on it at night when the other boys were loafing at the town pump. For a consideration in marbles he taught Buck Culpepper the chords in "G" on the guitar, and for further consideration taught him the chords in "D" and "C," and with the aid of Jimmy Fernald, aged nine, and Molly Culpepper, aged eleven, one with a triangle and the other with a pumpkin reed pipe, John organized his Band, which he led with his mouth-organ, and exhibited in Culpepper"s barn, appropriating to himself as the director the pins charged at the door. Forty years afterward, when Molly called his attention to his failure to divide with the children, John Barclay smiled as he lifted his lame foot to a fat leather chair in front of him and said, "That was what we call the promoter"s profit." And then the talk ran to Ellen, and John opened his great desk and from a box without a mark on it he brought out a tintype picture of Ellen at fourteen, a pink-cheeked child in short sleeves, with the fringe of her pantalets showing above her red striped stockings and beneath her bulging skirts, and with a stringy, stiff feather rising from the front of her narrow-rimmed hat.
During the time when he was going to school by day and working evenings and caring for the town herd through the summer, the war was dragging wearily on. Sometimes a soldier came home on a furlough and there was news of the Sycamore Ridge men, but oftener it was a season of waiting and working. The women and children cared for the farms and the stores as best they could and lived, heaven only knows how, and opened every newspaper with horror and dread, and glanced down the long list of names of the dead, the missing and the wounded, fearful of what they might see. Mrs. Barclay heard from Miss Lucy and through her kept track of Philemon Ward, who was transferred to another regiment after he was made major. And when he was made a colonel at Shiloh, there were tear blots on Miss Lucy"s letter that told of it, and after Appomattox he was brevetted a general. As for Captain Culpepper, he came home a colonel, and Jake Dolan came home a first lieutenant. But Watts McHurdie came home with a letter from Lincoln about his song, and he was the greatest man of all of them.
It is odd that Sycamore Ridge grew during the war. Where the people came from, no one could say--yet they came, and young Barclay remembered even during the war of playing in the foundations and running over the rafters of new houses. But when the war closed, the great caravan that had lagged while the war was raging, began to trail itself steadily in front of Mrs. Barclay"s door, through the streets of Sycamore Ridge and out over the western hills. Soldiers with their families pa.s.sed, going to the free homesteads, and the line of movers"
wagons began with daybreak and rumbled by far into the night. But hundreds of wagons stopped in Sycamore Ridge, and the stage came crowded every night. Brick buildings, the town"s mortal pride, began showing their fronts on Main Street, and other streets in the town began to a.s.sert themselves. Mrs. Barclay"s school grew from a score of children in 1864 to three rooms full in "65, and in "66 the whole town turned out to welcome General and Mrs. Ward, she that was Miss Lucy Barnes, and there was a reunion of "C" Company that night, and a camp-fire in Culpepper Hall, and the next day Lige Bemis was painting a sign which read "Philemon R. Ward, Attorney-at-Law, Pension Matters Promptly Attended To." And the first little Ward was born at the Thayer House and named Eli Thayer Ward.
The spring that found John Barclay sixteen years old found him a browned, gray-eyed, lumpy sort of a boy, big at the wrong places, and stunted at the wrong places, with a curious, uneven sort of an education. He knew all about Walden Pond; and he knew his Emerson--and was mad with pa.s.sion to see the man; he had travelled over the world with Scott; had crossed the bridge with Caesar in his father"s books; had roamed the prairie and the woods with Cooper"s Indians; had gone into the hearts of men with Thackeray and d.i.c.kens, holding his mother"s hand and listening to her voice; but he knew algebra only as a name, and rhetoric was a dictionary word with him.
Of earthly possessions he had two horses, a bill of sale for his melodeon, a saddle, a wagon, a set of harness; four mouth-organs, one each in "A," "D," "E," and "C," all carefully rolled in Canton flannel on a shelf above his bed; one concertina,--a sort of German accordion,--five pigs, a cow, and a bull calf. Moreover, there were _two_ rooms in the Barclay home; and the great rock was gone from the door of the cave, and a wooden door was in its place and the Barclays were using it for a spring-house. The boy had a milk route and sold b.u.t.ter to the hotel. But the chiefest treasure of the household was John"s new music book. And while he played on his melodeon, Ellen Culpepper"s eyes smiled from the pages and her voice moved in the melodies, and his heart began to feel the first vague vibration with the great harmony of life. And so the pimples on his chin reddened, and the squeak in his voice began to squawk, and his big milky eyes began to see visions wherein a man was walking through this vain world. As for Ellen Culpepper, her shoe tops were tiptoeing to her skirts, and her eyes were full of dreams of the warrior bold, "with spurs of gold," who "sang merrily his lay." And rising from these dreams, she always stepped on her feet. But that was a long time ago, and men and women have been born and loved, and married and brought children into the world since then. For it was a long time ago.
CHAPTER IV
The changes of time are hard to realize. One knows, of course, that the old man once was young. One understands that the tree once was a sapling, and conversely we know that the child will be a man and the gaunt sapling stuck in the earth in time will become a great spreading tree. But the miracle of growth pa.s.ses not merely our understanding, but our imagination.
So though men tell us, and grow black in the face with the vehemence of telling, that the Sycamore Ridge of the sixties--a gray smudge of unpainted wooden houses bordering the Santa Fe trail, with the street merging into the sunflowers a block either way from the pump,--is the town that now lies hidden in the elm forest, with its thirty miles of paving and its scores of acres of wide velvet lawns, with its parks wherein fountains play, guarded by cannon discarded by the pride of modern war, with the court-house on the brink of the hill that once was far west of the town and with twenty-two thousand people whizzing around in trolleys, rattling about in buggies or scooting down the shady avenues in motor-cars--whatever the records may show, the real truth we know; the towns are not the same; the miracle of growth cannot fool us. And yet here is the miracle in the making. Always in John Barclay"s eyes when he closed them to think of the first years that followed the war between the states, rose visions of yellow pine and red bricks and the litter and debris of building; always in his ears as he remembered those days were the confused noises of wagons whining and groaning under their heavy loads, of gnawing saws and rattling hammers, of the clink of trowels on stones, of the swish of mortar in boxes, and of the murmur of the tide of hurrying feet over board sidewalks, ebbing and flowing night and morning. In those days new boys came to town so rapidly that sometimes John met a boy in swimming whom he did not know, and, even in 1866, when Ellen and Molly Culpepper were giving a birthday party for Ellen, she declared that she "simply couldn"t have all the new people there."
And so in the sixties the boy and the town went through their raw, gawky, ugly adolescence together. As streets formed in the town, ideas took shape in the boy"s mind. As Lincoln Avenue was marked out on the hill, where afterward the quality of the town came to live, so in the boy"s heart books that told him of the world outlined vague visions.
Boy fashion he wrote to Bob Hendricks once or twice a month or a season, as the spirit moved him, and measured everything with the eyes of his absent friend. For he came to idealize Bob, who was out in the wonderful world, and their letters in those days were curious compositions--full of adventures by field and wood, and awkward references to proper books to read, and cures for cramps and bashfully expressed aspirations of the soul. Bob"s father had become a general, and when the war closed, he was sent west to fight the Indians, and he took Lieutenant Jacob Dolan with him, and Bob sent to John news of the Indian fighting that glorified Bob further.
And when a letter came to the Ridge from Dolan announcing that he and the Hendricks family were coming back to the Ridge to live,--the general to look after his neglected property, and Dolan to start a livery-stable,--John heard the news with a throb of great joy. When a letter from Bob confirmed the news, John began to count the days. For the love of boys is the most unselfish thing in a selfish world. They met awkwardly and sheepishly at the stage, and greeted each other with grunts, and became inseparable. Bob came back tall, lanky, grinny, and rather dumb, and he found John undersized, wiry, masterful, and rather mooney, but strong and purposeful, for a boy. But each accepted the other as perfect in every detail.
Nothing Bob did changed John"s att.i.tude, and nothing John did made Bob waver in his faith in John. Did the boys come to John with a sickening story that Bob"s sister made him bring a towel to the swimming hole, John glared at them a moment and then waved them aside with, "Well, you big brutes,--didn"t you know what it was for?" When they reported to John that Bob"s father was making him tip his hat to the girls, they got, instead of the outbreak of scorn they expected, "Well--did the girls tip back?" And when Bob"s sister said that the Barclay boy--barefooted, curly-headed, dusty, and sunburned--looked like something the old cat had dragged into the house, the boy-was impudent to his sister and took a whipping from his father.
That fall the children of Sycamore Ridge a.s.sembled for the first time in their new seven-room stone schoolhouse, and the two boys were in the high school. The board hired General Philemon Ward to teach the twenty high school pupils, and it was then he first began to wear the white neckties which he never afterwards abandoned. Ward"s first clash with John Barclay occurred when Ward organized a military company.
John"s limp kept him out of it, so he broke up the company and organized a literary society, of which he was president and Ellen Culpepper secretary, and a const.i.tution was adopted exempting the president and secretary from work in the society. It was natural enough that Bob Hendricks should be made treasurer, and that these three officers should be the programme committee, and then a long line of vice-presidents and a.s.sistant secretaries and treasurers and monitors was elected by the society.
So John became the social leader of the group of boys and girls who were just coming out of kissing games into dances at one another"s homes in the town. John decided who should be in the "crowd" and who might be invited only when a mixed crowd was expected. Fathers desiring trade, and mothers faithful to church ties, protested; but John Barclay had his way. It was his crowd. They called themselves the "Spring Chickens," and as John had money saved to spend as he pleased, he dictated many things; but he did not spend his money, he lent it, and his barn was stored with, skates and sleds and broken guns and sc.r.a.p-iron held as security, while his pockets bulged with knives taken as interest.
As the winter waned and the Spring Chickens waxed fat in social honours, Bob Hendricks glanced up from his algebra one day, and discovered that little Molly Culpepper had two red lips and two pig-tail braids of hair that reached below her waist. Then and there he shot her deftly with a paper wad, chewed and fired through a cane pipe-stem, and waited till she wiped it off her cheek with her ap.r.o.n and made a face at him, before he plunged into the mysteries of _x_2 + 2_xy_ + _y_2. And thus another old story began, as new and as fresh as when Adam and Eve walked together in the garden.
John Barclay was so busy during his last year in the Sycamore Ridge school that he often fancied afterwards that the houses on Lincoln Avenue in Culpepper addition must have come with the gra.s.s in the spring, for he has no memory of their building. Neither does he remember when General Madison Hendricks built the brick building on the corner of Main Street and Fifth Avenue, in which he opened the Exchange National Bank of Sycamore Ridge. Yet John remembered that his team and wagon were going all winter, hauling stone for the foundation of the Hendricks home on the hill--a great brick structure, with square towers and square "ells" rambling off on the prairie, and square turrets with ornate cornice pikes p.r.i.c.king the sky. For years the two big houses standing side by side--the Hendricks house and the Culpepper house, with its tall white pillars reaching to the roof, its double door and its two white wings spreading over the wide green lawn--were the show places of Sycamore Ridge, and the town was always divided in its admiration for them. John"s heart was sadly torn between them. Yet he was secretly glad to learn from his mother that his Uncle Union"s house in Haverhill had tall columns, green blinds on the white woodwork, and a wide hall running down the centre. For it made him feel more at home at the Culpeppers". But when the Hendricks"
piano came, after they moved into the big house, the boy"s heart was opened afresh; and he spent hours with Bob Hendricks at the piano, when he knew he would be welcome at the Culpeppers". He leased his town herd in the summer to Jimmie Fernald--giving him the right to take the cows to the commons around town upon the payment of five dollars a month to John for keeping out of the business, and pa.s.sing Jimmie good-will. In the meantime, by day, John worked his team, and hired two others and took contracts for digging cellars. At nights he went to the country with his concertina and played for dances, making two dollars a night, and General Hendricks for years pointed with pride to the fact that when the Exchange National Bank of Sycamore Ridge opened for business the first morning, standing at the head of the line of depositors was John Barclay, with his concertina under his arm, just as he had returned from a country dance at daylight, waiting to be first in line, with $178.53 in his pocket to deposit. That deposit slip, framed, still hangs over the desk in the office of the president of the bank, and when John Barclay became famous, it was always a part of the "Art Loan Exhibit," held by the women in Barclay Memorial Hall.
That summer of "67 John capitulated to life, held his hands up for the shackles and put on shoes in summer for the first time. Also, he only went swimming twice--both times at night, and he bought his first box of paper collars and his mother tried to make his neckties like those in Dorman"s store; but some way she did not get the hang of it, and John bought a Sunday necktie of great pride, and he and his mother agreed that it was off the tail of Joseph"s coat of many colours. But he wore it only on state occasions. At work, he made an odd figure limping over the dirt heaps and into the excavations bossing men old enough to be his father. He wore a serious face in those days,--for a boy,--and his mouth was almost hard, but something burned in his eyes that was more than ambition, though that lighted his face like a flame, and he was always whistling or singing. At night he and Bob Hendricks wandered away together, and sometimes they walked out under the stars and talked as boys will talk of their little world and the big world about them, or sometimes they sat reading at one or the other"s home, and one would walk home with the other, and the other walk a piece of the way back. They read poetry and mooned; "Lalla Rookh" appealed to John because of its music and melody, and both boys devoured Byron, and gobbled over the "Corsair" and the "Giaour" and "Childe Harold" with the book above the table, and came back from the barn on Sundays licking their chops after surrept.i.tiously nibbling "Don Juan." But they had Captain Mayne Reid and Kingsley as an antidote, and they soon got enough of Byron.
The two boys persuaded each other to go away to school, and John chose the state university because it was cheap and because he heard he could get work in Lawrence to carry him through. He did not recollect that his mother had any influence in the matter; but in those days she always seemed to be sitting by the lamp in their little home, sewing, with his shirts and underwear strewn about her. She had a permanent place in the town schools, and the Barclay home had grown to a kitchen and two bedrooms as well as the big room with its fireplace. His mother"s hair was growing gray at the temples, but her clear, firm, unwrinkled skin and strong broad jaw kept youth in her countenance, and as Martin Culpepper wrote in the Biography, where he names the pioneers of Sycamore Ridge whose lives influenced Watts McHurdie"s, "the three graces, Faith, Hope, and Charity, were mirrored in her smile."
One night when the boy came in tired after his night"s ramble, he left his mother, as he often did those last nights before he went away to school, bending over her work, humming a low happy-noted song, even though the hour was late. He lay in his bed beside the open window looking out into the night, dreaming with open eyes about life.
Perhaps he actually dreamed a moment, for he did not hear her come into the room; but he felt her bend over him, and a tear dropped on his face from hers. He turned toward her, and she put her arms about his neck. Then she sobbed: "Oh, good-by, my little boy--good-by. I am coming here to bid you good-by, every night now." He kissed her hand, and she was silent a moment, and then she spoke: "I know this is the last of it all, John. You will never come back to me again--not you, but a man. And you will seem strange, and I will seem strange." She paused a moment to let the cramp in her throat leave, then she went on: "I was going to say so many things--when this time came, but they"re all gone. But oh, my boy, my little tender-hearted boy--be a good man--just be a good man, John." And then she sobbed for an unrestrained minute: "O G.o.d, when you take my boy away, keep him clean, and brave, and kind, and--O G.o.d, make him--make him a good man." And with a pat and a kiss she rose and said as she left him, "Now good night, Johnnie, go to sleep."
In the Sycamore Ridge _Banner_ for September 12, 1867, appeared some verses by Watts McHurdie, beginning:--
"Hail and farewell to thee, friend of my youth, Pilgrim who seekest the Fountain of Truth, Hail and farewell to thy innocent pranks, No more can I send thee for left-handed cranks.
Farewell, and a tear laves the ink on my pen, For ne"er shall I "noint thee with strap-oil again."
It was a n.o.ble effort, and in his notes to the McHurdie poems following the Biography published over thirty years after those lines were written, Colonel Culpepper writes: "This touching, though somewhat humorous, poem was written on the occasion of the departure for college of one who since has become listed with the world"s great captains of finance--none other than Honourable John Barclay, whose fame is too substantial to need encomium in these humble pages.
Suffice it to say that between these two men, our hero, the poet, and the great man of affairs, there has always remained the closest friendship, and each carries in his bosom, wrapped in the myrrh of fond memory, the deathless blossom of friendship, that sweetest flower in the conservatory of the soul."
The day before John left for Lawrence he met Lieutenant Jacob Dolan.
"So ye"re going to college--ay, Johnnie?"
"Yes, Mr. Dolan," replied the boy.
"Well, they"re all givin" you somethin", Johnnie: Watts here has given a bit of a posey in verse; and my friend, General Hendricks, I"m told, has given you a hundred-dollar note; and General Philemon Ward has given you Wendell Phillips" orations; and your sweetheart--G.o.d bless her, whoever she is--will be givin" ye the makins" of a broken heart; and your mother"ll be givin" you her blessin"--and the saints"
prayers go with "em; and me, havin" known your father before you and the mother that bore you, and seein" her rub the roses off her cheeks tryin" to keep your ornery little soul in your worthless little body, I"ll give you this sentiment to put in your pipe and smoke: John Barclay, man--if they ever be"s a law agin d.a.m.n fools, the first raid the officers should make is on the colleges. And now may ye be struck blind before ye get your education and dumb if it makes a fool of ye."
And so slapping the boy on the back, Jake Dolan went down the street winding in and out among the brick piles and lumber and mortar boxes, whistling "Tread on the Tail of me Coat."
For life was all so fine and gay with Lieutenant Dolan in those days.
And he whistled and sang, and thought what he pleased, and said what he pleased, and did what he pleased, and if the world didn"t like it, the world could picket its horses and get out of Jacob Dolan"s livery barn. For Mr. Dolan was thinking that from the livery-stable to the office of sheriff is but a step in this land of the free and home of the brave; so he carried his head back and his chest out and invited insult in the fond hope of provoking a.s.sault. He was the flower of the times,--effulgent, rather gaudy, and mostly red!
CHAPTER V
Good times came to Sycamore Ridge in the autumn. The dam across the creek was furnishing power for a flour-mill and a furniture factory.
The endless worm of wagons that was wriggling through the town carrying movers to the West, was sloughing many of its scales in Sycamore Ridge. Martin Culpepper had been East with circulars describing the town and adjacent country. He had brought back three stage loads of settlers, and was selling lots in Culpepper"s addition faster than they could be surveyed. The Frye blacksmith shop had become a wagon shop, and then a hardware store was added; the flag fluttered from the high flagstaff over the Exchange National Bank building, and all day long farmers were going from the mill to the bank. General Philemon Ward gave up school-teaching and went back to his law office; but he was apt to take sides with President Andrew Johnson too vigorously for his own good, and clients often avoided his office in fear of an argument. Still he was cheerful, and being only in his early thirties, looked at the green hills afar from his pasture and was happy. The Thayer House was filled with guests, and the Fernalds had money in the bank; Mary Murphy and Gabriel Carnine were living happily ever after, and Nellie Logan was clerking in Dorman"s Dry Goods store and making Watts McHurdie understand that she had her choice between a preacher and a drummer. Other girls in the dining room of the Thayer House were rattling the dinner dishes and singing "Sweet Belle Mahone" and "Do you love me, Molly Darling?" to ensnare the travelling public that might be tilted back against the veranda in a mood for romance. And as John and Bob that hot September afternoon made the round of the stores and offices bidding the town good-by, it seemed to them that perhaps they were seizing the shadow and letting the substance fade. For it was such a good-natured busy little place that their hearts were heavy at leaving it.
But that evening John in his gorgeous necktie, his clean paper collar, his new stiff hat, his first store clothes, wearing proudly his father"s silver watch and chain, set out to say good-by to Ellen Culpepper, and his mother, standing in the doorway of their home, sighed at his limp and laughed at his strut--the first laugh she had enjoyed in a dozen days.
John and Bob together went up the stone walk leading across a yard, still littered with the debris of building, to the unboxed steps that climbed to the veranda of the Culpepper house. There they met Colonel Culpepper in his shirt-sleeves, walking up and down the veranda admiring the tall white pillars. When he had greeted the boys, he put his thumbs in his vest holes and continued his parade in some pomp.
The boys were used to this att.i.tude of the colonel"s toward themselves and the pillars. It always followed a hearty meal. So they sat respectfully while he marched before them, pointing occasionally, when he took his cigar from his mouth and a hand from his vest, to some feature of the landscape in the sunset light that needed emphatic attention.
"Yes, sir, young gentlemen," expanded the colonel, "you are doing the right and proper thing--the right and proper thing. Of all the avocations of youth, I conceive the pursuit of the sombre G.o.ddess of learning to be the most profitable--entirely the most profitable. I myself, though a young man,--being still on the right side of forty,--have reaped the richest harvest from my labours in the cla.s.sic shades. Twenty years ago, young gentlemen, I, like you, left my ancestral estates to sip at the Pierian spring. In point of fact, I attended the inst.i.tution founded by Thomas Jefferson, the father of the American democracy--yes, sir." He put his cigar back in his mouth and added, "Yes, sir, you are certainly taking a wise and, I may say, highly necessary step--"
Mrs. Culpepper, small, sprightly, blue-eyed, and calm, entered the veranda, and cut the colonel off with: "Good evening, boys. So you are going away. Well--we"ll miss you. The girls will be right out."
But the colonel would not be quenched; his fires were burning deeply.
"As I was saying, Mrs. Culpepper," he went on, "the cla.s.sic training obtained from a liberal education such as it was my fortune--"
Mrs. Culpepper smiled blandly as she put in, "Now, pa, these boys don"t care for that."
"But, my dear, let me finish. As I started to say: the flowers of poetry, Keats and his large white plumes, the contemplation of nature"s secrets, the reflective study of--"
"Yes,--here"s your coat now, pa," said the wife, returning from a dive into the hall. "John, how"s your ma going to get on without you?