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 butts on a rotting log, whereon some grass was spread for
their feed. Their string bridles hung loosely over the log. The
horsemen 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 grass 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 pronged 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 passing
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 passing 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 God'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 lust of land, but sometimes they go to satisfy
their souls. The spirit of God 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 passed 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 butterflies 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 grass, 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 lustily, 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 raccoons, 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 horsemen 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 reassuringly 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 cluster 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
passenger 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,
Massachusetts. 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 Passenger 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 pass against a
half-hundred horsemen, floundering under the bank, in the underbrush
below, who dared not file up the pass.
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 horsemen,
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 horsemen. 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 passed 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 passed
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 button as a return for the
smile he got at the sly twist he gave her hair as he passed her desk
on his way to the spelling class. 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 sex.
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 God 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 multitude 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 gods 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 passion 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.
They understood his sentiments; and yet because he was one of them,
because he had endured with them and suffered with them and ministered
to them, the town set him apart from its hatred. And Martin Culpepper
was sensitive enough to feel this. It came over him with a wave of
joy, and as Ward talked, Culpepper expanded. Ward closed in a low
tone, and his face was white with pent-up zeal as he asked some one to
pray. There was a silence, and then a woman's voice, trembling and
passionate, arose, and Sycamore Ridge knew that Mrs. Barclay, the
widow of the Westport martyr, was giving sound to a voice that had
long been still. It was a simple halting prayer, and not all those in
the room heard it clearly. The words were not always fitly chosen; but
as the prayer neared its close,--and it was a short prayer at the
most,--there came strength and courage into the voice as it asked for
grace for "the brother among us who has shared our sufferings and
lightened our burdens, and who has cleaved to us as a brother, but
whose heart is drawn away from us by ties of blood and kinship"; and
then the voice sank lower and lower as though in shame at its
boldness, and hushed in a tremulous Amen.
No one spoke for a moment, and as Sycamore Ridge looked up from the
floor, its eyes turned instinctively toward Martin Culpepper. He felt
the question that was in the hearts about him, and slowly, to the
wonder of all, he rose. He had a beautiful deep purring voice, and
when he opened his eyes, they seemed to look into every pair of eyes
in the throng. There were tears on his face and in his voice as he
spoke. "Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following
after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest,
I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: where
thou diest, I will die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to
me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me." And then he
sank to his chair and hid his face, and for a moment a hundred
wet-eyed men were still.
Though John Barclay was at the meeting, he remembered only his
mother's prayer, but in his heart there was always a picture of a
little boy trying to walk home with a little girl, and when he came up
with her she darted ahead or dropped back. At the Culpepper gate she
stood waiting fully a minute for him to catch her, and when he came up
to her, she laughed, "Huh, Mr. Smarty, you didn't, did you?" and ran
up the walk, scooted into the house, and slammed the door. But he
understood and went leaping down the hill toward home with happiness
tingling in his very finger-tips. He seemed to be flying rather than
walking, and his toes touched the dirt path so lightly that he rounded
the corner and ran plump into Miss Lucy and Philemon Ward standing at
the gate. And what he saw surprised him so that he let out a great
"haw-haw-haw" and ran, trying to escape his shame and fear at his
behaviour. But the next morning Miss Lucy smiled so sweetly at him as
he came into the schoolroom, that he knew he was forgiven, and that
thrill was lost by the thump of joy that startled his heart when he
saw a bunch of dog-tooth violets in his ink bottle, and in his
geography found a candy heart with a motto on it so fervent that he
did not eat it for three long abstemious days of sheer devotion, in
which there were eyes and eyes and eyes from the little girl in the
scarlet gown.
It is strange that the boy did not remember how Sycamore Ridge took
the call to arms for the war between the states. All he remembered of
the great event in our history as it touched the town was that one day
he heard there was going to be a war. And then everything seemed to
change. A dread came over the people. It fell upon the school, where
every child had a father who was going away.
And it was because Madison Hendricks, the first man to leave for the
war, was father of Bob and Elmer Hendricks that John's first
associations of the great Civil War go back to the big black-bearded
man. For Madison Hendricks, who was a graduate of West Point, and a
veteran of the Mexican War, was called to Washington in May, and his
boys acquired a prestige that was not accorded to them by the mere
fact that their father was president of the town company, and was
accounted the first citizen of the town. Madison Hendricks, who owned
the land on which the town was built, Madison Hendricks, scholar and
gentleman, veteran of the Mexican War, first mayor of Sycamore Ridge
upon its incorporation,--his sons had no standing. But Madison
Hendricks, formally summoned to go to Washington to put down the
rebellion, and leaving on the stage with appropriate ceremonies,
--there was a man who could bequeath to his posterity in the boy
world something of his consequence.
So in the pall that came upon the school in Sycamore Ridge that spring
of '61, Bob and Elmer Hendricks were heroes, and their sister--who
was their only guardian in their father's absence--had to put them in
her dresses and send them to bed, and punish them in all the shameful
ways that she knew to take what she called "the tuck out of them." And
the boy of all the boys who gave the Hendricks boys most homage was
little Johnnie Barclay. There was no dread in his hero-worship. He had
no father to go to the war. But the other children and all the women
were under a great cloud of foreboding, and for them the time was one
of tension and hoping against hope that the war would soon pass.
How the years gild our retrospect. It was in 1903 that Martin
Culpepper, a man in his seventies, collected and published "The
Complete Poetical and Philosophical Works of Watts McHurdie, together
with Notes and a Biographical Appreciation by Martin F. Culpepper."
One of the earlier chapters, which tells of the enlistment of the
volunteer soldiers for the Civil War in '61, devotes some space to the
recruiting and enlistment in Sycamore Ridge. The chapter bears the
heading "The Large White Plumes," and in his "introductory remarks"
the biographer says, "To him who looks back to those golden days of
heroic deeds only the lines of Keats will paint the picture in his
soul:--
"'Lo, I must tell a tale of chivalry,
For large white plumes are dancing in mine eyes.'"
And so the "large white plumes" blinded his eyes to the fear and the
dread that were in the hearts of the people, and he tells his readers
nothing of the sadness that men felt who put in crops knowing that
their wives must cultivate and harvest them. He sees only the glory of
it; for we read: "Hail to the spirit of mighty Mars. When he strode
through our peaceful village, he awoke many a war song in our breasts.
As for our hero, Mars, the war god forged iron reeds for his lute, and
he breathed into it the spirit of the age, and all the valour, all the
chivalry of a golden day came pouring out of his impassioned reeds."
Such is the magic of those large white plumes on Martin Culpepper's
memory. Although John Barclay in that latter day bought a thousand
copies of the Biography and sent them to public libraries all over the
world, he smiled as he read that paragraph referring to Watts
McHurdie's accordion as the "impassioned reeds." When he read it, John
Barclay, grown to a man of fifty-three, sitting at a great mahogany
table, with a tablet of white paper on a green blotting pad before
him, and a gorgeous rose rising from a tall graceful green vase on the
shining table, looked out over a brown wilderness of roofs and
chimneys across a broad river into the hills that were green afar off,
and there, rising out of yesterday, he saw, not the bent little old
man in the harness shop with steel-rimmed spectacles and greasy cap,
whom you may see to-day; but instead, the boy in John Barclay's soul
looked through his eyes, and he saw another Watts McHurdie,--a dapper
little fellow under a wide slouch hat, with a rolling Byronic collar,
and fancy yellow waistcoat of the period, in exceedingly tight
trousers. And then, flash! the picture changed, and Barclay saw Watts
McHurdie under his mushroom hat; Martin Culpepper in his long-tailed
coat; Philemon Ward, tall, fair-skinned, blue-eyed, slim, and sturdy;
skinny, nervous Lycurgus Mason and husky Gabriel Carnine from
Minneola; Jake Dolan in his shirt sleeves, without adornment of any
kind, except the gold horseshoe pinned on his shirt bosom; Daniel
Frye, the pride of an admiring family, in his best home-made clothes;
Henry Schnitzler, Oscar Fernald, and nearly a hundred other men, to
the boy's eyes so familiar then, now forgotten, and all their faces
blurred in the crowd that stood about the recruiting officer by the
town pump in Sycamore Ridge that summer day of '61. A score or so of
men had passed muster. The line on the post at the wooden awning in
front of Schnitzler's saloon was marked at five feet six. All had
stood by it with their heads above the line. It was Watts McHurdie's
turn. He wore high-heeled boots for the occasion, but strut as he
would, his roached hair would not touch the stick that came over the
line. "Stretch your neck--ye bantam," laughed Jake Dolan. "Walk
turkey fashion, Watts," cried Henry Schnitzler, rushing up behind
Watts and grabbing his waistband. The crowd roared. Watts looked
imploringly at the recruiting officer and blubbered in wrath: "Yes,
damn you--yea; that's right. Of course; you won't let me die for my
bleedin' country because I ain't nine feet tall." And the little man
turned away trying to choke his tears and raging at his failure. And
because the recruiting officer was considerable of a man, Watts
McHurdie's name was written in the muster roll, and he went out.
Many days must have passed between the time when the men were mustered
in and the day they went away to the war. But to the man who saw those
times through the memory of the boy in blue jeans forever playing
bugle-calls upon his fife, it was all one day. For that crowd
dissolved, and another picture appeared upon the sensitized plate of
his memory. There is a crowd in the post-office--mostly men who are
going away to war. The stage has come in, and a stranger, better
dressed than the men of Sycamore Ridge, is behind the letter-boxes of
the post-office. The boy is watching his box; for it is the day when
the _Springfield Republican_ is due. Gradually the hum in front of the
boxes quiets, and two loud voices have risen behind the screen. Then
out walks great Martin Culpepper, white of face, with pent-up fury.
His left hand is clutched like a talon in the shoulder of the
stranger, whom Martin is holding before him. "Gentlemen, your
attention," demands Culpepper. The stranger swallows his Adam's apple
as if to speak; Martin turns to him with, "Don't you say that word
again, sir, or I'll wring your neck." Then he proceeds:--
"Gentlemen, this busybody has come all the way from Washington here to
tell me I'm a thief. I wrote to his damn Yankee government that I was
needing the money last winter to go East on the aid committee and
would replace it, and now that I'm going out to-morrow to die for his
damn Yankee government, he has the impertinence to come in here and
say I stole that money. Now what I want to ask you, gentlemen, is
this: Do I go out to-morrow to die on the field of glory for my
country, or does this here little contemptible whippersnapper take me
off to rot in some Yankee jail? I leave it to you, gentlemen. Settle
it for yourselves." And with that Culpepper throws the man into the
crowd and walks behind the screen in solemn state.
The boy never knew how it was settled. But Martin Culpepper went to
"the field of glory," and all the boy knew of the incident is here
recorded. However, in the Biography of Watts McHurdie above-mentioned
and aforesaid occur these words, in the same chapter--the one
entitled "The Large White Plumes": "Let memory with gentle hand cover
with her black curtain of soft oblivion all that was painful on that
glorious day. Let us not recall the bickerings and the strifes, let
the grass watered by Lethe's sweet spring creep over the scars in the
bright prospect which lies under our loving gaze. Let us hold in our
heart the tears in beauty's eyes; the smile that curls her crimson
lips, and the hope that burns upon her brow. Let us fondle the sacred
memory of every warm hand clasp of comrade and take to the silent
grave the ever green garland of love that adorned our hearts that day.
For the sordid thorns that pierced our bleeding hearts--what are they
but ashes to-day, blown on the winds of yesterday?"
What indeed, Martin Culpepper--what indeed, smiled John Barclay as he
reached for the rose on his broad mahogany desk across forty long
years, and looking through a wide window, saw on the blank wall of a
great hulk of a building half a mile away, the fine strong figure of a
man with black shaggy hair on his young leonine head rise and wave his
handkerchief to a woman with tears running down her face and anguish
in her eyes, standing in a swarm of children. What indeed are sordid
thorns when the "large white plumes are dancing"--what indeed?
That was a busy night in Sycamore Ridge--the night before the men
left for war in the summer of '61. And the busiest man in all the town
was Philemon R. Ward. Every man in the town was going, and most of the
men were going who lived in the county--an area as large as a New
England state, and yet when they were all gathered in Main Street,
there were less than fivescore of them. They had agreed to elect Ward
captain, Martin Culpepper first lieutenant, Jake Dolan second
lieutenant. It was one of the diversions of the occasion to call out
"Hello, Cap," when Ward hustled by a loitering crowd. But his pride
was in his work, and before sundown he had it done. The Yankee in him
gave him industry and method and foresight. At sunset the last of the
twenty teams and wagons he had ordered came rattling down the hill
west of town, driven by Gabriel Carnine of Minneola, with Mrs.
Lycurgus Mason sitting like a war goddess on the back seat holding
Lycurgus, a spoil of battle, while he held their daughter on his lap,
withal a martial family party. Mrs. Barclay and Miss Lucy went to the
aid store-room and worked the long night through, getting breakfast
for the men. Mary Murphy and Nellie Logan came from the Thayer House
to the aid room when the hotel dishes were washed, and helped with the
work. And while they were there the Culpeppers walked in, returning
from a neighbourly visit to Miss Hendricks; John Barclay in an apron,
stirring a boiling pot of dried apples, turned his back on the eyes
that charmed him, but when the women sent him for a bucket of water,
he shook the handle at Ellen Culpepper and beckoned her with a finger,
and they slipped out into the moonlight together. She had hold of the
handle of the bucket with him, and they pulled and hauled and laughed
as boy and girl will laugh so long as the world turns round. The
street was deserted, and only the bar of light that fell across the
sidewalk from Schnitzler's saloon indicated the presence of human
beings in the little low buildings that pent in the highway. The boy
and the girl stood at the pump, and the boy stuck a foot in the horse
trough. He made a wet silhouette of it on the stone beneath him, and
reached for the handle of the pump. Then he said, "I got somepin I
won't tell."
"Three little niggers in a peanut shell," replied the girl.
"All right, Miss Cuteness. All right for you; I was going to tell you
somepin, but I won't now." He gave the pump-handle a pull. It was limp
and did not respond with water. "Ellen--" the boy repeated as he
worked the handle, "I got somepin to tell you. Honest I have."
"I don't care, Mr. Smarty," the girl replied; she made a motion as if
to walk away, but did not. The boy noticed it and said, "Yes,
sir--it's somepin you'd like to know." The girl did not turn round.
The boy, who had been working with the wheezy pump, was holding the
handle up, and water was gurgling down the well. And before she could
answer he said, "Say, Ellen--don't be mad; honest I got somepin."
"Who's it about?" she asked over her shoulder.
"Me."
"That's not much--who else?"
"Elmer Hendricks!"
"Who else?" The girl was halfway turned around when she spoke.
"Bob--Bob Hendricks," replied the boy.
"Aw--Bob Hendricks--" returned the girl, in contempt. Then she faced
the boy and said, "What is it?"
"Come here 'n' I'll tell you."
"I'll come this far." The girl took two steps.
"I got to whisper it, and you can't hear."
"Well, 'tain't much." The girl dangled one bare foot hesitatingly.
"I'll come halfway," she added.
The boy made a mark in the dust of the road a few feet from him with
his toe, and said, "Come to there."
The girl shook her head, and spoke. "Tell me part--'n' I'll see if
it's good."
"Me and Elmer an' Bob are goin' to run away!" The girl stepped to the
toe mark and cried, "What?"
"Yes, sir--in the mornin'." He caught hold of the girl's arm
awkwardly and swung her around to the opposite side of the
pump-handle, and put her hands on it and began to pump. She pumped
with him as he puffed between the strokes, "Um' huh--we're going to
hide in the provision wagons, under some saddles they is there and
go--to--war!" The water was pouring into the bucket by the time he
had got this out. Their hands touched on the pump-handle. It was the
boy who drew his hand away. The girl gasped:--
"Why, John Barclay,--it ain't no such thing--does your ma know it?"
He told her that no one knew it but her, and they pumped in silence
until the bucket was full, and walking back carrying the bucket
between them, he told her another secret: that Watts McHurdie had
asked John to get his guitar after midnight, and play an accompaniment
to the accordion, and that Watts and Ward and Jake Dolan and Gabriel
Carnine were going out serenading. Further he told her that Watts was
going to serenade Nellie Logan at the Thayer House, and that Gabriel
Carnine was going to serenade Mary Murphy, and that Philemon Ward was
going to serenade Miss Lucy, and that he, John Barclay, had suggested
that it would be fine to serenade Mrs. Culpepper, because she was such
a nice woman, and they agreed that if he would bring his guitar, they
would!
When the boy and girl returned to the store, Ward and Miss Lucy went
to the Barclay home for the guitar. When they came back, Mrs. Barclay
noted a pink welt on one of Ward's fingers where his cameo ring had
been, and she observed that from time to time Miss Lucy kept feeling
of her hair as if to smooth it. It was long after midnight before the
girls from the hotel went home, and Miss Lucy and Mrs. Barclay lay on
the counter in the store, trying to sleep. They awoke with the sound
of music in their ears, and Miss Lucy said, "It's Captain Ward--and
the other boys, serenading us." They heard the high tenor voice of
Watts McHurdie and the strong clear voice of Ward rising above the
accordion and guitar:--
"For her voice is on the breeze,
Her spirit comes at will,
At midnight on the seas
Her bright smile haunts me still."
And underneath these high voices was the gruff bass voice of Gabriel
Carnine and the baritone of Jake Dolan. And when Mrs. Barclay heard
the piping treble of her son, and the tinkle of his guitar, her eyes
filled with tears of pride.
The serenaders waked the chickens, and the crowing roosters roused
Mrs. Barclay, and in the hurry of the hour she forgot to look for her
son. As "the gray dawn was breaking," a hundred men came into the
room, and found the smoking breakfast on the table. It was a good
breakfast as breakfasts go when men are hungry. But they sat in
silence that morning. The song was all out of them; the spring of
youth was crushed under the weight of great events. And as they
rose--they who had been so merry the day before, and had joked of the
things the soldier fears, they were all but mute, and left their
breakfasts scarcely tasted.
The women remember this,--the telltale sign of the untouched
breakfast,--and their memory is better than that of Martin Culpepper,
who wrote in that plumy chapter of the Biography, before mentioned:--
"The soldiers left their homes that beautiful August morning as the
sun was kissing the tips of the sycamore that gave the magnificent
little city its name. They had partaken abundantly of a bountiful
breakfast, and as they satisfied their inner man from a table groaning
with good things prepared by the fair hands of the gentler sex, the
gallant men rose with song and cheer, and went on their happy way
where duty and honour called them."
But the women who scraped the plates that morning knew the truth. One
wonders how much of history would be thrown out as worthless, like
Martin Culpepper's fine writing, if the women who scraped the plates
might testify. For those "large white plumes" do not dance in women's
eyes!
After breakfast the men tumbled into the wagons, and as one wagon
after another rattled out of Fernald's feed lot and came down the
street, the men waved their hats and the women waved their aprons, and
a great cloud of dust rose on the highway, and as the wagons ducked
down the bank to the river, only the tall figure of Martin Culpepper,
waving his handkerchief, rose above the cloud. At the end of the line
was a provision wagon, and on it rode Philemon Ward--Yankee in his
greatest moment, scorning the heroic place in the van, and looking
after the substantials. In the feed lot, just as the reins were in his
hands, Ward saw Elmer Hendricks' foot peeping from under a saddle.
Ward dragged the boy out, spanking him as he came over the end gate,
and noted the sheepish smile on his face. Ten days later, as Ward,
marching in the infantry, was going up a hill through the timber at
the battle of Wilson's Creek, that same boy rode by with the cavalry,
and seeing Ward, waved a carbine and smiled as he charged the brow of
the hill. That night, going back under the stars, Ward stumbled over a
body, and stooping, saw the smile still on the boy's face, and the
carbine clutched in his hand. But for the hole through the boyish
brow, the eyes might still have been laughing.
CHAPTER III
A few years ago, in the room of the great mahogany table, with its
clean blotting pad, its writing tablet, and its superb rose rising
from a green vase in the midst of the shining unlittered expanse,
there was a plain, heavy mahogany wainscoting reaching chin-high to
the average man. A few soft-toned pictures adorned the dull gray walls
above the wainscoting, and directly over a massive desk that never was
seen open hung a framed letter. The letter was written on blue-lined
paper in red pokeberry ink. At the top of the letter was the
advertisement of a hotel, done in quaint, old-fashioned, fancy script
with many curly-cues and printers' ornaments. The advertisement set
forth that the Thayer House at Sycamore Ridge was "First class in
every particular," and that "Especial attention was paid to transient
custom." On a line in the right-hand corner the reader was notified
that the tavern was founded by the Emigrant Aid Society, and balancing
this line, in the left-hand corner, were these words: "The only
livery-stable west of Lawrence." John Barclay's eyes have read it a
thousand times, and yet he always smiled when he scanned the letter
that followed the advertisement. The letter read:--
"Dear Ma I am going to war. Doan crye. Iff father was here he wood go;
so why should not I. I will be very caerfull not to get hurt & stay by
Cap Ward all the time. So godby yours truly J. Barclay Jr."
It was five hours after the soldiers had gone when Mrs. Barclay came
home from her work in the aid room, and the first thing that attracted
her attention was her son's letter, lying folded on the table. When
she read it, she ran with the open letter across the common to the
town. It was a woman's town that morning,--not a man was left in
it,--for Ezra Lane, the only old man living in the Ridge, had left
_Freedom's Banner_ to shift for itself while he rode to Leavenworth
with the soldiers to bring back the teams; and when Mrs. Barclay came
into the street, she found some small stir there, made by Miss
Hendricks--the only mother the Hendricks boys remembered--who was
inquiring for her lost boys. Mrs. Barclay displayed her note, and in a
moment the whole population of Sycamore Ridge, with hands under its
aprons, was standing in front of the post-office. Then Ellen Culpepper
found her tongue, and Mrs. Barclay began to look for a horse. Elmer
Hendricks' pony in the pasture was the only horse Ward had left within
twenty miles. When Ellen Culpepper and her little sister Molly came
back from the pasture and announced that Elmer's pony was gone also,
the women surmised that he had taken it with him, for they could not
know that after he was spanked from the provision wagon, he had
slipped out to the pasture and ridden by a circuitous route to the
main road.
It was Captain Ward, dismounting from his driver's seat on the
provision wagon at noon, who discovered two boys: a little boy eleven
years old in a dead faint, and a bigger boy panting with the heat.
They threw cold spring water on John Barclay's face, and finally his
eyes opened, and he grinned as he whispered, "Hullo, Captain," to the
man bending over him. The man held water to the boy's lips, and he
sipped a little and swam out into the blackness again, and then the
man reappeared and the boy tried to smile and whispered, "Aw--I'm all
right." They saw he was coming out of his faint, and one by one the
crowd dropped away from him; but Ward stayed, and when the child could
speak, he replied to Ward's question, "'Cause I wanted to." And then
again when the question was repeated, the boy said, "I tell you 'cause
I wanted to." He shook his head feebly and grinned again and tried to
rise, but the man gently held him down, and kept bathing his temples
with cold water from the spring beside them. Finally, when the man
seemed a little harsh in his questions, the boy's eyes brimmed and he
said: "Whur'd my pa be if he was alive to-day? I just guess I got as
much right here as you have." He made a funny little picture lying on
the lush grass by the spring in the woods; his browned face, washed
clean on the forehead and temples, showed almost white under the dirt.
There were tear-stained rings about the eyes, and his pink shirt and
blue trousers were grimy with dust, and the red clay of the Sycamore
still was on the sides of his dust-brown bare feet. Around a big toe
was a rag which showed a woman's tying--neat and firm, but red with
clay.
Ward left, and Bob Hendricks came and stood over the prostrate boy.
Bob was carrying a bucket of water to the cook as a peace offering.
"What did they do?" asked the boy on the ground.
"Just shook me--and then said father'd tend to me for this." The boys
exchanged comments on the situation without words, and then Bob said
as he drew the dripping bucket from the spring, "We're going clear on
to Leavenworth, and they say then we've got to come back with Ezra
Lane and the teams."
The boy on the ground raised himself by rolling over and catching hold
of a sapling. He panted a moment, and "I'll bet y' I don't." The other
boy went away with a weak "Me neither," thrown over his shoulder.
During that long afternoon, and all the next day and the next, the
boys ran from wagon to wagon, climbing over end gates, wriggling among
the men, running with the horses through the shady woods, paddling in
the fords, and only refusing to move when the men got out of the
wagons and walked up the long clay hills that rise above the Kaw
River. At night they camped by the prairie streams, and the men sang
and wondered what they were doing at home, and Philemon Ward took John
Barclay out into the silence of the woods and made him say his
prayers. And Ward would look toward the west and say, "Well,
Johnnie,--there's home," and once they stood in an open place in the
timber, and Ward gazed at a bright star sinking in the west, and said,
"I guess that's about over Sycamore Ridge." They went on, and the boy,
looking back to see why the man had stopped, caught him throwing a
kiss at the star. And they could not know, as they walked back
together through the woods abashed, that two women sitting before a
cabin door under a sycamore tree were looking at an eastern star, and
one threw kisses at it unashamed while the other wept. And on other
nights, many other nights, the two, Miss Lucy and Mrs. Barclay, sat
looking at their star while the terror in their hearts made their lips
mute. God makes men brave who stand where bullets fly, yet always they
can run away. But God seems to give no alternative to women at home
who have to wait and dread.
Forty years later John Barclay took from a box in a safety vault back
of his office in the city a newspaper. It was the Sycamore Ridge
_Banner_, yellow and creased and pungent with age. "This," he said to
Senator Myton, spreading the wrinkled sheet out on the mahogany table,
"this is my enlistment paper." He smiled as he read aloud:--
"At noon of our first day out we came across two stowaways. Hendricks,
aged twelve, son of our well-known and popular Mayor, and J. Barclay,
aged eleven, son of Mrs. M. Barclay, who, owing to the suddenness of
the departure of our troops for the seat of war in Missouri, and
certain business delays made necessary in ye editor's return, were
slipped out with our company rather than left in the rough and
uncertain city of Leavenworth. They are called by the boys of 'C'
company respectively 'the little sergeant and the little corporal,
Good Luck boys.'"
A little farther down the column was this paragraph:
"Aug. 2nd we went into camp on Sugar Creek, and some sport was had by
the men who went in bathing, taking the horses with them."
"Ever go in swimming with the horses, Senator?" asked Barclay. The
senator shook his head doubtfully.
"Well--you haven't. For if you had you'd remember it," answered
Barclay, and a hundred naked young men and two skinny, bony boys
splashed and yelled and ducked and wrestled and locked their strong
wet arms about the necks of the plunging horses and dived under them,
and rolled across them and played with them like young satyrs in the
cool water under the overhanging elms with the stars twinkling in the
shining mahogany as Barclay folded the paper and put it away. He
thrummed the polished surface a moment and looked back into the past
to see Philemon Ward straight, lean, and glistening like a god
standing on a horse ready to dive, and as he huddled, crouched for the
leap, Barclay said, "Well, come on, Senator, we must go to lunch now."
It was late in the afternoon of their third day's journey that the men
from Sycamore Ridge rode in close order, singing, through the streets
of Leavenworth. Watts McHurdie was playing his accordion, and the
people turned to look at the uncouth crowd in civilian's clothes that
went bellowing "O My Darling Nellie Gray," across the town and out to
the Fort. Ezra Lane promised to call at the Fort for the two boys and
with drivers for the teams early the next morning--but to Sycamore
Ridge, Leavenworth in those days was the great city with its pitfalls,
and when Ezra Lane, grizzled though he was, came to a realizing sense
of his responsibilities, the next day was gone and the third was
waning. When he went to the Fort, he found the Sycamore Ridge men had
been hurried into Missouri to meet General Price, who was threatening
Springfield, and no word had been left for him about the boys. As he
left the gate at the Fort, a troop of cavalry rode by gaily, and a
boy, a big overgrown fourteen-year-old boy in a blue uniform, passed
and waved his hand at the befuddled old man, and cried, "Good-by, Mr.
Lane,--tell 'em you saw me." He knew the boy was from Sycamore Ridge,
but he knew also that he was not one of the boys who had come with the
soldiers; and being an old man, far removed from the boy world, he
could not place the child in his blue uniform, so he drove away
puzzled.
The afternoon the men from Sycamore Ridge came to Leavenworth they
were hurriedly examined again, signed the muster rolls, and were sent
away without uniforms all in twenty-four hours. But not before they
had found time to have their pictures taken in borrowed regimentals.
For twenty years after the war the daguerreotypes of the soldiers
taken at Leavenworth that day were the proudest adornments of the
centre-tables of Sycamore Ridge, and even now on Lincoln Avenue, in a
little white cottage with green blinds, that sits in a broad smooth
lawn with elm trees on it, stands an easel. On the easel is a
picture--an enlarged crayon drawing of a straight, handsome young
fellow in a captain's uniform. One hand is in his coat, and the other
at his hip. His head is thrown back with a fierce determination into
the photographer's iron rest and all together the picture is marked
with the wrinkled front of war. For over one corner of the easel hangs
a sword with an ivory handle, and upon it is an inscription
proclaiming the fact that the sword was presented to Captain Philemon
R. Ward by his company for gallant conduct on the field of battle on
the night of August 4, 1861. Above the easel in the corner hangs
another picture--that of a sweet-faced old man of seventy, beaming
rather benignly over his white lawn necktie. The forty-five years that
have passed between the two faces have trimmed the hair away from the
temples and the brow, have softened the mouth, and have put patience
into the eyes--the patience of a great faith often tried but never
broken. The five young women of the household know that the crayon
portrait on the bamboo easel is highly improper as a parlour
ornament--for do they not teach school, and do they not take all the
educational journals and the crafty magazines of art? But the hand
that put it there was proud of its handiwork, and she who hung the
sword upon the easel is gone away, so the girls smile at the fierce
young boyish face in the picture as they pass it, and throw a kiss at
the face above it, and the easel is not moved.
And the man,--the tall old man with a slight stoop in his shoulders,
the old man who wears the alpaca coat and the white lawn tie seen in
the upper picture,--sometimes he wanders into the stately front room
with a finger in a census bulletin as a problem in his head creases
his brow--and the sight of the sword always makes him smile, and
sometimes the smile is a chuckle that stirs the cockles of his heart.
For his mind goes back to that summer night of August 4, 1861, and he
sees himself riding on a horse with a little boy behind with his arms
in the soldier's belt. It is dusk, and "C" Company on foot is filing
down a Missouri hill. It is a muddy road, and the men are tired and
dirty. There is no singing now. A man driving an ox team has turned
out of the road to let the soldiers pass. Some one in the line asks
the man, "Where's Price?"
"Over the hill yonder," replies the man, pointing with his hickory
whip-stock. The word buzzes up and down the line. The captain on his
horse with the boy clutching at his belt does not hear it. But the
line lags and finally halts. The men have been only two days under
military discipline. That day last week Phil Ward--who was he,
anyway? Henry Schnitzler and Oscar Fernald could have bought him and
sold him twice over. So the line halted. Then the captain halted. Then
he called Second Lieutenant Dolan and asked to know what was the
matter. "They say they are going to camp," responded Dolan, touching
his cap. Captain Ward's face flushed. He told Dolan to give the order
to march. There were shouts and laughter, and Gabriel Carnine cried,
"Say, Phil, this here Missourian we passed says old General Price is
over that hill." The boys laughed again, and Ward saw that trouble was
before him. The men stood waiting while he controlled his rage before
he spoke. Dolan said under his breath from the ground beside the
horse, "They're awful tired, Cap, and they don't want to tackle
Price's army all by their lonelies." Some one in the company called
out, "We've voted on this thing, Cap. Don't the majority rule in this
country?"
A smile twitched at Ward's mouth and the boy in him pricked a twinkle
in his eyes, for he was only twenty-six, and he laughed--threw his
head back and then leaned over and slapped the horse's neck and
finally straightened up and said, "Gentlemen, I bow to the will of the
people."
And so it happened that when they drew their first month's pay, Martin
Culpepper and Jake Dolan suggested to the company that they buy Ward a
sword to commemorate the victory of the people. And Martin Culpepper
made a great presentation speech in which he said that to the
infantry, cavalry, and artillery arms of military service, "C" Company
had added the "vox populi." But the night after the presentation Oscar
Fernald and Watts McHurdie crawled under the captain's tent and stole
the sword and pawned it for beer, and there was a sound of revelry by
night.
When they found the great camp near Springfield, it seemed to John
Barclay that all the soldiers in the world were gathered. It is
difficult for a boy under a dozen years to remember things
consecutively; because boys do not do things consecutively. They flit
around like butterflies, and so the picture that they make of events
jumps from scene to scene. One film on a roll of John's memory showed
a hot August day in the camp of "C" Company; the men are hurrying
about the place. The tents are down; the boys--John and Bob--are
kicking around the vacant camp looking for trophies. But there the
film broke and did not record the fact that Captain Ward put Bob and
John on a commissary wagon that stood in a side street as the soldiers
moved out. John remembered looking into a street filled with marching
soldiers. First the regulars and the artillery came swinging down the
street. At their head the boy saw General Lyon, the commanding
officer, and around him was a bodyguard whose plumed hats, with the
left brim pinned up, caught the boys' eyes. The regulars marched by
silently. It was part of their day's work; but following them came a
detachment of Germans singing "Marchen Rote," and then the battery of
six guns and then the Kansans. Small wonder Captain Gordon Granger
told Colonel Mitchel that the Kansas soldiers were only an armed mob.
They filed out of Springfield, some in rags and some in tags and some
in velvet gowns. They carried guns; but they looked like delegates to
a convention, and as the boys saw their own company, they waved their
hands, but they were almost ashamed of the shabby clothes of the men
from Sycamore Ridge; for a boy always notices clothes on others. When
the Germans stopped singing "Marchen Rote," the boys heard Watts
McHurdie's high tenor voice start up "The Dutch Companee," and the
crowd that was lining the street cheered and cheered. A Missouri
regiment followed and more regulars, and then a battery of four guns
passed, and then came more Kansans still going to that everlasting
convention. And a band came roaring by,--with its crashing brass and
rumbling drums,--and then after the band had turned the corner, came
Iowa in gray blouses and such other garments as the clothes-lines of
the country afforded. They were singing as they passed--a song the
boy had never heard, being all about the "happy land of Canaan." And
before the sun had set again, after that night, hundreds of those who
sang of the happy land were there. In the rear were the ambulances and
the ammunition and the hospital vans, and the wagon which held the
boys wheeled into the line. After they had passed, the streets were
clogged with carts and drays and wagons of all sorts, for the citizens
were moving to places of safety.
As a man, the boy's memory did not tell him how the boys fared, but he
does remember that it was dark in the timber where they camped that
night, and that they slipped away into the woods to lie down together.
The chirping of the birds at dawn wakened them, and as John sat up
rubbing his eyes, he heard a rifle's crack. They were at the edge of a
field, and half a mile from him, troops were marching by columns
across a clearing. The rifle-shot was followed by another, and
another, and then by a half-dozen. "Wake up, Bob--wake up--they's a
battle," he cried, and the two boys stumbled to their feet. The shots
were far in front of the marching soldiers, and the boys could not
make out what the firing meant. The line formed and ran up the hill,
and the boys saw the morning sun flashing on the guns of the enemy.
The battery roared, and the boys were filled with terror. They ran
through the woods like dogs until they came to the soldiers from
Sycamore Ridge. The boys crawled on their bellies to their friends,
and lay with their faces all but buried in the ground. The men were
lying at the edge of the timber talking, and Watts McHurdie was on his
back.
"What's the matter with you, Watts?" asked Oscar Fernald.
"Os," replied Watts, "I got a presentiment I'm goin' to be shot in the
rear. It will kill me to be shot in the back, and I've got a notion
that's how I am goin' to die."
The line laughed. Captain Ward, who was sitting a few paces in the
rear of the men, went over to Watts, and scuffled the man over with
his foot. A bullet went through Ward's hat before he got back to his
place. The men were sticking up ramrods and betting on the number of
minutes they would last. No ramrod stood more than ten minutes. Martin
Culpepper threw up his hat five times before a bullet hit it; but he
went bareheaded the rest of the day, and John Barclay, in sheer fear,
began to dig a hole under him. After he had been on his belly for an
hour, Henry Schnitzler got tired and rose. The men begged him to lie
down. But his only reply when they told him he was a fool was, "Vell,
vot of it?" And when they said he would be shot, he answered again,
"Vell, vot of it?" And when Jake Dolan cried, "You pot-gutted
Dutchman, sit down or there'll be a sauer-kraut shower in hell pretty
quick," Henry shook his fat sides a moment and laughed, "Vell, vot of
dot--altzo!" For an hour, that seemed ten, he moved back and forth on
the line, firing and joking, and then the spell broke and a bullet
took part of his jaw. As he dropped to his position, with the blood
gushing from his face, his eyes blazed, and he spat out, "By hell-tam,
now I vos mad," and he fought the day out and died that night. But as
he sank to his place when the bullet hit him, Watts McHurdie saw
Schnitzler stagger, and through the smoke, knew that he was wounded.
Watts rushed to Schnitzler and bent over him, when a ball hit Watts
and went ripping through the fleshy part of his hip. "Shot in the
back--damn it, shot in the back!" he screamed, as he jumped into the
air. "What did I tell you, boys, I'm shot in the back." And he crawled
bleeding to the rear.
All the long forenoon the camp of the enemy continued to belch out
men. The battery mowed them down, and once the Kansans were ordered to
charge the hill, and the boys were left alone. It was there that the
two were separated. John saw men sink in awful silence, and the blood
ooze from their heads. He saw men cramp in agony and choke with blood,
and he saw Martin Culpepper, perhaps with the large white plumes still
dancing in his eyes, dash out of the line and pick up a Union banner
that Sigel's men had lost, and that the enemy was flaunting just
before the artillery mowed the gray line down. He heard the hoarse men
cheer Martin, and as the tall swart figure came running back waving
the flag, the boy prayed to his father's God to save the man.
When the battle lulled, the boy found himself parted from "C" Company,
and fled back through the woods to the rear. There he came upon a
smell that was familiar. He had known it in the slaughter-house at
home. It was the smell of fresh blood, and with it came the sickening
drone of flies. In an instant he stood under a tree where men were
working smeared with blood. He stumbled over a little pile of
dismembered legs and hands. A man with a bloody knife was bending over
a human form stretched on a bloody and, it seemed to the boy, a greasy
table. Another was helping the big man. They were cutting the bullet
out of Watts McHurdie, who was lying white and unconscious and with
flies crawling over him, half naked and blood-smeared, on the table.
The boy screamed, and the man turned his head and snarled through his
clenched teeth that held the knife, "Get out of here--no--go get me
a bucket of water from the creek." Some one handed the boy a bucket,
and he ran where he was told to go, with the awful sight burned on his
brain, with the sickening smell in his nose, and with the drone of
flies in his ears. When he came back the firing had begun again. The
surgeon was saying, "Well, that's all that's waiting--now I'm going
for a minute." He grabbed a gun standing by the table and ran toward
the front; he did not take off his blood-splotched apron, and the boy
fled from the place in terror. In a few moments the firing ceased; but
the boy ran on, hunting for a hiding-place. He saw a troop of
Alabamians plunge over a log in a charge, and roll in an awful,
writhing, screaming pile of dying men and horses, and in the heap he
saw the terror-stricken face of a youth, who was shrieking for help;
John carried that fear-distorted face in his memory for years, until
long afterwards it appeared in Sycamore Ridge.
But that day John fled from the death-trap almost mad with fear.
Rushing farther into the woods, he came upon General Lyon and his
staff. The plumed hats of the bodyguard told the boy that the
sandy-haired man before him was in command, though the man's face was
bloody from a wound in his head, and though his clothes were stained
with blood and he was hatless. He sat upright on his horse, and as the
boy turned, he heard the voices of Captain Ward and his soldiers,
begging to be sent into the fight. It was a clamour fierce and
piteous, and the general had turned his head to the Kansans, when
something at the left startled him. There was no firing, and a column
of soldiers was approaching. Doubt paralyzed the group around Lyon for
a moment. The men wore gray blouses strangely like those the Iowans
wore. The men might be Sigel's men, coming back from their artillery
duel. The general plainly was puzzled. He rode out from the bodyguard
a few paces. The boy was staring at him, when the bodyguard with their
gay plumed hats came up, and he saw wrath flash into the general's
face as he recognized the enemy. "Shoot them--shoot them--" he
shouted. But the gray line vomited its smoke first, and the boy felt
his foot afire. The general dropped from his horse, and as the boy
looked down, he saw a red blot coming out on his instep. In the same
instant he saw Captain Ward rush to the falling general, and saw the
bodyguard gather about him, and then the blackness came over the child
and he fell. He did not see them bear General Lyon's body into the
brush, nor hear Ward moan his sorrow. But when Ward returned from the
thicket, he saw the child lying limp on the grass.
As Ward ran toward the hospital van carrying the limp little body, he
could see that a ball had pierced the boy's foot. Also he saw the men
in retreat who had shot Lyon, and all over the field the firing had
ceased. As he hurried through the underbrush, Ward ran into Bob
Hendricks hiding in the thicket. Ward took the child's hand and he
began to sob: "I saw Elmer go up that hill, Captain; I saw him go up
with the horses and he ain't come back." But Ward did not understand
him, and hurried the little fellow along with John to the surgeon.
Then Ward left them, and when John Barclay opened his eyes, Bob
Hendricks was sitting beside him. A great lint bandage was about
John's foot, and they were in a wagon jolting over a rutty road. He
did not speak for a long time, and then he asked, "Did we whip 'em?"
And Bob nodded and said, "Cap says so!"
The children clasped hands and talked of many things that passed from
the boy's mind. But his mind recorded that the next day in the
hospital Martin Culpepper said, "Bob can't come to-day, Johnnie; you
know he's tendin' Elmer's funeral." The boy must have opened his eyes,
for the man said, "Why, Johnnie, I thought you knew; yes; they found
him dead that night--right under the reb--under the enemies' guns on
the brink of the hill."
The child's eyes filled with tears, but he did not cry. His emotion
was spent. The two sat together for a time, and the little boy said,
"Why didn't you go, Mr. Culpepper?" And the man replied: "Me?
Oh--why--Oh, yes, I got a little scratch here in my leg, and they
won't let me out of here. There's Watts over there in the next cot; he
got a little scratch too--didn't you, Watts?" Watts and the boy
smiled at each other, but John did not see Bob again for years. Miss
Hendricks came and took him to their father's people in Ohio.
One day some one came in the hospital where John and Watts and Martin
Culpepper were lying, and began to call out mail for the men, and the
third name the corporal called was "Captain Martin Culpepper"; and
when they brought him a long official envelope with General Frémont's
name on it, Martin Culpepper held it in his hands, looked at the
inscription, read the word "captain" again and again, and could not
speak for choked joy. And tears so dimmed his eyes that he could not
see the "large white plumes" of chivalry, but the men in the beds
cheered as they heard the words the corporal read.
With such music as that in his ears, and with his soul stirred by the
events about him, Watts McHurdie, lying in the hospital, wrote the
song that made him famous. They know in Sycamore Ridge that Watts is
not much of a poet, that his rhymes are sometimes bad and his metre
worse. But once his heart took fire and burned for a day sheer white,
and in that day he wrote words that a nation sang, and now all the
world is singing. And they are proud of him, and when people come to
Sycamore Ridge on pilgrimages to see the author of the song, men do
not smile in wonder; they show the visitors his shop, and point out
the bowed little man bending over his bench, stretching his arms out
as he sews, and they point him out with pride. Not even John Barclay
with all his millions, or Bob Hendricks, who once refused a place in
the President's cabinet, are more esteemed in Sycamore Ridge than the
little harness maker who set the world to singing.
And curiously enough, John Barclay was with Watts McHurdie when he
wrote the song. They brought him an accordion one day while he was
getting well, and the two sat together. Watts droned along and shut
his eyes and mumbled some words, and then burst out with the chorus.
Over and over he sang it and exclaimed between breaths: "Say--ain't
that fine? I just made it up." He was exalted with his performance,
and some women came loitering down the corridor where the wounded man
and the boy were lying. The visitors gazed compassionately at
them--little Watts not much larger than the boy. A woman asked, "And
where were you wounded, son?" looking at Watts with his accordion. His
face flushed up at the thought of his shame, and he could not keep
back the tears that always betrayed him when he was deeply moved.
"Ten--ten miles from Springfield, madam, ten miles from Springfield."
And to hide his embarrassment he began sawing at his accordion,
chanting his famous song. But being only a little boy, John Barclay
tittered.
A few days after the battle Captain Ward wrote to Miss Lucy telling
her that some soldiers slightly wounded would go home on a furlough to
Lawrence, and that they would take John with them and put him on the
stage at Lawrence for Sycamore Ridge. Then Ward's letter continued:
"It is all so horrible--this curse of war; sometimes I think it is
worse than the curse of slavery. There is no 'pomp and circumstance of
glorious war.' Men died screaming in agony, or dumb with fear. They
were covered with dirt, and when they were dead they merged into the
landscape like inanimate things. What vital difference is there
between a living man and a dead man, that one stands out in a scene
big and obtrusive, and the other begins to fade into the earth as soon
as death touches the body? The horror of death is upon me, and I
cannot shake it off. It is a fearful thing to see a human soul pass
'in any shape, in any mood.' And I have seen so many deaths--we lost
one man out of every three--that I am all unnerved. I saw General
Lyon die--the only abolitionist in the regular army, they say. He
died like a soldier--but not as the soldiers die in pictures. He sank
off his horse so limp, and so like an animal with its death wound, and
gasped so weakly, 'I'm killed--take care of my body,' that when we
covered his face and bore him away, we could not realize we were
carrying a man's body. And now, my dear, if I should go as these men
go, I have neither kith nor kin to mourn me--only you, and you must
not mourn, for I shall be near you always and always, without sign or
token, and when you feel my presence near, know that it is real, and
not a seeming. For the great force of life that moves events in this
world has but one symbol, but one vital manifestation, and that is
love, and when a soul is touched with that, it is immortal."
But Martin Culpepper, with his dancing plumes, saw things in another
light. Perhaps we always see things in another light when forty years
have passed over them. But in his chapter "The Shrill Trump," in the
Biography, he writes: "'O you mortal engines, whose rude throats the
immortal Jove's dread clamours counterfeit,' O for the 'spirit-stirring
drum, and the ear-splitting fife' 'in these piping times of peace.'
Small wonder it was that with the clang and clank of sabre and artillery
in his ears, with the huzzas of comrades and the sparkle of the wine of
war in his eyes, our hero wrote the never dying words that made him
famous. How the day comes back with all its pageantry, the caparisoned
horses, the handsome men stepping to the music of inspiring melody, the
clarion commands of the officers, and the steady rumble of a thousand
feet upon the battle ground, going careless whether to death or
immortality in deathless fame."
A curious thing is that deathless fame which Martin speaks of--a
passing curious thing; for when word came of Henry Schnitzler's death,
Mary Murphy, of the Thayer House, put off Gabriel Carnine's ring, and
wept many tears in the stage driver's coffee and wore black in her hat
for a year, and when Gabriel came home, she married him and all went
as merrily as a wedding-bell. What covert tenderness or dream of gauzy
romance was in her memory, the town could never know; but the
Carnines' first boy was named Henry, and for many years after the war,
she was known among the men, who do not understand a woman's heart, as
the "War widow by brevet." Yet that was Henry's "deathless fame" in
Sycamore Ridge, for the town has long since forgotten him, and even
his name means nothing to our children, who see it on the bronze
statue set up by the rich John Barclay to commemorate our soldier
dead.
But John was our first war hero. And when he brought his battle scars
home that September night in '61, for hours before the stage drove
across Sycamore Creek the boy was filled with a nameless dread that he
might be spanked.
They carried him on a cot to his mother's house, and put him in the
great carved four-poster bed, and in the morning Miss Lucy came and
hovered over him, and they talked of Captain Ward to her heart's
content, and the boy told Miss Lucy the gossip of the hospital,--that
Captain Ward was to be made a major,--and she kissed him and petted
him until he was glad none of the boys was around to see the sickening
spectacle. And then Miss Lucy and Mrs. Barclay told the child of their
plans,--that Miss Lucy was going to war as a nurse, and that Mrs.
Barclay was to teach the Sycamore Ridge school during the winter. And
in a few weeks John was out of the hero business, working in
Culpepper's store after school, and getting used to a limp that stayed
with him all his life.
The next spring he traded a carbine that he brought home from the army
for an Indian pony, and then he began business for himself. He organized
the cows of the town into a town herd and took them every morning to
pasture on the prairie. All day he rode in the open air, and the town
boys came out to play with him, and they explored the cave by his
mother's house, and with their sling-shots killed quails and prairie
chickens and cooked them, and they played war through the long summer
days. But John did not grow as the other boys grew; he remained
undersized, and his limp put him at a disadvantage; so he had few
fights, but he learned cunning, and got his way by strategy rather than
by force--but he always had his way. He was strong; the memory of what
he had seen and what he had been that one awful day in the battle made
lines on his face; sometimes at night he would wake screaming, when he
dreamed he was running away from the surgeon with the bloody knife in
his teeth and that the man was going to throw an arm at him. And when he
wished to bring Ellen Culpepper to time he would begin in a low
terrorful voice, "And I saw--the man--take--a--g-r-e-a-t l-o-n-g knife
d-r-i-p-p-i-n-g with r-e-d-b-l-o-o-d out of his t-e-e-t-h and go slish,
k-slish," but he never got farther than this, for the girl would begin
shaking, and if they were alone, would run to him and grab him and put
her hand to his mouth to make him stop.
And so his twelfth year passed under the open sky in the sunshine in
summer and in winter working after school in town where men were
wanting, and where a boy could always find work. He grew brown and
lean, and as his voice grew squeaky and he sang alto in the school, he
became more and more crafty and masterful. The fact that his mother
was the teacher, did not give him more rights in school than other
boys, for she was a sensible woman, but it gave him a prestige on the
playground that he was not slow to take. He was a born trader; and he
kept what he got and got more. His weakness was music. He kept two
cows in his herd in the summer time in return for the use of the
melodeon at the Thayer House, and moved it to his own home and put it
in the crowded little room, and practised on it at night when the
other boys were loafing at the town pump. For a consideration in
marbles he taught Buck Culpepper the chords in "G" on the guitar, and
for further consideration taught him the chords in "D" and "C," and
with the aid of Jimmy Fernald, aged nine, and Molly Culpepper, aged
eleven, one with a triangle and the other with a pumpkin reed pipe,
John organized his Band, which he led with his mouth-organ, and
exhibited in Culpepper's barn, appropriating to himself as the
director the pins charged at the door. Forty years afterward, when
Molly called his attention to his failure to divide with the children,
John Barclay smiled as he lifted his lame foot to a fat leather chair
in front of him and said, "That was what we call the promoter's
profit." And then the talk ran to Ellen, and John opened his great
desk and from a box without a mark on it he brought out a tintype
picture of Ellen at fourteen, a pink-cheeked child in short sleeves,
with the fringe of her pantalets showing above her red striped
stockings and beneath her bulging skirts, and with a stringy, stiff
feather rising from the front of her narrow-rimmed hat.
During the time when he was going to school by day and working
evenings and caring for the town herd through the summer, the war was
dragging wearily on. Sometimes a soldier came home on a furlough and
there was news of the Sycamore Ridge men, but oftener it was a season
of waiting and working. The women and children cared for the farms and
the stores as best they could and lived, heaven only knows how, and
opened every newspaper with horror and dread, and glanced down the
long list of names of the dead, the missing and the wounded, fearful
of what they might see. Mrs. Barclay heard from Miss Lucy and through
her kept track of Philemon Ward, who was transferred to another
regiment after he was made major. And when he was made a colonel at
Shiloh, there were tear blots on Miss Lucy's letter that told of it,
and after Appomattox he was brevetted a general. As for Captain
Culpepper, he came home a colonel, and Jake Dolan came home a first
lieutenant. But Watts McHurdie came home with a letter from Lincoln
about his song, and he was the greatest man of all of them.
It is odd that Sycamore Ridge grew during the war. Where the people
came from, no one could say--yet they came, and young Barclay
remembered even during the war of playing in the foundations and
running over the rafters of new houses. But when the war closed, the
great caravan that had lagged while the war was raging, began to trail
itself steadily in front of Mrs. Barclay's door, through the streets
of Sycamore Ridge and out over the western hills. Soldiers with their
families passed, going to the free homesteads, and the line of movers'
wagons began with daybreak and rumbled by far into the night. But
hundreds of wagons stopped in Sycamore Ridge, and the stage came
crowded every night. Brick buildings, the town's mortal pride, began
showing their fronts on Main Street, and other streets in the town
began to assert themselves. Mrs. Barclay's school grew from a score of
children in 1864 to three rooms full in '65, and in '66 the whole town
turned out to welcome General and Mrs. Ward, she that was Miss Lucy
Barnes, and there was a reunion of "C" Company that night, and a
camp-fire in Culpepper Hall, and the next day Lige Bemis was painting
a sign which read "Philemon R. Ward, Attorney-at-Law, Pension Matters
Promptly Attended To." And the first little Ward was born at the
Thayer House and named Eli Thayer Ward.
The spring that found John Barclay sixteen years old found him a
browned, gray-eyed, lumpy sort of a boy, big at the wrong places, and
stunted at the wrong places, with a curious, uneven sort of an
education. He knew all about Walden Pond; and he knew his
Emerson--and was mad with passion to see the man; he had travelled
over the world with Scott; had crossed the bridge with Cæsar in his
father's books; had roamed the prairie and the woods with Cooper's
Indians; had gone into the hearts of men with Thackeray and Dickens,
holding his mother's hand and listening to her voice; but he knew
algebra only as a name, and rhetoric was a dictionary word with him.
Of earthly possessions he had two horses, a bill of sale for his
melodeon, a saddle, a wagon, a set of harness; four mouth-organs, one
each in "A," "D," "E," and "C," all carefully rolled in Canton flannel
on a shelf above his bed; one concertina,--a sort of German
accordion,--five pigs, a cow, and a bull calf. Moreover, there were
_two_ rooms in the Barclay home; and the great rock was gone from the
door of the cave, and a wooden door was in its place and the Barclays
were using it for a spring-house. The boy had a milk route and sold
butter to the hotel. But the chiefest treasure of the household was
John's new music book. And while he played on his melodeon, Ellen
Culpepper's eyes smiled from the pages and her voice moved in the
melodies, and his heart began to feel the first vague vibration with
the great harmony of life. And so the pimples on his chin reddened,
and the squeak in his voice began to squawk, and his big milky eyes
began to see visions wherein a man was walking through this vain
world. As for Ellen Culpepper, her shoe tops were tiptoeing to her
skirts, and her eyes were full of dreams of the warrior bold, "with
spurs of gold," who "sang merrily his lay." And rising from these
dreams, she always stepped on her feet. But that was a long time ago,
and men and women have been born and loved, and married and brought
children into the world since then. For it was a long time ago.
CHAPTER IV
The changes of time are hard to realize. One knows, of course, that
the old man once was young. One understands that the tree once was a
sapling, and conversely we know that the child will be a man and the
gaunt sapling stuck in the earth in time will become a great spreading
tree. But the miracle of growth passes not merely our understanding,
but our imagination.
So though men tell us, and grow black in the face with the vehemence
of telling, that the Sycamore Ridge of the sixties--a gray smudge of
unpainted wooden houses bordering the Santa Fe trail, with the street
merging into the sunflowers a block either way from the pump,--is the
town that now lies hidden in the elm forest, with its thirty miles of
paving and its scores of acres of wide velvet lawns, with its parks
wherein fountains play, guarded by cannon discarded by the pride of
modern war, with the court-house on the brink of the hill that once
was far west of the town and with twenty-two thousand people whizzing
around in trolleys, rattling about in buggies or scooting down the
shady avenues in motor-cars--whatever the records may show, the real
truth we know; the towns are not the same; the miracle of growth
cannot fool us. And yet here is the miracle in the making. Always in
John Barclay's eyes when he closed them to think of the first years
that followed the war between the states, rose visions of yellow pine
and red bricks and the litter and debris of building; always in his
ears as he remembered those days were the confused noises of wagons
whining and groaning under their heavy loads, of gnawing saws and
rattling hammers, of the clink of trowels on stones, of the swish of
mortar in boxes, and of the murmur of the tide of hurrying feet over
board sidewalks, ebbing and flowing night and morning. In those days
new boys came to town so rapidly that sometimes John met a boy in
swimming whom he did not know, and, even in 1866, when Ellen and Molly
Culpepper were giving a birthday party for Ellen, she declared that
she "simply couldn't have all the new people there."
And so in the sixties the boy and the town went through their raw,
gawky, ugly adolescence together. As streets formed in the town, ideas
took shape in the boy's mind. As Lincoln Avenue was marked out on the
hill, where afterward the quality of the town came to live, so in the
boy's heart books that told him of the world outlined vague visions.
Boy fashion he wrote to Bob Hendricks once or twice a month or a
season, as the spirit moved him, and measured everything with the eyes
of his absent friend. For he came to idealize Bob, who was out in the
wonderful world, and their letters in those days were curious
compositions--full of adventures by field and wood, and awkward
references to proper books to read, and cures for cramps and bashfully
expressed aspirations of the soul. Bob's father had become a general,
and when the war closed, he was sent west to fight the Indians, and he
took Lieutenant Jacob Dolan with him, and Bob sent to John news of the
Indian fighting that glorified Bob further.
And when a letter came to the Ridge from Dolan announcing that he and
the Hendricks family were coming back to the Ridge to live,--the
general to look after his neglected property, and Dolan to start a
livery-stable,--John heard the news with a throb of great joy. When a
letter from Bob confirmed the news, John began to count the days. For
the love of boys is the most unselfish thing in a selfish world. They
met awkwardly and sheepishly at the stage, and greeted each other with
grunts, and became inseparable. Bob came back tall, lanky, grinny, and
rather dumb, and he found John undersized, wiry, masterful, and rather
mooney, but strong and purposeful, for a boy. But each accepted the
other as perfect in every detail.
Nothing Bob did changed John's attitude, and nothing John did made Bob
waver in his faith in John. Did the boys come to John with a sickening
story that Bob's sister made him bring a towel to the swimming hole,
John glared at them a moment and then waved them aside with, "Well,
you big brutes,--didn't you know what it was for?" When they reported
to John that Bob's father was making him tip his hat to the girls,
they got, instead of the outbreak of scorn they expected, "Well--did
the girls tip back?" And when Bob's sister said that the Barclay
boy--barefooted, curly-headed, dusty, and sunburned--looked like
something the old cat had dragged into the house, the boy-was impudent
to his sister and took a whipping from his father.
That fall the children of Sycamore Ridge assembled for the first time
in their new seven-room stone schoolhouse, and the two boys were in
the high school. The board hired General Philemon Ward to teach the
twenty high school pupils, and it was then he first began to wear the
white neckties which he never afterwards abandoned. Ward's first clash
with John Barclay occurred when Ward organized a military company.
John's limp kept him out of it, so he broke up the company and
organized a literary society, of which he was president and Ellen
Culpepper secretary, and a constitution was adopted exempting the
president and secretary from work in the society. It was natural
enough that Bob Hendricks should be made treasurer, and that these
three officers should be the programme committee, and then a long line
of vice-presidents and assistant secretaries and treasurers and
monitors was elected by the society.
So John became the social leader of the group of boys and girls who
were just coming out of kissing games into dances at one another's
homes in the town. John decided who should be in the "crowd" and who
might be invited only when a mixed crowd was expected. Fathers
desiring trade, and mothers faithful to church ties, protested; but
John Barclay had his way. It was his crowd. They called themselves the
"Spring Chickens," and as John had money saved to spend as he pleased,
he dictated many things; but he did not spend his money, he lent it,
and his barn was stored with, skates and sleds and broken guns and
scrap-iron held as security, while his pockets bulged with knives
taken as interest.
As the winter waned and the Spring Chickens waxed fat in social
honours, Bob Hendricks glanced up from his algebra one day, and
discovered that little Molly Culpepper had two red lips and two
pig-tail braids of hair that reached below her waist. Then and there
he shot her deftly with a paper wad, chewed and fired through a cane
pipe-stem, and waited till she wiped it off her cheek with her apron
and made a face at him, before he plunged into the mysteries of _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 grass in the
spring, for he has no memory of their building. Neither does he
remember when General Madison Hendricks built the brick building on
the corner of Main Street and Fifth Avenue, in which he opened the
Exchange National Bank of Sycamore Ridge. Yet John remembered that his
team and wagon were going all winter, hauling stone for the foundation
of the Hendricks home on the hill--a great brick structure, with
square towers and square "ells" rambling off on the prairie, and
square turrets with ornate cornice pikes pricking the sky. For years
the two big houses standing side by side--the Hendricks house and the
Culpepper house, with its tall white pillars reaching to the roof, its
double door and its two white wings spreading over the wide green
lawn--were the show places of Sycamore Ridge, and the town was always
divided in its admiration for them. John's heart was sadly torn
between them. Yet he was secretly glad to learn from his mother that
his Uncle Union's house in Haverhill had tall columns, green blinds on
the white woodwork, and a wide hall running down the centre. For it
made him feel more at home at the Culpeppers'. But when the Hendricks'
piano came, after they moved into the big house, the boy's heart was
opened afresh; and he spent hours with Bob Hendricks at the piano,
when he knew he would be welcome at the Culpeppers'. He leased his
town herd in the summer to Jimmie Fernald--giving him the right to
take the cows to the commons around town upon the payment of five
dollars a month to John for keeping out of the business, and passing
Jimmie good-will. In the meantime, by day, John worked his team, and
hired two others and took contracts for digging cellars. At nights he
went to the country with his concertina and played for dances, making
two dollars a night, and General Hendricks for years pointed with
pride to the fact that when the Exchange National Bank of Sycamore
Ridge opened for business the first morning, standing at the head of
the line of depositors was John Barclay, with his concertina under his
arm, just as he had returned from a country dance at daylight, waiting
to be first in line, with $178.53 in his pocket to deposit. That
deposit slip, framed, still hangs over the desk in the office of the
president of the bank, and when John Barclay became famous, it was
always a part of the "Art Loan Exhibit," held by the women in Barclay
Memorial Hall.
That summer of '67 John capitulated to life, held his hands up for the
shackles and put on shoes in summer for the first time. Also, he only
went swimming twice--both times at night, and he bought his first box
of paper collars and his mother tried to make his neckties like those
in Dorman's store; but some way she did not get the hang of it, and
John bought a Sunday necktie of great pride, and he and his mother
agreed that it was off the tail of Joseph's coat of many colours. But
he wore it only on state occasions. At work, he made an odd figure
limping over the dirt heaps and into the excavations bossing men old
enough to be his father. He wore a serious face in those days,--for a
boy,--and his mouth was almost hard, but something burned in his eyes
that was more than ambition, though that lighted his face like a
flame, and he was always whistling or singing. At night he and Bob
Hendricks wandered away together, and sometimes they walked out under
the stars and talked as boys will talk of their little world and the
big world about them, or sometimes they sat reading at one or the
other's home, and one would walk home with the other, and the other
walk a piece of the way back. They read poetry and mooned; "Lalla
Rookh" appealed to John because of its music and melody, and both boys
devoured Byron, and gobbled over the "Corsair" and the "Giaour" and
"Childe Harold" with the book above the table, and came back from the
barn on Sundays licking their chops after surreptitiously nibbling
"Don Juan." But they had Captain Mayne Reid and Kingsley as an
antidote, and they soon got enough of Byron.
The two boys persuaded each other to go away to school, and John chose
the state university because it was cheap and because he heard he
could get work in Lawrence to carry him through. He did not recollect
that his mother had any influence in the matter; but in those days she
always seemed to be sitting by the lamp in their little home, sewing,
with his shirts and underwear strewn about her. She had a permanent
place in the town schools, and the Barclay home had grown to a kitchen
and two bedrooms as well as the big room with its fireplace. His
mother's hair was growing gray at the temples, but her clear, firm,
unwrinkled skin and strong broad jaw kept youth in her countenance,
and as Martin Culpepper wrote in the Biography, where he names the
pioneers of Sycamore Ridge whose lives influenced Watts McHurdie's,
"the three graces, Faith, Hope, and Charity, were mirrored in her
smile."
One night when the boy came in tired after his night's ramble, he left
his mother, as he often did those last nights before he went away to
school, bending over her work, humming a low happy-noted song, even
though the hour was late. He lay in his bed beside the open window
looking out into the night, dreaming with open eyes about life.
Perhaps he actually dreamed a moment, for he did not hear her come
into the room; but he felt her bend over him, and a tear dropped on
his face from hers. He turned toward her, and she put her arms about
his neck. Then she sobbed: "Oh, good-by, my little boy--good-by. I am
coming here to bid you good-by, every night now." He kissed her hand,
and she was silent a moment, and then she spoke: "I know this is the
last of it all, John. You will never come back to me again--not you,
but a man. And you will seem strange, and I will seem strange." She
paused a moment to let the cramp in her throat leave, then she went
on: "I was going to say so many things--when this time came, but
they're all gone. But oh, my boy, my little tender-hearted boy--be a
good man--just be a good man, John." And then she sobbed for an
unrestrained minute: "O God, when you take my boy away, keep him
clean, and brave, and kind, and--O God, make him--make him a good
man." And with a pat and a kiss she rose and said as she left him,
"Now good night, Johnnie, go to sleep."
* * * * *
In the Sycamore Ridge _Banner_ for September 12, 1867, appeared some
verses by Watts McHurdie, beginning:--
"Hail and farewell to thee, friend of my youth,
Pilgrim who seekest the Fountain of Truth,
Hail and farewell to thy innocent pranks,
No more can I send thee for left-handed cranks.
Farewell, and a tear laves the ink on my pen,
For ne'er shall I 'noint thee with strap-oil again."
It was a noble effort, and in his notes to the McHurdie poems
following the Biography published over thirty years after those lines
were written, Colonel Culpepper writes: "This touching, though
somewhat humorous, poem was written on the occasion of the departure
for college of one who since has become listed with the world's great
captains of finance--none other than Honourable John Barclay, whose
fame is too substantial to need encomium in these humble pages.
Suffice it to say that between these two men, our hero, the poet, and
the great man of affairs, there has always remained the closest
friendship, and each carries in his bosom, wrapped in the myrrh of
fond memory, the deathless blossom of friendship, that sweetest flower
in the conservatory of the soul."
The day before John left for Lawrence he met Lieutenant Jacob Dolan.
"So ye're going to college--ay, Johnnie?"
"Yes, Mr. Dolan," replied the boy.