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, hadleftFreedom's Bannerto 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 asmuch 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 atthe 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 RidgeBanner, 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, androlled 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 foundtime 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, andsometimes 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 throughthe 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, ashe 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—nowI'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 bodyinto 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 tocall 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 vitalmanifestation, 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 boywas 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 lowterrorful 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 reunionof "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 weretworooms 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." Andrising 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 townso 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 theboys 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 hisbarn 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 ofx2+ 2xy+y2. 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, afterthey 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 nighthe 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 bendover 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 RidgeBannerfor 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, thedeathless blossom of friendship, that sweetest flower in the conservatory of the soul."
The day before John left for Lawrence he met Lieutenant Jacob Dolan.
"So ye're going to college—ay, Johnnie?"
"Yes, Mr. Dolan," replied the boy.
"Well, they're all givin' you somethin', Johnnie: Watts here has given a bit of a posey in verse; and my friend, General Hendricks, I'm told, has given you a hundred-dollar note; and General Philemon Ward has given you Wendell Phillips' orations; and your sweetheart—God bless her, whoever she is—will be givin' ye the makins' of a broken heart; and your mother'll be givin' you her blessin'—and the saints' prayers go with 'em; and me, havin' known your father before you and the mother that bore you, and seein' her rub the roses off her cheeks tryin' to keep your ornery little soul in your worthless little body, I'll give you this sentiment to put in your pipe and smoke: John Barclay, man—if they ever be's a law agin damn fools, the first raid the officers should make is on the colleges. And now may ye be struck blind before ye get your education and dumb if it makes a fool of ye." And so slapping the boy on the back, Jake Dolan went down the street winding in and out among the brick piles and lumber and mortar boxes, whistling "Tread on the Tail of me Coat."
For life was all so fine and gay with Lieutenant Dolan in those days. And he whistled and sang, and thought what he pleased, and said what he pleased, and did what he pleased, and if the world didn't like it, the world could picket its horses and get out of Jacob Dolan's livery barn. For Mr. Dolan was thinking that from the livery-stable to the office of sheriff is but a step in this land of the free and home of the brave; so he carried his head back and his chest out and invited insult in the fond hope of provoking assault. He was the flower of the times,—effulgent, rather gaudy, and mostly red!