A Certain Rich Man | Page 8

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