Part 16 (2/2)

Money was plentiful, and the Exchange National Bank grew with the country. The procession of covered wagons, that had straggled and failed the year before, began to close ranks in the spring; and in place of ”Buck” and ”Ball” and ”Star,” and ”Bright” and ”Tom” and ”Jerry,” who used to groan under the yoke, horses were hitched to the wagons, and stock followed after them, and thus Garrison County was settled, and Sycamore Ridge grew from three to five thousand people in three years. In the spring of '75 the _Banner_ began to publish a daily edition, and Editor Brownwell went up and down the railroad on his pa.s.s, attending conventions and making himself a familiar figure in the state. Times were so prosperous that the people lost interest in the crime of '73, and General Ward had to stay in his law-office, but he joined the teetotalers and helped to organize the Good Templars and the state temperance society. Colonel Culpepper in his prosperity took to fancy vests, cut extremely low, and the Culpepper women became the nucleus of organized polite society in the Ridge.

The money that John Barclay made in that first wheat transaction was the foundation of his fortune. For that money gave him two important things needed in making money--confidence in himself, and prestige.

He was twenty-five years old then, and he had demonstrated to his community thoroughly that he had courage, that he was crafty, and that he went to his end and got results, without stopping for overnice scruples of honour. Sycamore Ridge and Garrison County, excepting a few men like General Ward, who were known as cranks, regarded John as the smartest man in the county--smarter even than Lige Bemis. And the whole community, including some of the injured farmers themselves, considered Hendricks a sissy for his scruples, and thought Barclay a shrewd financier for claiming all that he could get. Barclay got hold of eight thousand acres of wheat land, in adjacent tracts, and went ahead with his business. In August he ploughed the ground for another crop. Also he persuaded his mother to let him build a new home on the site of the Barclay home by the Sycamore tree under the ridge, and when it was done that winter Mr. and Mrs. John Barclay moved out of their rooms at the Thayer House and lived with John's mother. The house they built cost ten thousand dollars when it was finished, and it may still be seen as part of the great rambling structure that he built in the nineties. John put five hundred dollars' worth of books into the new house--sets of books, which strangely enough he forced himself to wade through laboriously, and thus he cultivated a habit of reading that always remained with him. In those days the books with cracked backs in his library were Emerson, Browning, and Tennyson. And after a hard day's work he would come home to his poets and his piano.

He thought out the whole plan of the Barclay Economy Car Door Strip about midnight, sitting in his night clothes at the piano after reading ”Abt Vogler,” and the central idea for the address on the ”Practical Transcendentalist,” which he delivered at the opening of the state university the next year, came to him one winter night after he had tried to compose a clanging march as an air to fit Emerson's ”The Sphinx.” After almost a quarter of a century that address became the first chapter of Barclay's famous book, which created such ribaldry in the newspapers, ent.i.tled ”The Obligations of Wealth.”

It was in 1879 that Barclay patented his Economy Door Strip, and put it in his grain cars. It saved loss of grain in s.h.i.+pping, and Barclay, being on terms of business intimacy with the railroad men, sold the Economy Strip to the railroads to use on every car of grain or flour he s.h.i.+pped. And Lycurgus Mason, taken from the kitchen of the Mason House, hired a room over McHurdie's harness shop, and made the strips there. His first day in his new shop is impressed upon his memory by an incident that is the seed of a considerable part of this story.

He always remembers that day, because, when he got to the Thayer House, he found John there in the buggy waiting for him, and a crowd of men sitting around smoking cigars. In the seat by Barclay was a cigar-box, and Lycurgus cut in, before John could speak, with, ”Well, which is it?”

And John returned, ”A girl--get in; Mother Mason needs you.”

Lycurgus fumbled under the box lid for a cigar as he got into the buggy, and repeated: ”Mother needs me, eh? Well, now, ain't that just like a woman, taking a man from his work in the middle of the day?

What are you going to name her?”

”How do you like Jeanette?” asked Barclay, as he turned the horse.

”You know we can't have two Janes,” he explained.

”Well,” asked the elder man, tentatively, ”how does mother stand on Jeanette?”

”Mother Mason,” answered Barclay, ”is against it.”

”All right,” replied Lycurgus, ”I vote aye. What does she want?” he asked.

”Susan B.,” returned Barclay.

”Susan B. Anthony?” queried the new grandfather.

”Exactly,” replied the new father.

The two rode down the street in silence; as they turned into the Barclay driveway Lycurgus chuckled, ”Well--well--Susan B. Wants to put breeches on that child before she gets her eyes open.” Then he turned on Barclay with a broad grin of fellows.h.i.+p, as he pinched the young man's leg and laughed, ”Say--John--honest, ain't that just like a woman?”

And so Jeanette Thatcher Barclay came into this world, and what with her Grandmother Barclay uncovering her to look at the Thatcher nose, and her Grandmother Mason taking her to the attic so that she could go upstairs before she went down, that she might never come down in the world, and what with her Grandfather Mason rubbing her almost raw with his fuzzy beard before the women could scream at him, and what with her father trying to jostle her on his knee, and what with all the different things Mrs. Ward, the mother of six, would have done to her, and all the things Mrs. Culpepper, mother of three, would have done to her, and Mrs. McHurdie, mother of none, prevented the others from doing, Jeanette had rather an exciting birthday. And Jeanette Barclay as a young woman often looks at the sc.r.a.p-book with its crinkly leaves and reads this item from the _Daily Banner_: ”The angels visited our prosperous city again last Thursday, June 12, and left a little one named Jeanette at the home of our honoured townsman, John Barclay.

Mother and child progressing nicely.” But under this item is a long poem clipped from a paper printed a week later,--Jeanette has counted the stanzas many times and knows there are seventeen, and each one ends with ”when the angels brought Jeanette.” Her father used to read the verses to her to tease her when she was in her teens, and once when she was in her twenties, and Jeanette had the lonely poet out to dinner one Sunday, she sat with him on the sofa in the library, looking at the old sc.r.a.p-book. Their eyes fell upon the verses about the angels bringing Jeanette, and the girl noticed the old man mumming it over and smiling.

”Tell me, Uncle Watts,” she asked, ”why did you make such a long poem about such a short girl?”

The poet ran his fingers through his rough gray beard, and went on droning off the lines, and grinning as he read. When he had finished, he took her pretty hand in his gnarly, bony one and patted the white firm flesh tenderly as he peered back through the years. ”U-h-m, that was years and years ago, Jeanette--years and years ago, and Nellie had just bought me my rhyming dictionary. It was the first time I had a chance to use it.” The lyrical artist drummed with his fingers on the mahogany arm of the sofa. ”My goodness, child--what a long column there was of words rhyming with 'ette.'” He laughed to himself as he mused: ”You know, my dear, I had to let 'brevet' and 'fret' and 'roulette' go, because I couldn't think of anything to say about them.

You don't know how that worries a poet.” He looked at the verses in the book before him and then shook his head sadly: ”I was young then--it seems strange to think I could write that. Youth, youth,” he sighed as he patted the fresh young hand beside him, ”it is not by chance you rhyme with truth.”

His eyes glistened, and the girl put her cheek against his and squeezed the thin, trembling hand as she cried, ”Oh, Uncle Watts, Uncle Watts, you're a dear--a regular dear!”

”In his latter days,” writes Colonel Culpepper, in the second edition of the Biography, ”those subterranean fires of life that flowed so fervently in his youth and manhood smouldered, and he did not write often. But on occasion the flames would rise and burn for a moment with their old-time ardour. The poem 'After Glow' was penned one night just following a visit with a young woman, Jeanette, only daughter of Honourable and Mrs. John Barclay, whose birth is celebrated elsewhere in this volume under the t.i.tle 'When the Angels brought Jeanette.' The day after the poem 'After Glow' was composed I was sitting in the harness shop with the poet when the conversation turned upon the compensations of age. I said: 'Sir, do you not think that one of our compensations is that found in the freedom and the rare intimacy with which we are treated by the young women? They no longer seem to fear us. Is it not sweet?' I asked. Our hero turned from his bench with a smile and a deprecating gesture as he replied softly, 'Ah, Colonel--that's just it; that's just the trouble.' And then he took from a box near by this poem, 'The After Glow,' and read it to me. And I knew the meaning of the line--

”'Oh, drowsy blood that tosses in its sleep.'

”And so we fell to talking of other days. And until the twilight came we sat together, dreaming of faded moons.”

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