This chapter might have had in it "all the quality, pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war" if it had not been for the matters that came up for discussion at the meeting of the Garrison County Old Settlers' Association this year of our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Eight. For until that meeting the legend of the last hour of the County-seat War of '73 had flourished unmolested; but there General Philemon Ward rose and laid an axe at the root of the legend, and while of course he did not destroy it entirely, he left it scarred and withered on one side and therefore entirely unfitted for historical purposes. It seems that Gabriel Carnine was assigned by President John Barclay of the Association to prepare and read a paper on "The Rise, Decline, and Fall of Minneola." Certainly that was a proper subject considering the fact that corn has been growing over the site of Minneola for twenty years. And surely Gabriel Carnine, whose black beard has whitened in thirty years' faithful service to Sycamore Ridge, whose wife lies buried on the Hill, and whose children read the Sycamore Ridge Banner in the uttermost parts of the earth,—surely Gabriel Carnine might have been trusted to tell the truth of the conflict waged between the towns a generation ago. But men have curious works in them, and unless one has that faith in God that gives him unbounded faith in the goodness of man, one should not open men up in the back and watch the wheels go 'round. For though men are good, and in the long run what they do is God's work and is therefore acceptable, no man is perfect. There goes Lige Bemis past the post-office, now, for instance; when he was in the legislature in the late sixties, every one knows that Minneola raised twenty thousand dollars in cash and offered it to Lige if he would pretend to be sick and quit work on the Sycamore Ridge county-seat bill. He could have fooled us, and could have taken the money, which was certainly more than he could expect to get from Sycamore Ridge. Did he take it? Not at all. A million would not have tempted him. He was in that game; yet ten days after he refused the offer of Minneola, he tried to blackmail his United States senator out of fifty dollars, and sold his vote to a candidate for state printer for one hundred dollars and flashed the bill around Sycamore Ridge proudly for a week before spending it.

So Gabriel Carnine must not be blamed if in that paper on Minneola, before the Old Settlers' Association, he let out the pent-up wrath of thirty years; and also if in the discussion General Ward unsealed his lips for the first time and blighted the myth that told how a hundred Minneola men had captured the court-house yard on the night that John Barclay and Bob Hendricks rode home from their captivity to sign the tax levy. Legend has always said that Lige Bemis, riding half a mile ahead of the others that night, came to the courtyard; found it guarded by Minneola men, rode back, met John and Bob and the general crossing the bridge over the old ford of the Sycamore, and told them that they could not get into the court-house until the men came up who had ridden out to rescue the commissioners,—perhaps a quarter of an hour behind the others,—and that even then there must be a fight of doubtful issue; and further that it was after eleven o'clock, and soon would be too late to sign the levy. The forty thousand people in Garrison County have believed for thirty years that finding the court-house yard in possession of the enemy, Bemis suggested going through the cave by the Barclays' home, which had its west opening in the wall of the basement of the court-house; and furthermore, tradition has said that Bemis led John and Bob through the cave, and with crowbars and hammers they made a man-sized hole in the wall, crawled through it, mounted the basement stairs, unlocked the commissioners' room, held their meeting in darkness, and five minutes before twelve o'clock astonished the invading forces by lighting a lamp in their room, signing the levy that Bemis, as county attorney, had prepared the Sunday before, and slipping with it into the basement, through the cave and back to the troop of horsemen as they were jogging across the bridge on their way back from Carnine's farm. And here are the marks of General Ward's axe—verified by Gabriel Carnine: first, that there were no Minneola invaders in possession of the court-house, but only a dozen visitors loafing about town that night to watch developments; second, that the regular pickets were out as usual, and an invading force could not have stolen in; and third, that Bemis knew it, but as his political fortunes were low, he rode ahead of the others, hatched up the cock-and-bull story about the guarded court-house, and persuaded the boys to let him lead them into a romantic adventure that would sound well in the campaign and help to insure his reËlection the following year. In view of the general's remarks and Gabriel Carnine's corroborative statement, and in view of the bitterness with which Carnine assailed the whole Sycamore Ridge campaign, how can a truthful chronicler use the episode at all? History is a fickle goddess, and perhaps Pontius Pilate, being human and used to human errors and human weakness, is not so much to blame for asking, "What is truth?" and then turning away before he had the answer.

Walking home from the meeting through Mary Barclay Park, Barclay's mind wandered back to the days when he won his first important lawsuit—the suit brought by Minneola to prevent the collection of taxes under the midnight levy to build the court-house. It was that lawsuit which brought him to the attention of the legal department of the Fifth Parallel Railroad Company, and his employment by that company to defeat the bonds of its narrow-gauged competitor, that was seeking entrance into Garrison County, was the beginning of his career. And in that fight to defeat the narrow-gauged railroad, the people of Garrison County learned something of Barclay as well. He and Bemis went over the county together,—the little fox and the old coyote, the people called them,—and where men were for sale, Bemis bought them, and where they were timid, John threatened them, and where they were neither, both John and Bemis fought with a ferocity that made men hate but respect the pair. And so though the Fifth Parallel Railroad never came to the Ridge, its successor, the Corn Belt Road, did come, and in '74 John spoke in every schoolhouse in the county, urging the people to vote the bonds for the Corn Belt Road, and his employment as local attorney for the company marked his first step into the field of state politics. For it gave him a railroad pass, and brought him into relations with the men who manipulated state affairs; also it made him a silent partner of Lige Bemis in Garrison County politics.

But even when he was county commissioner, less than two dozen years old, he was a force in Sycamore Ridge, and there were days when he had four or five thousand dollars to his credit in General Hendricks' bank. The general used to look over the daily balances and stroke his iron-gray beard and say: "Robert, John is doing well to-day. Son, I wish you had the acquisitive faculty. Why don't you invest something and make something?" But Bob Hendricks was content to do his work in the bank, and read at home one night and slip over to the Culpeppers' the next night, and so long as the boy was steady and industrious and careful, his father had no real cause for complaint, and he knew it. But the town knew that John was getting on in the world. He owned half of Culpepper's second addition, and his interest in College Heights was clear; he never dealt in equities, but paid cash and gave warranty deeds for what he sold. It was believed around the Ridge that he could "clean up," for fifteen or twenty thousand dollars, and when he called Mrs. Mason of the Mason House, Minneola, into the dining room one afternoon to talk over a little matter with her, he found her most willing. It was a short session. After listening and punctuating his remarks with "of courses" and "yeses" and "so's," Mrs. Mason's reply was:—

"Of course, Mr. Barclay,"—the Mr. Barclay he remembered as the only time in his life he ever had it from her,—"of course, Mr. Barclay, that is a matter rather for you and Mr. Mason to settle. You know," she added, folding her hands across her ample waist, "Mr. Mason is the head of the house!" Then she lifted her voice, perhaps fearing that matters might be delayed. "Oh, pa!" she cried. "Pa! Come in here, please. There's a gentleman to see you."

Lycurgus Mason came in with a tea towel in his hands and an apron on. He heard John through in a dazed way, his hollow eyes blinking with evident uncertainty as to what was expected of him. When Barclay was through, the father looked at the mother for his cue, and did not speak for a moment. Then he faltered: "Why, yes,—yes,—I see! Well, ma, what—" And at the cloud on her brow Lycurgus hesitated again, and rolled his apron about his hands nervously and finally said, "Oh—well—whatever you and her ma think will be all right with me, I guess." And having been dismissed telepathically, Lycurgus hurried back to his work.

It was when John Barclay was elected President of the Corn Belt Railway, in the early nineties, that Lycurgus told McHurdie and Ward and Culpepper and Frye, as the graybeards wagged around the big brown stove in the harness shop one winter day: "You know ma, she never saw much in him, and when I came in the room she was about to tell him he couldn't have her. Now, isn't that like a woman?—no sense about men. But I says: 'Ma, John Barclay's got good blood in him. His grandpa died worth a million,—and that was a pile of money for them days;' so I says, 'If Jane Mason wants him, ma,' I says, 'let her have him. Remember what a fuss your folks made over me getting you,' I says; 'and see how it's turned out.' Then I turned to John—I can see the little chap now a-standing there with his dicky hat in his hand and his pipe-stem legs no bigger than his cane, and his gray eyes lookin' as wistful as a dog's when you got a bone in your hand, and I says, 'Take her along, John; take her along and good luck go with you,' I says; 'but,' I says, 'John Barclay, I want you always to remember Jane Mason has got a father.' Just that way I says. I tell you, gentlemen, there's nothing like having a wife that respects you." The crowd in the harness shop wagged their heads, and Lycurgus went on: "Now, they ain't many women that would just let a man stand up like that and, as you may say, give her daughter right away under her nose. But my wife, she's been well trained."

In the pause that followed, Watts McHurdie's creaking lever was the only sound that broke the silence. Then Watts, who had been sewing away at his work with waving arms, spoke, after clearing his throat, "I've heard many say that she was sich." And the old man cackled, and it became a saying-among them and in the town.

One who goes back over the fifty years that have passed since Sycamore Ridge became a local habitation and a name finds it difficult to realize that one-third of its life was passed before the panic of '78, which closed the Hendricks' bank. For those first nineteen years passed as the life of a child passes, so that they seem only sketched in; yet to those who lived at all, to those like Watts McHurdie and Philemon Ward, who now pass their happiest moments mooning over tilted headstones in the cemetery on the Hill, those first nineteen years seem the longest and the best. And that fateful year of '73 to them seems the most portentous. For then, perhaps for the first time, they realized the cruel uncertainty of the struggle for existence. With the terrible drouth of '60 this realization did not come; for the town was young, and the people were young; only Ezra Lane was a graybeard in all the town in the sixties; and youth is so sure; there is no hazard under thirty. In the war they fought and marched and sang and starved and died, and were still young. But when the financial panic of '73 spread its dread and its trouble over the land, youth in Sycamore Ridge was gone; it was manhood that faced these things in the Ridge, and manhood had cares, had given hostages to fortune, and life was serious and hard; and big on the horizon was the fear of failure. General Hendricks swayed in the panic of '73; and the time marked him, took the best of the light from his eye, and put the slightest perceptible hobble on his feet. To Martin Culpepper and Watts McHurdie and Philemon Ward and Jacob Dolan and Oscar Fernald, the panic came in their late thirties and early forties, a flash of lightning that prophesied the coming of the storm and stress of an inexorable fate.

The wedding of John Barclay and Jane Mason occurred in September, 1873, two days after he had stood on the high stone steps of the Exchange National Bank and made a speech to the crowd, telling them he was the largest depositor in the bank, and begging them to stop the run. But the run did not stop, and the day before John's wedding the bank did not open; the short crop and the panic in the East were more than Garrison County people could stand. But all the first day of the bank's closing and all the next day John worked among the people, reassuring them. So that it was five o'clock in the evening before he could start to Minneola for his wedding.

And such a wedding! One would say that when hard times were staring every one in the face, social forms would be observed most simply. But one would say so without reckoning with Mrs. Lycurgus Mason. As the groom and the bridesmaid and best man rode up from Sycamore Valley, two miles from Minneola, in the early falling dusk that night, the Mason House loomed through the darkness, lighted up like a steamboat. "You'll have to move along, John," said Bob Hendricks; "I think I heard her whistle."

On the sidewalk in front of the hotel they met Mrs. Mason in her black silk with a hemstitched linen apron over it. She ushered them into the house, took them to their rooms, and whirled John around on a pivot, it seemed to him, with her interminable directions. His mother, who had come over to Minneola the day before, came to his room and quieted her son, and as he got ready for what he called the "ordeal," he could hear Mrs. Mason swinging doors below stairs, walking on her heels through the house, receiving belated guests from Sycamore Ridge and the country,—for the whole county had been invited,—and he heard her carrying out a dog that had sneaked into the dining room.

The groom missed the bride, and as he was tying his necktie,—which reminded him of General Ward by its whiteness,—he wondered why she did not come to him. He did not know that she was a prisoner in her room, while all the young girls in Sycamore Ridge and Minneola were looking for pins and hooking her up and stepping on each other's skirts. For one wedding is like all weddings—whether it be in the Mason House, Minneola, or in Buckingham Palace. And some there are who marry for love in Minneola, and some for money, and some for a home, and some for Heaven only knows what, just as they do in the chÂteaux and palaces and mansions. And the groom is nobody and the bride is everything, as it was in the beginning and as it shall be ever after. Probably poor Adam had to stand behind a tree neglected and alone, while Lilith and girls from the land of Nod bedecked Eve for the festivities. Men are not made for ceremonies. And so at all the formal occasions of this life—whether it be among the great or among the lowly, in the East or the West, at weddings, christenings, and funerals—man hides in shame and leaves the affairs to woman, who leads him as an ox, even a muzzled ox, that treadeth out the corn. "The doomed man," whispered John to Bob as the two in their black clothes stood at the head of the stair that led into the parlour of the Mason House that night, waiting for the wedding march to begin on the cabinet organ, "ate a hearty supper, consisting of beefsteak and eggs, and after shaking hands with his friends he mounted the gallows with a firm step!"

Then he heard the thud of the music book on the organ, the creak of the treadle,—and when he returned to consciousness he was Mrs. Mason's son-in-law, and proud of it. And she,—bless her heart and the hearts of all good women who give up the joy of their lives to us poor unworthy creatures,—she stood by the wax-flower wreath under the glass case on the whatnot in the corner, and wept into her real lace handkerchief, and wished with all the earnestness of her soul that she could think of some way to let John know that his trousers leg was wrinkled over his left shoe top. But she could not solve the problem, so she gave herself up to the consolation of her tears. Yet it should be set down to her credit that when the preacher's amen was said, hers was the first head up, and while the others were rushing for the happy pair she was in the kitchen with her apron on dishing up the wedding supper. Well might the Sycamore Ridge Weekly Banner declare that the "tables groaned with good things." There were not merely a little piddling dish of salad, a bite of cake, and a dab of ice-cream. There were turkey and potatoes and vegetables and fruit and bread and cake and pudding and pie—four kinds of pie, mark you—and preserves, and "Won't you please, Mrs. Culpepper, try some of that piccalilli?" and "Oh, Mrs. Ward, if you just would have a slice of that fruit cake," and "Now, General,—a little more of the gravy for that turkey dressing—it is such a long ride home," or "Colonel, I know you like corn bread, and I made this myself as a special compliment to Virginia."

And through it all the bride sat watching the door—looking always through the crowd for some one. Her face was anxious and her heart was clouded, and when the guests had gone and the house was empty, she left her husband and slipped out of the back door. There, after the glare of the lamps had left her eyes, she saw a little man walking with his head down, out near the barn, and she ran to him and threw her arms about him and kissed him, and when she led Lycurgus Mason, who was all washed and dressed, back through the kitchen to her husband, John saw that the man's eyelids were red, and that on the starched cuffs were the marks of tears. For to him she was only his little girl, and John afterward knew that she was the only friend he had in the world. "Oh, father, why didn't you come in?" cried the daughter. "I missed you so!" The man blinked a moment at the lights and looked toward his wife, who was busy at a table, as he said: "Who? Me?" and then added: "I was just lookin' after their horses. I was coming in pretty soon. You oughtn't to bother about me. Well, John," he smiled, as he put out his hand, "the seegars seems to be on you—as the feller says." And John put his arm about Lycurgus Mason, as they walked out of the kitchen, and Jane reached for her gingham apron. Then life began for Mr. and Mrs. John Barclay in earnest.