The older of the two men, named Jim Berners, was a merchant, owning with his son a large store on the principal street of the newer town and had been brought to the Illinois town when he was a child. His father, an Englishman, had come to America as a young man and for several years had been a merchant in the city of Philadelphia. Having married there and wanting to establish himself as the head of a landed family in the new country he had come to Illinois when land could be had at a low price and had bought five hundred acres of river bottom land.
With his young wife and his three children he lived in the river town and had cleared and got ready for planting most of his land when misfortune came down upon him. In the crude little towns of that day doctors were for the most part half educated, the houses were stuffy and full of drafts in winter and epidemics of smallpox, followed by scarlet fever, diphtheria and typhus came and could not be checked. Within two years the merchant’s rather delicate wife died and her death was followed by his own and by the death of two of his three children. There was only the babe left alive and he had been put in charge of an old judge with whom the father had formed a friendship.
The young Berners had grown into manhood in the household of the judge, whose great boast it was that he was a personal friend of Abraham Lincoln. He told me he had never been ill a day in his life. Upon reaching manhood he sold three hundred acres of his land and like his father became a merchant.
Father and son still owned the Berners merchandising establishment although they seemed to give it little attention.
What a place it was! Some ten years before I made his acquaintance the younger Berners, named Alonzo, had gone to Chicago where he had got quite hopelessly drunk. During his whole life the man had been a sufferer from some obscure nervous disease and was never without pain. The sprees he sometimes went on were but a kind of desperate attempt to free himself for a short time from the presence of pain. After the drunken time he was dreadfully ill and seemed about to die and then there came a time of weakness and a kind of physical peace. The tense nerves of his slender body relaxed, he slept at night and spent the days talking with a few friends, reading books or riding about town in a buggy.
On the sprees, of ten years before, sprees indulged in twice a year at regular intervals outside his own town, when he had stolen away without warning to his father or to an older sister of the household, young Alonzo had been picked up in the city of Chicago by an English deep-sea sailor. The sailor had been working for a time on a lake steamer but had tired of the place and had left his ship at Chicago and had also gone on a drunk. He rescued Alonzo Berners from the men into whose hands he had fallen and brought him home and later became attached to the Berners establishment, staying in the Illinois town at first as clerk in the store and later as the store’s manager. He was a heavily built man of fifty-five when I saw him and had a white scar, evidently from an old knife wound, on his brown cheek and a peculiar waddling gait. As he hustled about the store one thought of a fat duck trying to make its way rapidly along on land.
In the Berners establishment were sold hardware, agricultural implements, house and barn paints, jack-knives and a thousand other things and there was also a harness shop in the main building facing the town’s principal street. Back of the main building there was an alleyway and across the alleyway half a dozen large frame buildings in which were kept hides bought from the farmers, coal, lumber, bins of corn, wheat and oats in bags and hay in bales.
The whole establishment, an infinitely busy place, was run by the sailor who could neither read or write but who was helped by a stern-looking woman bookkeeper. The sailor was shrewd wise and jolly and had always some tale of life on the deep sea to tell to his farmer customers. He was the most popular man in town and there was another feature that added tremendously to the popularity of the store. In the spring, just before planting time, and in the fall after the crops were harvested, the Berners gave a great feast in one of the sheds. The hay corn and lumber were taken out and long wooden tables erected, while invitations were sent far and wide to the town and country people. Women of the town and country wives came to help prepare the feast, the old sailor waddled about shouting, pigs, turkeys, calves and lambs were killed, bushels of potatoes baked, pies and cakes, baked in advance by the women, were brought and there was a feast lasting sometimes all afternoon and far into the night. Alonzo Berners had provided many barrels of beer and the sailor and his pals among the farmers got half drunk and sang songs and made speeches while the professional men of the town, the lawyers, judges and doctors, all came and made speeches. What a storm of talk! Even the preachers and the rival merchants were there and a prayer was said as each new group sat down to the feast, the ministers shaking their heads over the beer drinking but falling to with a will at the food. The two annual affairs must often have cost the Berners a good part of the profits made during the year but they did not mind. “It doesn’t matter,” said the elder Berners. “I’m old and nearly ready to die, it isn’t likely Alonzo will live very long and as for Hallie,” meaning the daughter, “I have already given her one of my two farms. The Berners are going to peter out anyway and why should they care about leaving money behind them?”
The elder Berners, a man of seventy, rarely went into town but spent most of his days in his little garden and during my own visit at the house he came every day to sit with me, smoking his pipe and talking until he fell asleep in his chair. When he had been a younger man and before his wife died he had owned several trotting horses of which he loved to talk. One of the horses, named “Peter Point,” had been the pride and joy of his life and he spoke of the horse as of a beloved son.
Oh, what a great magnificent beast the stallion Peter Point had been and how he could trot! Sometimes when he spoke of him the old man jumped to his feet and climbing on the chair seat touched the limb of an apple tree with his fingers. “Looket here now. He was taller than that. Yes, siree! He was taller than that when he threw up his head,” he declared, jumping down from the chair and hopping about like an excited boy and walking up and down before me rubbing his hands together. He told me a long tale of a trip he had once taken with his stallion and two trotting mares as far east as Pennsylvania and of how Peter Point won every race in which he started, always the trotting free-for-all, and spoke fervently of the moment when he came out with the others and paraded before the grandstand before the first heat of a race. Jim Berners, then young and strong, sat in the sulky and what a moment it was for him. The memory of it filled him with excitement. “My father used to talk of the English aristocracy to his friend the judge, with whom I was left when all my family died, and the judge told me tales of what he had to say. Sometimes on days like that, when we came out for the first heat and were scoring down for the start or going slowly back for another try after a false start, I used to think of his words. There was me, sitting in the sulky, and there was the man, old Charlie Whaley, who took care of Peter Point, standing over near the grandstand with a blanket over his shoulder. Charlie winked and nodded at me and I winked at him. How swelled up with pride I was. I usually had two or three hundred dollars bet on Peter’s chances and he never once went back on me. I thought we were pretty aristocratic ourselves, Peter and me.”