A Certain Rich Man

by William Allen White

"Yes," he replied, "I suppose that is all they want." He drummed on his desk a moment and then asked, "Does your father know how much it is?"

"Yes," she answered, "I found in his desk at the house last night a paper on which he had been figuring—poor father—all the night before. All the night before—" she repeated, and then sobbed, "Poor father—all the night before. He knew it was coming. He knew the detective was here. He told me to-day that the sum he had there was correct. It is sixteen thousand five hundred and forty-three dollars. But he doesn't know I'm here, John. I told him I had some money of my own—some I'd had for years—and I have—oh, I have, John Barclay—I have." She looked up at him with the pallid face stained with fresh tears and asked, "I have—I have—haven't I, John, haven't I?"

He put his elbows on the desk and sank his head in his hands and sighed, "Yes, Molly—yes, you have."

They sat in silence until the roar of the waters and the murmur of the wheels about them came into the room. Then the woman rose to go. "Well, John," she said, "I suppose one shouldn't thank a person for giving her her own—but I do, John. Oh, it's like blood money to me—but father—I can't let father suffer."

She walked to the door, he stepped to unlatch it, and she passed out without saying good-by. When she was gone, he slipped the latch, and sat down with his hands gripping the table before him. As he sat there, he looked across the years and saw some of the havoc he had made. There was no shirking anything that he saw. A footfall passing the door made him start as if he feared to be caught in some guilty act. Yet he knew the door was locked. He choked a little groan behind his teeth, and then reached for the top of his desk, pulled down the rolling cover, and limped quickly out of the room—as though he were leaving a corpse. What he saw was the ghost of the Larger Good, mocking him through the veil of the past, and asking him such questions as only a man's soul may hear and not resent.

He walked over the mill for a time, and then calling his stenographers from their room, dictated them blind and himself dumb with details of a deal he was putting through to get control of the cracker companies of the country. When he finished, the sunset was glaring across the water through the window in front of him, and he had laid his ghost. But Molly Brownwell had her check, and her father was saved.

That evening the colonel sat with Watts McHurdie, on the broad veranda of the Culpepper home, and as the moon came out, General Ward wandered up the walk and Jake Dolan came singing down the street about "the relic of old dacincy—the hat me father wore." Perhaps he had one drink in him, and perhaps two, or maybe three, but he clicked the gate behind him, and seeing the three men on the veranda, he called out:—

"Hi, you pig-stealing Kansas soldiers, haven't ye heard the war is over?" And then he carolled: "Oh, can't get 'em up, Oh, can't get 'em up, Oh, can't get 'em up in the mornin'—Get up, you"—but the rest of the song, being devoted to the technical affairs of war, and ending with a general exhortation to the soldier to "get into your breeches," would give offence to persons of sensitive natures, and so may as well be omitted from this story.

There was an awkward pause when Dolan came on the veranda. The general had just tried to break the ice, but Dolan was going at too high a speed to be checked.

"Do you know," he asked, "what I always remember when I hear that call? You do not. I'll tell you. 'Twas the morning of the battle of Wilson's Creek, and Mart and me was sleeping under a tree, when the bugler of the Johnnies off somewhere on the hill he begins to crow that, and it wakes Mart up, and he rolls over on me and he says: 'Jake,' he says, or maybe 'twas me says, 'Mart,' says I—anyway, one of us says, 'Shut up your gib, you flannel-mouthed mick,' he says, 'and let me pull my dream through to the place where I find the money,' he says. And I says, 'D'ye know what I'm goin' to do when I get home?' says I. 'No,' says he, still keen for that money; 'no,' says he, 'unless it is you're going to be hanged by way of diversion,' he says. 'I'm going to hire a bugler,' says I. 'What fer—in the name of all the saints?' says he. 'Well,' says I, 'I'm going to ask him to blow his damn horn under my window every morning at five o'clock,' I says, 'and then I'm going to get up and poke my head out of the window and say: "Mister, you can get me up in the army, but on this occasion would you be obliging enough to go to hell"!' And Mart, seeing that the money was gone from his dream, he turns over and wallops me with the blanket till I was merely a palpitating mass. That was a great battle, though, boys—a great battle."