After breakfast the men tumbled into the wagons, and as one wagon after another rattled out of Fernald's feed lot and came down the street, the men waved their hats and the women waved their aprons, and a great cloud of dust rose on the highway, and as the wagons ducked down the bank to the river, only the tall figure of Martin Culpepper, waving his handkerchief, rose above the cloud. At the end of the line was a provision wagon, and on it rode Philemon Ward—Yankee in his greatest moment, scorning the heroic place in the van, and looking after the substantials. In the feed lot, just as the reins were in his hands, Ward saw Elmer Hendricks' foot peeping from under a saddle. Ward dragged the boy out, spanking him as he came over the end gate, and noted the sheepish smile on his face. Ten days later, as Ward, marching in the infantry, was going up a hill through the timber at the battle of Wilson's Creek, that same boy rode by with the cavalry, and seeing Ward, waved a carbine and smiled as he charged the brow of the hill. That night, going back under the stars, Ward stumbled over a body, and stooping, saw the smile still on the boy's face, and the carbine clutched in his hand. But for the hole through the boyish brow, the eyes might still have been laughing.
CHAPTER III
A few years ago, in the room of the great mahogany table, with its clean blotting pad, its writing tablet, and its superb rose rising from a green vase in the midst of the shining unlittered expanse, there was a plain, heavy mahogany wainscoting reaching chin-high to the average man. A few soft-toned pictures adorned the dull gray walls above the wainscoting, and directly over a massive desk that never was seen open hung a framed letter. The letter was written on blue-lined paper in red pokeberry ink. At the top of the letter was the advertisement of a hotel, done in quaint, old-fashioned, fancy script with many curly-cues and printers' ornaments. The advertisement set forth that the Thayer House at Sycamore Ridge was "First class in every particular," and that "Especial attention was paid to transient custom." On a line in the right-hand corner the reader was notified that the tavern was founded by the Emigrant Aid Society, and balancing this line, in the left-hand corner, were these words: "The only livery-stable west of Lawrence." John Barclay's eyes have read it a thousand times, and yet he always smiled when he scanned the letter that followed the advertisement. The letter read:—
"Dear Ma I am going to war. Doan crye. Iff father was here he wood go; so why should not I. I will be very caerfull not to get hurt & stay by Cap Ward all the time. So godby yours truly J. Barclay Jr."
It was five hours after the soldiers had gone when Mrs. Barclay came home from her work in the aid room, and the first thing that attracted her attention was her son's letter, lying folded on the table. When she read it, she ran with the open letter across the common to the town. It was a woman's town that morning,—not a man was left in it,—for Ezra Lane, the only old man living in the Ridge, had left Freedom's Banner to shift for itself while he rode to Leavenworth with the soldiers to bring back the teams; and when Mrs. Barclay came into the street, she found some small stir there, made by Miss Hendricks—the only mother the Hendricks boys remembered—who was inquiring for her lost boys. Mrs. Barclay displayed her note, and in a moment the whole population of Sycamore Ridge, with hands under its aprons, was standing in front of the post-office. Then Ellen Culpepper found her tongue, and Mrs. Barclay began to look for a horse. Elmer Hendricks' pony in the pasture was the only horse Ward had left within twenty miles. When Ellen Culpepper and her little sister Molly came back from the pasture and announced that Elmer's pony was gone also, the women surmised that he had taken it with him, for they could not know that after he was spanked from the provision wagon, he had slipped out to the pasture and ridden by a circuitous route to the main road.
It was Captain Ward, dismounting from his driver's seat on the provision wagon at noon, who discovered two boys: a little boy eleven years old in a dead faint, and a bigger boy panting with the heat. They threw cold spring water on John Barclay's face, and finally his eyes opened, and he grinned as he whispered, "Hullo, Captain," to the man bending over him. The man held water to the boy's lips, and he sipped a little and swam out into the blackness again, and then the man reappeared and the boy tried to smile and whispered, "Aw—I'm all right." They saw he was coming out of his faint, and one by one the crowd dropped away from him; but Ward stayed, and when the child could speak, he replied to Ward's question, "'Cause I wanted to." And then again when the question was repeated, the boy said, "I tell you 'cause I wanted to." He shook his head feebly and grinned again and tried to rise, but the man gently held him down, and kept bathing his temples with cold water from the spring beside them. Finally, when the man seemed a little harsh in his questions, the boy's eyes brimmed and he said: "Whur'd my pa be if he was alive to-day? I just guess I got as much right here as you have." He made a funny little picture lying on the lush grass by the spring in the woods; his browned face, washed clean on the forehead and temples, showed almost white under the dirt. There were tear-stained rings about the eyes, and his pink shirt and blue trousers were grimy with dust, and the red clay of the Sycamore still was on the sides of his dust-brown bare feet. Around a big toe was a rag which showed a woman's tying—neat and firm, but red with clay.
Ward left, and Bob Hendricks came and stood over the prostrate boy. Bob was carrying a bucket of water to the cook as a peace offering.
"What did they do?" asked the boy on the ground.