It is odd that Sycamore Ridge grew during the war. Where the people came from, no one could say—yet they came, and young Barclay remembered even during the war of playing in the foundations and running over the rafters of new houses. But when the war closed, the great caravan that had lagged while the war was raging, began to trail itself steadily in front of Mrs. Barclay's door, through the streets of Sycamore Ridge and out over the western hills. Soldiers with their families passed, going to the free homesteads, and the line of movers' wagons began with daybreak and rumbled by far into the night. But hundreds of wagons stopped in Sycamore Ridge, and the stage came crowded every night. Brick buildings, the town's mortal pride, began showing their fronts on Main Street, and other streets in the town began to assert themselves. Mrs. Barclay's school grew from a score of children in 1864 to three rooms full in '65, and in '66 the whole town turned out to welcome General and Mrs. Ward, she that was Miss Lucy Barnes, and there was a reunion of "C" Company that night, and a camp-fire in Culpepper Hall, and the next day Lige Bemis was painting a sign which read "Philemon R. Ward, Attorney-at-Law, Pension Matters Promptly Attended To." And the first little Ward was born at the Thayer House and named Eli Thayer Ward.
The spring that found John Barclay sixteen years old found him a browned, gray-eyed, lumpy sort of a boy, big at the wrong places, and stunted at the wrong places, with a curious, uneven sort of an education. He knew all about Walden Pond; and he knew his Emerson—and was mad with passion to see the man; he had travelled over the world with Scott; had crossed the bridge with Cæsar in his father's books; had roamed the prairie and the woods with Cooper's Indians; had gone into the hearts of men with Thackeray and Dickens, holding his mother's hand and listening to her voice; but he knew algebra only as a name, and rhetoric was a dictionary word with him. Of earthly possessions he had two horses, a bill of sale for his melodeon, a saddle, a wagon, a set of harness; four mouth-organs, one each in "A," "D," "E," and "C," all carefully rolled in Canton flannel on a shelf above his bed; one concertina,—a sort of German accordion,—five pigs, a cow, and a bull calf. Moreover, there were two rooms in the Barclay home; and the great rock was gone from the door of the cave, and a wooden door was in its place and the Barclays were using it for a spring-house. The boy had a milk route and sold butter to the hotel. But the chiefest treasure of the household was John's new music book. And while he played on his melodeon, Ellen Culpepper's eyes smiled from the pages and her voice moved in the melodies, and his heart began to feel the first vague vibration with the great harmony of life. And so the pimples on his chin reddened, and the squeak in his voice began to squawk, and his big milky eyes began to see visions wherein a man was walking through this vain world. As for Ellen Culpepper, her shoe tops were tiptoeing to her skirts, and her eyes were full of dreams of the warrior bold, "with spurs of gold," who "sang merrily his lay." And rising from these dreams, she always stepped on her feet. But that was a long time ago, and men and women have been born and loved, and married and brought children into the world since then. For it was a long time ago.
CHAPTER IV
The changes of time are hard to realize. One knows, of course, that the old man once was young. One understands that the tree once was a sapling, and conversely we know that the child will be a man and the gaunt sapling stuck in the earth in time will become a great spreading tree. But the miracle of growth passes not merely our understanding, but our imagination.
So though men tell us, and grow black in the face with the vehemence of telling, that the Sycamore Ridge of the sixties—a gray smudge of unpainted wooden houses bordering the Santa Fe trail, with the street merging into the sunflowers a block either way from the pump,—is the town that now lies hidden in the elm forest, with its thirty miles of paving and its scores of acres of wide velvet lawns, with its parks wherein fountains play, guarded by cannon discarded by the pride of modern war, with the court-house on the brink of the hill that once was far west of the town and with twenty-two thousand people whizzing around in trolleys, rattling about in buggies or scooting down the shady avenues in motor-cars—whatever the records may show, the real truth we know; the towns are not the same; the miracle of growth cannot fool us. And yet here is the miracle in the making. Always in John Barclay's eyes when he closed them to think of the first years that followed the war between the states, rose visions of yellow pine and red bricks and the litter and debris of building; always in his ears as he remembered those days were the confused noises of wagons whining and groaning under their heavy loads, of gnawing saws and rattling hammers, of the clink of trowels on stones, of the swish of mortar in boxes, and of the murmur of the tide of hurrying feet over board sidewalks, ebbing and flowing night and morning. In those days new boys came to town so rapidly that sometimes John met a boy in swimming whom he did not know, and, even in 1866, when Ellen and Molly Culpepper were giving a birthday party for Ellen, she declared that she "simply couldn't have all the new people there."
And so in the sixties the boy and the town went through their raw, gawky, ugly adolescence together. As streets formed in the town, ideas took shape in the boy's mind. As Lincoln Avenue was marked out on the hill, where afterward the quality of the town came to live, so in the boy's heart books that told him of the world outlined vague visions. Boy fashion he wrote to Bob Hendricks once or twice a month or a season, as the spirit moved him, and measured everything with the eyes of his absent friend. For he came to idealize Bob, who was out in the wonderful world, and their letters in those days were curious compositions—full of adventures by field and wood, and awkward references to proper books to read, and cures for cramps and bashfully expressed aspirations of the soul. Bob's father had become a general, and when the war closed, he was sent west to fight the Indians, and he took Lieutenant Jacob Dolan with him, and Bob sent to John news of the Indian fighting that glorified Bob further.
And when a letter came to the Ridge from Dolan announcing that he and the Hendricks family were coming back to the Ridge to live,—the general to look after his neglected property, and Dolan to start a livery-stable,—John heard the news with a throb of great joy. When a letter from Bob confirmed the news, John began to count the days. For the love of boys is the most unselfish thing in a selfish world. They met awkwardly and sheepishly at the stage, and greeted each other with grunts, and became inseparable. Bob came back tall, lanky, grinny, and rather dumb, and he found John undersized, wiry, masterful, and rather mooney, but strong and purposeful, for a boy. But each accepted the other as perfect in every detail.
Nothing Bob did changed John's attitude, and nothing John did made Bob waver in his faith in John. Did the boys come to John with a sickening story that Bob's sister made him bring a towel to the swimming hole, John glared at them a moment and then waved them aside with, "Well, you big brutes,—didn't you know what it was for?" When they reported to John that Bob's father was making him tip his hat to the girls, they got, instead of the outbreak of scorn they expected, "Well—did the girls tip back?" And when Bob's sister said that the Barclay boy—barefooted, curly-headed, dusty, and sunburned—looked like something the old cat had dragged into the house, the boy-was impudent to his sister and took a whipping from his father.