A Certain Rich Man

by William Allen White

"But why?" persisted the young man.

"Widder who?" returned Watts, grinning and putting his hand to his ear.

When John repeated his question the third time, McHurdie said:—

"I know a way you can get rich mighty quick, sonny." And when the boy refused to "bite," Watts went on: "If any one asks you what Watts McHurdie thinks about politics so long as he is in the harness business, you just take the fellow upstairs, and pull down the curtain, and lock the door, and tell him you don't know, and not to tell a living soul."

With Bob Hendricks, John had little better success in solving the mystery of the rise of Bemis. "Father says he's effective, and he would rather have him for him than against him," was the extent of Bob's explanation.

Ward's answer was more to the point. He said: "Lige Bemis is a living example of the power of soft soap in politics. We know—every man in this county knows—that Lige Bemis was a horse thief before the war, and that he was a cattle thief and a camp-follower during the war; and after the war we know what he was—he and the woman he took up with. Yet here he has been a member of the legislature and is beginning to be a figure in state politics,—at least the one to whom the governor and all the fellows write when they want information about this county. Why? I'll tell you: because he's committed every crime and can't denounce one and goes about the country extenuating things and oiling people up with his palaver. Now he says he is a lawyer—yes, sir, actually claims to be a lawyer, and brought his diploma into court two years ago, and they accepted it. But I know, and the court knows, and the bar knows it was forged; it belonged to his dead brother back in Hornellsville, New York. But Hendricks downstairs said we needed Lige in the county-seat case, so he is a member of the bar, taking one hundred per cent for collecting accounts for Eastern people, and giving the country a black eye. A man told me he was on over fifty notes for people at the bank; he signs with every one, and Hendricks never bothers him. He managed to get into all the lodges, right after the war when they were reorganized, and he sits up with the sick, and is pall-bearer—regular professional pall-bearer, and I don't doubt gets a commission for selling coffins from Livingston." Ward rose from the table his full six feet and put his hands in his pocket and stretched his legs as he added, "And when you think how many Bemises in the first, second, or third degree there are in this government, you wonder if the Democrats weren't right when they declared the war was a failure."

The general spoke as he did to John partly in anger and partly because he thought the youth needed the lesson he was trying to implant. "You know, Martin," explained the general, a few days later, to Colonel Culpepper, "John has come home a Barclay—not a Barclay of his father's stripe. He has taken back, as they say. It's old Abijah—with the mouth and jaw of a wolf. I caught him palavering with a juror the other day while we had a case trying."

The colonel rested his hands on his knees a moment in meditation and smiled as he replied: "Still, there's his mother, General. Don't ever forget that the boy's mother is Mary Barclay; she has bred most of the wolf out of him. And in the end her blood will tell."

And now observe John Barclay laying the footing stones of his fortune. He put every dollar he could get into town lots, paying for all he bought and avoiding mortgages. Also he joined Colonel Culpepper in putting the College Heights upon the market. "For what," explained the colonel, when the propriety of using the name for his addition was questioned, when no college was there nor any prospect of a college for years to come—"what is plainer to the prophetic eye than that time will bring to this magnificent city an institution of learning worthy of our hopes? I have noticed," added the colonel, waving his cigar broadly about him, "that learning is a shy goddess; she has to be coaxed—hence on these empyrean heights we have provided for a seat of learning; therefore College Heights. Look at the splendid vista, the entrancing view, in point of fact." It was the large white plumes dancing in the colonel's prophetic eyes. So it happened that more real estate buyers than clients came to the office of Ward and Barclay. But as the general that fall had been out of the office running for Congress on the Greeley ticket, still protesting against the crime of paying the soldiers in paper and the bondholders in gold, he did not miss the clients, and as John saw to it that there was enough law business to keep Mrs. Ward going, the general returned from the canvass overwhelmingly beaten, but not in the least dismayed; and as Jake Dolan put it, "The general had his say and the people had their choice—so both are happy."

As the winter deepened John and Colonel Culpepper planted five hundred elm trees on the campus on College Heights, lining three broad avenues leading from the town to the campus with the trees. John rode into the woods and picked the trees, and saw that each one was properly set. And the colonel noticed that the finest trees were on Ellen Avenue and spoke of it to Mrs. Culpepper, who only said, "Yes, pa—that's just like him." And the colonel looked puzzled. And when the colonel added, "They say he is shining up to that Mason girl from Minneola, that comes here with Molly," his wife returned, "Yes, I expected that sooner than now." The colonel gave the subject up. The ways of women were past his finding out. But Mrs. Culpepper had heard Jane Mason sing a duet in church with John Barclay, and the elder woman had heard in the big contralto voice of the girl something not meant for the preacher. And Mrs. Culpepper heard John answer it, so she knew what he did not know, what Jane Mason did not know, and what only Molly Culpepper suspected, and Bob Hendricks scoffed at.