A Certain Rich Man

by William Allen White

As for John, he said to Bob: "I know why you always want me to go over with you and Molly to get the Mason girl—by cracky, I'm the only fellow in town that will let you and Molly have the back seat coming home without a fuss! No, Robbie—you don't fool your Uncle John." And so when there was to be special music at the church, or when any other musical event was expected, John and Bob would get a two-seated buggy, and drive to Minneola and bring the soloist back with them. And there would be dances and parties, and coming from Minneola and going back there would be much singing. "The fox is on the hill, I hear him calling still," was a favourite, but "Come where the lilies bloom" rent the midnight air between the rival towns many times that winter and spring of '73. And never once did John try to get the back seat. But there came a time when Bob Hendricks told him that Molly told him that Jane had said that Molly and Bob were pigs—never to do any of the driving. And the next time there was a trip to Minneola, John said as the young people were seated comfortably for the return trip, "Molly, I heard you said that I was a pig to do all the driving, and not let you and Bob have a chance. Was that true?"

"No—but do you want to know who did say it?" answered Molly, and Jane Mason looked straight ahead and cut in with, "Molly Culpepper, if you say another word, I'll never speak to you as long as I live." But she glanced down at Barclay, who caught her eye and saw the smile she was swallowing, and he cried: "I don't believe you ever said it, Molly,—it must have been some one else." And when they had all had their say,—all but Jane Mason,—John saw that she was crying, and the others had to sing for ten minutes without her, before they could coax away her temper. And crafty as he was, he did not know it was temper—he thought it was something entirely different.

For the craft of youth always is clumsy. The business of youth is to fight and to mate. Wherever there is young blood, there is "boot and horse," and John Barclay in his early twenties felt in him the call for combat. It came with the events that were forming about him. For the war between the states had left the men restless and unsatisfied who had come into the plain to make their homes. They had heard and followed in their youth the call John Barclay was hearing, and after the war was over, they were still impatient with the obstacles they found in their paths. So Sycamore Ridge and Minneola, being rival towns, had to fight. The men who made these towns knew no better settlement than the settlement by force. And even during his first six months at home from school, when John sniffed the battle from afar, he was glad in his soul that the fight was coming. Sycamore Ridge had the county-seat; but Minneola, having a majority of the votes in the county, was trying to get the county-seat, and the situation grew so serious for Sycamore Ridge that General Hendricks felt it necessary to defeat Philemon Ward for the state senate so that Sycamore Ridge could get a law passed that would prevent Minneola's majority from changing the county-seat. This was done by a law which Hendricks secured, giving the county commissioners the right to build a court-house by direct levy, without a vote of the people,—a court-house so large that it would settle the county-seat matter out of hand.

The general, however, took no chances even with his commissioners. For he had his son elected as one, and with the knowledge that John was investing in real estate in the Ridge and had an eye for the main chance, the general picked John for the other commissioner. The place was on the firing-line of the battle, and John took it almost greedily. As the spring of '73 opened, there were alarms and rumours of strife on every breeze, and youth was happy and breathed the fight into its nostrils like a balsam. For all the world of Sycamore Ridge was young then, and all the trees were green in the eyes of the men who kept up the town. Each town had its hired desperadoes, and there were pickets about each village, and drills in the streets of the two towns, and a martial spirit all over the county. And as John limped about his tasks in those stirring spring days, he felt that he was coming into his own. But it was all a curious mock combat,—that between the towns,—for though the pickets drilled, and the bad men swaggered on the streets, and the bullies roared their anathemas, the social relations between the towns were not seriously disturbed. Youths and maidens came from Minneola to the Ridge for parties and dances, and from the Ridge young men went to Minneola to weddings and festivals of a social nature unmolested, for it takes a real war—and sometimes more than that—to put a bar across the mating ground of youth. So Bob and Molly and John drove to Minneola time and again for Jane Mason, and other boys and girls came and went from town to town, while the bitterness and the bickering and the mimic war between the rival communities went on.

Dolan was made sheriff, and Bemis county attorney, and with those two officers and a majority of the county commissioners the Ridge had the forces of administration with her. And so one night Minneola came with her wrinkled front of war; viz., forty fighting men under Gabriel Carnine and an ox team, prepared to take the county records by force and haul them home by main strength. But Lycurgus Mason, whose wife had locked him in the cellar that night to keep him from danger, was the cackling goose that saved Rome; for when, having escaped his wife's vigilance, he came riding down the wind from Minneola to catch up with his fellow-townsmen, his clatter aroused the men of the Ridge, and they hurried to the court-house and greeted the invaders with half a thousand armed men in the court-house yard. And in a crisis where craft and cunning would not help him, courage came out of John Barclay's soul for the first time and into his life as he limped through the guns into the open to explain to the men from Minneola when they finally arrived that Lycurgus Mason had not betrayed them, but had rushed into the town, thinking his friends were there ahead of him. It was a plucky thing for John to do, considering that his death would stop the making of the levy for the court-house that was to be recorded in a few days. But the young man's blood tingled with joy as he jumped the court-house fence and went back to his men. There was something like a smile from Jane Mason in his joy, but chiefly it was the joy that youth has in daring, that thrilled him. And the next day, or perhaps it was the next,—at any rate, it was a Sunday late in June,—when an armed posse from Minneola came charging down on the town at noon, John ran from his office unseen, over the roofs of buildings upon which as a boy he had romped, and ducking through a second-story window in Frye's store, got two kegs of powder, ran out of the back door, under the exposed piling supporting the building, put the two kegs of powder in a wooden culvert under the ammunition wagons of the Minneola men, who were battling with the town in the street, and taking a long fuse in his teeth, crawled back to the alley, lit the fuse, and ran into the street to look into the revolver of J. Lord Lee—late of the Red Legs—and warn him to run or be blown up with the wagons. And when the explosion came, knocking him senseless, he woke up a hero, with the town bending over him, and Minneola's forces gone.

And so John and the town had their fling together. And we who sit among our books or by our fire—or if not that by our iron radiator exuding its pleasance and comfort—should not sniff at that day when blood pulsed quicker and joy was keener, and life was more vivid than it is to-day.

Thirty-five years later—in August, 1908, to be exact—the general, in his late seventies, sat in McHurdie's harness shop while the poet worked at his bench. On the floor beside the general was the historical edition of the Sycamore Ridge Banner—rather an elaborate affair, printed on glossy paper and bedecked with many photogravures of old scenes and old faces. A page of the paper was devoted to the County Seat War of '73. The general had furnished the material for most of the article,—though he would not do the writing,—and he held the sheet with the story upon it in his hand. As he read it in the light of that later day, it seemed a sordid story of chicanery and violence—the sort of an episode that one would expect to find following a great war. The general read and reread the old story of the defeat of Minneola, and folded his paper and rolled it into a wand with which he conjured up his spirit of philosophy. "Heigh-ho," he sighed. "We don't know much, do we?"

McHurdie made no reply. He bent closely over his work, and the general went on: "I was mighty mad when Hendricks defeated me for the state senate in '72, just to get that law passed cheating Minneola out of a fair vote on the court-house question. But it's come out all right."

The harness maker sewed on, and the general reflected. Finally the little man at the bench turned his big dimmed eyes on his visitor, and asked, "Did you think, General, that you knew more than the Lord about making things come out right?" There was no reply and McHurdie continued, "Well, you don't—I've got that settled in my mind."

There was silence for a time, and Ward kept beating his leg with the paper wand in his hand. "Watts," said the general, finally, "I know what it was—it was youth. John Barclay had to go through that period. He had to fight and wrangle and grapple with life as he did. Do you remember that night the Minneola fellows came up with their ox team and their band of killers to take the county records—" and there was more of it—the old story of the town's wild days that need not be recorded, and in the end, in answer to some query from the general on John's courage, Watts replied, "John was always a bold little fice—he never lacked brass."