A Certain Rich Man

by William Allen White

They were standing at the Culpepper gate as he spoke. A light in the upper windows showed that the parents were in. Buchanan came ambling along the walk and went through the gate between them without speaking. When he had closed the door, the girl came close to her lover. He took her in his arms, and cried, "Oh, darling,—only four more days together." He paused, and in the starlight she saw on his face more than words could have told her of his love for her. He was a silent youth; the spoken word came haltingly to his lips, and as often happens, words were superfluous to him in his moments of great emotion. He put her hands to his lips, and moaned, for the hour of parting seemed to be hurrying down upon him. Finally his tongue found liberty. "Oh, sweetheart—sweetheart," he cried, "always remember that you are bound in my soul with the iron of youth's first love—my only love. Oh, I never could again, dear,—only you—only you. After this it would be a sacrilege."

They stood silent in the joy of their ecstasy for a long minute, then he asked gently: "Do you understand, Molly,—do you understand? this is forever for us, Molly,—forever. When one loves as we love—with our childhood and youth welded into it all—whom God hath joined—" he stammered; "oh, Molly, whom God hath joined," he whispered, and his voice trembled as he sighed again, and kissed her, "whom God hath joined. Oh, God—God, God!" cried the lover, as he closed his eyes with his lips against her hair.

The restless horses recalled the lovers to the earth. It was Molly who spoke. "Bob—Bob—I can't let you go!"

Molly Culpepper had no reserves with her lover. She went on whispering, with, her face against his heart: "Bob—Bob, big boy, I am going to tell you something truthy true, that I never breathed to any one. At night—to-night, in just a few minutes—when I go up to my room—all alone—I get your picture and hold it to me close, and holding it right next to my very heart, Bob, I pray for you." She paused a moment, and then continued, "Oh, and—I pray for us—Bob—I pray for us." Then she ran up the stone walk, and on the steps she turned to throw kisses at him, but he did not move until he heard the lock click in the front door.

At the livery-stable he found Watts McHurdie bending over some break in his buggy. They walked up the street together. At the corner where they were about to part the little man said, as he looked into the rapturous face of the lanky boy, "Well, Bob,—it's good-by, John, for you, I suppose?"

"Oh—I don't know," replied the other from his enchanted world and then asked absently, "Why?"

"Well, it's nature, I guess. She'll take all his time now." He rubbed his chin reflectively, and as Bob turned to go Watts said: "My Heavens, how time does fly! It just seems like yesterday that all you boys were raking over the scrap-pile back of my shop, and slipping in and nipping leather strands and braiding them into whips, and I'd have to douse you with water to get rid of you. I got a quirt hanging up in the shop now that Johnnie Barclay dropped one day when I got after him with a pan of water. It's a six-sided one, with eight strands down in the round part. I taught him how to braid it." He chewed a moment and spat before going on: "And now look at him. He's little, but oh my." Something was working under McHurdie's belt, for Bob could hear it chuckling as he chewed: "Wasn't she a buster? It's funny, ain't it—the way we all pick big ones—we sawed-offs"? The laugh came—a quiet, repressed gurgle, and he added: "Yes—by hen, and you long-shanks always pick little dominickers. Eh?" He chewed a meditative cud before venturing, "That's what I told her comin' home to-night." Bob knew whom he meant. The man went on: "But when she saw them—him so little she'll have to shake the sheet to find him—and her so big and busting, I seen her—you know," he nodded his head wisely to indicate which "her" he meant. "I saw her a-eying me, out of the corner of her eye, and looking at him, and then looking at the girl, and looking at herself, and on the way home to-night I'm damned if I didn't have to put off asking her another six months." He sighed and continued, "And the first thing I know the drummer or the preacher'll get her." He chewed for a minute in peace and chuckled, "Well—Bob, I suppose you'll be next?" He did not wait for an answer, but spoke up quickly, "Well, Bob, good night—good night," and hurried to his shop.

The next day the people that blackened Main Street in Sycamore Ridge talked of two things—the bank failure and the new Golden Belt Wheat Company. Barclay enlisted Colonel Culpepper, and promised him two dollars for every hundred-acre option to lease that he secured at three dollars an acre—the cash on the lease to be paid March first. Barclay's plan was to organize a stock company and to sell his stock in the East for enough to raise eight dollars an acre for every acre he secured, and to use the five dollars for making the crop. He believed that with a good wheat crop the next year he could make money and buy as much land as he needed. But that year of the panic John capitalized the hardship of his people, and made terms for them, which they could not refuse. He literally sold them their own want. For the fact that he had a little ready money and could promise more before harvest upon which the people might live—however miserably was no concern of his—made it possible for him to drive a bargain little short of robbery. It was Bob's part of the business to float the stock company in the East among his father's rich friends. John was to furnish the money to keep Bob in New York, and the Hendricks' connections in banking circles were to furnish the cash to float the proposition, and the Hendricks' bank—if John could get it opened again—was to guarantee that the stock subscribed would pay six per cent interest. So there was no honeymoon for John Barclay. When he dropped the reins and helped his bride out of the buggy the next morning in front of the Thayer House, he hustled General Ward's little boy into the seat, told him to drive the team to Dolan's stable, and waving the new Mrs. Barclay good-by, limped in a trot over to the bank. In five minutes he was working in the crowd, and by night had the required number of the depositors ready to agree to let their money lie a year on deposit, and that matter was closed. He was a solemn-faced youth in those days, with a serious air about him, and something of that superabundance of dignity little men often think they must assume to hold their own. The town knew him as a trim little man in a three-buttoned tail-coat, with rather extraordinary neckties, a well-brushed hat, and shiny shoes. To the country people he was "limping Johnnie," and General Ward, watching Barclay hustle his way down Main Street Saturday afternoons, when the sidewalk and the streets were full of people, used to say, "Busier 'n a tin pedler." And he said to Mrs. Ward, "Lucy, if it's true that old Grandpa Barclay got his start carrying a pack, you can see him cropping out in John, bigger than a wolf."

But the general had little time to devote to John, for he was state organizer of a movement that had for its object the abolition of middlemen in trade, and he was travelling most of the time. The dust gathered on his law-books, and his Sunday suit grew frayed at the edges and shiny at the elbows, but his heart was in the cause, and his blue eyes burned with joy when he talked, and he was happy, and had to travel two days and nights when the fourth baby came, and then was too late to serve on the committee on reception, and had to be satisfied with a minor place on the committee on entertainment and amusements of which Mrs. Culpepper was chairman. But John turned in half of a fee that came from the East for a lawsuit that both he and Ward had forgotten, and Miss Lucy would have named the new baby Mary Ward, but the general stood firm for Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Sitting at Sunday dinner with the Wards on the occasion of Elizabeth Cady Stanton Ward's first monthly birthday, John listened to the general's remarks on the iniquity of the money power, and the wickedness of the national banks, and kept respectful and attentive silence. The worst the young man did was to wink swiftly across the table at Watts McHurdie, who had been invited by Mrs. Ward with malice prepense and seated by Nellie Logan. The wink came just as the general, waving the carving knife, was saying: "Gentlemen, it's the world-old fight—the fight of might against right. When I was a boy like you, John, the fight was between brute strength and the oppressed; between slaves and masters. Now it is between weakness and cunning, between those who would be slaveholders if they could be, and those who are fighting the shackles." And Mrs. Ward saw the wink, and John saw that she saw it, and he was ashamed.

So before the afternoon was over, Mr. and Mrs. John Barclay went over to Hendricks's, picking up Molly Culpepper on the way, and the three spent the evening with the general and Miss Hendricks—a faded mousy little woman in despairing thirties; and before the open fire they sat and talked, and John played the piano for an hour, and thought out an extra kink for the Golden Belt Wheat Company's charter. He jabbered about it to Jane as they walked home, and the next day it became a fact.