"That boy," said the colonel to his assembled family one evening as they dined on mush and dried peaches, and coffee made of parched corn, "that John Barclay certainly and surely is a marvel. Talk about drawing blood from a turnip,—why, he can strike an artery in a pumpkin." The colonel smiled reflectively as he proceeded: "Chicago lawyer came in on the stage this afternoon,—kinder getting uneasy about a little interest I owed to an Ohio man on that College Heights property, and John took that Chicago lawyer up to his office, and talked him into putting the interest in a second mortgage with all the interest that will fall due till next spring, and then traded him Golden Belt Wheat Company stock for the mortgage and a thousand dollars besides."
"Well, did John give you back the mortgage, father?" asked Molly.
"No, sis,—that wouldn't be business," replied the colonel, as he stirred his dried peaches into his third dish of mush for dessert; "business is business, you know. John took the mortgage over to the bank and discounted it for some money to buy more options with. John surely does make things hum."
"Yes, and he's made Bob resign from the board of commissioners, and won't let him come home Christmas, and keeps him on fifty dollars a month there in New York—all the same," returned the girl.
The colonel looked at his daughter a moment in sympathetic silence; then he put his thumbs in the armholes of his vest and tilted back in his chair and answered: "Oh, well, my dear,—when you are living in a brown-stone house on Fifth Avenue down in New York, stepping on a nigger every which way you turn, you'll thank John that he did keep Bob at work, and not bring him back here to pin on a buffalo tail, drink crick water, eat tumble weeds, and run wild. I say, and I fear no contradiction when I say it, that John Barclay is a marvel—a living wonder in point of fact. And if Bob Hendricks wants to come back here and live on the succulent and classic bean and the luscious, and I may say tempting, flapjack, let him come, Molly Farquhar Culpepper, let him come." The colonel, proud of his language, looked around the family circle. "And we at our humble board, with our plain though—shall I say nutritive—yes, nutritive and wholesome fare, should thank our lucky stars that John Barclay keeps the Golden Belt Wheat Company going, and your husband and father can make a more or less honest dollar now and then to supply your simple wants."
The colonel had more in his mind, for he rose and began to pace the floor in a fine frenzy. But Mrs. Culpepper looked up for an instant from her tea, and said, "You know you forgot the mail to-day, father," and he replied, "Yes, that's so." Then added: "Molly dear, will you bring me my overcoat—please?"
The girl bundled her father into his threadbare blue army overcoat with the cape. He stood for a moment absently rattling some dimes in his pocket. Then the faintness of their jingle must have appealed to him, for he drew a long breath and walked majestically away. He was a tall stout man in the midst of his forties, with a military goatee and black flowing mustaches, and he wore his campaign hat pinned up at the side with the brass military pin and swayed with some show of swagger as he walked. His gift of oratory he did not bring to the flower of its perfection except at lodge. He was always sent as a delegate to Grand Lodge, and when he came home men came from all over the county to see the colonel exemplify the work. But as he marched to funerals under his large white plume and with his sword dangling at his side, Colonel Martin Culpepper, six feet four one way and four feet two the other, was a regal spectacle, and it will be many years before the town will see his like again.
The colonel walked over to the post-office box and got his mail, then took a backless chair and drew it up to the sand box in which the stove sat, and the conversation became general in its nature, ranging from Emerson's theory of the cosmos and the whiskey ring to the efficacy of a potato in the pocket for rheumatism. Finally when they had come to their "don't you remembers" about the battle of Wilson's Creek, General Ward, with his long coat buttoned closely about him, came shivering into the store to get some camphor gum and stood rubbing his cold hands by the stove while the clerk was wrapping up the package. His thin nose was red and his eyes watered, and he had little to say. When he went out the colonel said, "What's he going to run for this year?"
"Haven't you heard?" replied McHurdie, and to the colonel's negative Watts replied, "Governor—the uprising's going to nominate him."
"Yes," said Frye, "and he'll go off following that foolishness and leave his wife and children to John or the neighbours."