A Certain Rich Man

by William Allen White

The letter was not signed, but it came in Barclay's envelope, and was addressed by Barclay's hand.

The general fumbled with the pad of blank notes before him for a long time. He read and reread Barclay's letter. Then he put away the pad and tore the letter into bits and started for the front door. But a terror seized him, and he walked behind the counter and put his palsied hand into the box where he kept cancelled checks, and picked out one of Gabriel Carnine's checks. He folded it up, and started for the door again, but turned weakly at the threshold, and walked to the back room of the bank.

When it was done, and had been worked through the books, General Hendricks, quaking with shame and fear, sat shivering before his desk with jaws agape and the forged name gashed into his soul. And "the strong men" bowed themselves as he shuffled home in the twilight. The next day when the inspector came, "all the daughters of music were brought low" and the feeble, bent, stricken man piped and wheezed and stammered his confused answers to the young man's questions, and stood paralyzed with unspeakable horror while the inspector glanced at the Carnine note and asked some casual question about it. When the bank closed that night, General Hendricks tried to write to his son and tell him the truth, but he sat weeping before his desk and could not put down the words he longed to write. Bob Hendricks found that tear-stained letter half finished in the desk when he came home, and he kept it locked up for years. And when he discovered that the date on the letter and the date on the forged note were the same, the son knew the meaning of the tears. But it was all for the Larger Good, and so John Barclay won another game with Destiny.

But the silver cord was straining, and morning after morning the old pitcher went to the fountain, to be battered and battered and battered. His books, which he kept himself, grew spotted and dirty, and day by day in the early spring the general dreaded lest some depositor would come into the bank and call for a sum in cash so large that it would take the cash supply below the legal limit, and that an inspector would suddenly appear again and discover the deficiency. Except Barclay the other directors knew nothing of the situation. They signed whatever reports the general or Barclay put before them; there came a time in April when any three of a dozen depositors could have taken every penny out of the bank. When the general was unusually low in spirits, Barclay sent Colonel Culpepper around to the bank with his anthem about times being better when the spring really opened, and for an hour the general was cheerful, but when the colonel went, the general always saw the axe hanging over his head. And then one morning late in April—one bright Sunday morning—the wheel of the cistern was broken, and they found the old man cold in his bed with his face to the wall.

John Barclay was on a horse riding to the railroad—four hours away, before the town was up for late Sunday morning breakfast. That afternoon he went into Topeka on a special engine, and told a Topeka banker who dealt with the bank of Sycamore Ridge the news of the general's death, and asked for five thousand dollars in silver to allay a possible run. At midnight he drove into the Ridge with the money, and the bank opened in the morning at seven o'clock instead of nine, so that a crowd might not gather, and depositors who came, saw back of Barclay a great heap of silver dollars, flanked by all the gold and greenbacks in the vault, and when a man asked for his money he got it in silver, and when Oscar Fernald presented a check for over three thousand dollars, Barclay paid it out in silver, and in the spirit of fun, Sheriff Jake Dolan, who heard of the counting and recounting of the money while it was going on, brought in a wheelbarrow and Oscar wheeled his money to his hotel, while every loafer in town followed him. At noon Fernald came back with his money, and Barclay refused to take it. The town knew that also. Barclay did not step out of the teller's cage during the whole day, but Lige Bemis was his herald, and through him Barclay had Dolan refuse to give Fernald protection for his money unless Fernald would consent to be locked up in jail with it. In ten minutes the town knew that story, and at three o'clock Barclay posted a notice saying the bank would remain open until nine o'clock that night, to accommodate any depositors who desired their money, but that it would be closed for three days following until after the funeral of the president of the bank.

The next day he sat in the back room of the bank and received privately nearly all the money that had been taken out Monday, and several thousand dollars besides that came through fear that Fernald's cash would attract robbers from the rough country to the West who might loot the town. To urge in that class of depositors, Barclay asked Sheriff Dolan to detail a guard of fifty deputies about the bank day and night, and the day following the cash began coming in with mildew on it, and Adrian Brownwell appeared that night with a thousand dollars of old bank-notes, issued in the fifties, that smelled of the earth. Thursday John limped up and down the street inviting first one business man and then another into the bank to help him count cash and straighten out his balance. And each of a dozen men believed for years that he was the man who first found the balance in the books of the Exchange National Bank of Sycamore Ridge, after John Barclay had got them tangled. And when Barclay was a great and powerful man in the world, these men, being interviewed by reporters about the personality of Barclay, took pride in telling this story of his blundering. But when Bob Hendricks reached Sycamore Ridge Thursday noon, confidence in the safety of the bank was founded upon a rock.

So when the town closed its stores that afternoon and took the body of the general, its first distinguished citizen to die, out upon the Hill, and laid it to rest in the wild prairie grass, John Barclay and Jane, his wife, rode in the carriage with the mourners, and John stood by his friend through the long service, and when the body was lowered into the grave, the most remote thought in all the world from John's mind was that he was responsible for the old man's death.

Bob Hendricks saw Molly Culpepper for the first time in twenty months, standing by her father with those who gathered about the general's grave, and as soon as he could leave the friends who came home with him and his sister, he hurried to the Culpeppers'. As he left his home, he could see Molly sitting on the veranda behind one of the pillars of great pride. She moved down the steps toward the gate to meet him. It was dusk,—deep dusk,—but he knew her figure and was thrilled with joy. They walked silently from the gate toward the veranda, and the youth's soul was moved too deeply for words. So deeply indeed was his being stirred, that he did not notice in his eagerness to bring their souls together how she was holding him away from her heart.

The yellow roses were blooming, and the pink roses were in bud. They strayed idly to the side of the house farthest from the street, and there they found the lilacs, heavy with blooms; they were higher than the girl's head,—a little thicket of them,—and behind the thicket was a rustic seat made of the grape-vines. He stepped toward the chair, pulling her by the hand, and she followed. He tried to gather her into his arms, but she slid away from him and cried, "No—no, Bob—no!"

"Why—why—why! what's wrong?" gasped the youth.