A Certain Rich Man

by William Allen White

The colonel put out his hand as he rose. When their hands met he was saying: "Blood tells, Robert Hendricks, blood tells. Wasn't your sainted father a Democrat, boy, a Democrat like me, sir,—a Union Democrat in point of fact?" The colonel squeezed the younger man's hand as he cried: "A Union Democrat, sir, who could shoot at his party, sir, but never could bring himself to vote against it—not once, sir—not once. And Robert Hendricks, when I see you acting as you've acted just now, sir, this very minute in point of fact, I may say, sir, that you're almost honest enough to be a Democrat, sir—like your sainted father." The colonel held the young man's hand affectionately for a time and then dropped it, sighing, "Ah, sir—if it wasn't for your damned Yankee free schools and your damned Yankee surroundings, what a Democrat you would have made, Robert—what a grand Democrat!" The colonel waved his silver tobacco box proudly and made for the door and left Hendricks sitting at his desk, drumming on the board with one hand, and resting his head in the other, looking longingly into the abyss from which he had escaped; for the lure of the danger still fluttered his soul.

Strength had come to him in that hour to resist the temptation. But the temptation still was there. For he was a young man, giving up for an intangible thing called justice the dearest thing in his life. He had opened the door of his life's despair and had walked in, as much like a man as he could, but he kept looking back with a heavy heart, hungering with his whole body and most of his soul for all that he had renounced. And so, staring at the light of other days, and across the shadow of what might have been, he let ten long minutes tick past toward the inevitable hour, and then he rose and put his hand to the plough for the long furrow.

They are all off the stage now, as Bob Hendricks is standing in the front door of the bank that August night with his watch in his hand reckoning the minutes—some four thousand three hundred of them—until Molly Culpepper will pass from him forever, and as the stage is almost deserted, we may peep under the rear curtain for a minute. Observe Sycamore Ridge in the eighties, with Hendricks its moving spirit, controlling its politics, dominating its business,—for John Barclay's business has moved to the City and Bob Hendricks has become the material embodiment of the town. And the town there on the canvas is a busy town of twenty thousand people. Just back of that scene we find a convention spread on the canvas, a political convention wherein Robert Hendricks is struggling for good government and clean politics. Observe him a taciturn, forceful man, with his hands on the machinery of his party in the state, shaping its destinies, directing its politics, seeking no office, keeping himself in the background, desiring only to serve, and not to advertise his power. So more and more power comes to him, greater and wider opportunities to serve his state. His business grows and multiplies, and he becomes a strong man among men; always reserved, always cautious, a man whose self-poise makes people take him for a cynic, though his heart is full of hope and of the joy of life to the very last. Let us lift up one more rag—one more painted rag in the scenery of his life—and see him a reformer of national fame; see him with an unflinching hand pull the wires that control a great national policy of his party, and watch in that scene wherein he names a president—even against the power and the money and the organization of rich men, brutally rich men like John Barclay. Hendricks' thin hair is growing gray in this scene, and his skin is no longer fresh and white; but his eyes have a twinkle in them, and the ardour of his soul glows in a glad countenance. And as he sits alone in his room long after midnight while the bands are roaring and the processions cheering and the great city is ablaze with excitement, Robert Hendricks, turning fifty, winds his watch—the same watch that he holds in his hand here while we pause to peek under the canvas behind the scenes—and wonders if Molly will be glad that his side won. He has not seen her for months, nor talked with her for years, and yet as he sits there winding his watch after his great strategic victory in national politics, he hopes fondly that perhaps Molly will know that he played a clean hand and won a fair game.

Now let us crawl out from under this rubbish of the coming years, back into Sycamore Ridge. And while the street is deserted, let us turn the film of events forward, letting them flit by unnoticed past the wedding of Molly Culpepper and Adrian Brownwell until we come to the August day when the railroad came to Sycamore Ridge.

Jacob Dolan, sheriff in and for Garrison County for four years, beginning with 1873, remembered the summer of 1875 to his dying day, as the year when he tore his blue soldier coat, and for twenty-five years, after the fight in which the coat was torn, Dolan never put it on for a funeral or a state occasion, that he did not smooth out the seam that Nellie Logan McHurdie made in mending the rent place, and recall the exigencies of the public service which made it necessary to tear one's clothes to keep the peace.

"You may state to the court in your own way," said the judge at the trial of the sheriff for assault, "just how the difficulty began."

"Well, sir," answered Dolan, "there was a bit of a celebration in town, on August 30, it being the day the railroad came in, and in honour of the occasion I put on my regimentals, and along about—say eleven o'clock—as the crowd began to thicken up around the bank corner, and in front of the hardware store, I was walking along, kind of shoving the way clear for the ladies to pass, when some one behind me says, 'General Hendricks was an old thief, and his son is no better,' and I turned around and clapt my eye on this gentleman here. I'd never seen him before in my whole life, but I knew by the bold free gay way he had with his tongue that he was from Minneola and bent on trouble. 'Keep still,' says I, calm and dignified like, bent on preserving the peace, as was my duty. 'I'll not,' says he. 'You will,' says I. 'Tis a free country,' says he, coming toward me with one shoulder wiggling. 'But not for cowards who malign the dead,' says I. 'Well, they were thieves,' says he, shaking his fist and getting more and more into contempt of court every minute. 'You're a liar,' says I, maintaining the dignity of my office. 'And you're a thief too,' says he. 'A what?' says I. 'A thief,' says he. 'Whack,' says I, with my stick across his head, upholding the dignity of the court. 'Biff,' says he, with a brick that was handy, more and more contemptuous. 'You dirty, mangy cur,' says I, grabbing him by the ears and pounding his head against the wall as I spoke, hoping to get some idea of the dignity of the court into his rebellious head. 'Whoop,' says he, and, as he tore my coat, 'Yip yip,' says I, and may it please the court it was shortly thereafter that the real trouble started, though I misremember just how at this time." And as there were three "E" Company men on the jury, they acquitted Dolan and advised the court to assess a fine on the prosecuting witness for contributory negligence in resisting an officer.

But the coat—the blue coat with brass buttons, with the straps of a lieutenant on the shoulders, was mended and even in that same summer did active service many times. For that was a busy summer for Sycamore Ridge, and holidays came faster than the months. When the supreme court decided the Minneola suit to enjoin the building of the court-house, in favour of Syeamore Ridge, there was another holiday, and men drew John Barclay around in the new hack with the top down, and there were fireworks in the evening. For it was John Barclay's lawsuit. Lige Bemis, who was county attorney, did not try to claim credit for the work, and when the last acre of the great wheat crop of the Golden Belt Wheat Company was cut, and threshed, there was a big celebration and the elevator of the Golden Belt Wheat Company was formally turned over to the company, and John Barclay was the hero of another happy occasion. For the elevator, standing on a switch by the railroad track, was his "proposition." And every one in town knew that the railroad company had made a rate of wheat to Barclay and his associates, so low that Minneola could not compete, even if she hauled her wheat to another station on the road, so Minneola teams lined up at Barclay's elevator. That autumn Minneola, without a railroad, without a chance for the county-seat, and without a grain market, began to fag, and during the last of September, the Mason House came moving out over the hill road, from Minneola to Sycamore Ridge, surrounded by a great crowd of enthusiastic men from the Ridge. Every evening, of the two weeks in which the house was moving, people drove out from Sycamore Ridge to see it, and Lycurgus Mason, sitting on the back step smoking,—he could not get into the habit of using the front steps even in his day of triumph,—was a person of considerable importance.

Money was plentiful, and the Exchange National Bank grew with the country. The procession of covered wagons, that had straggled and failed the year before, began to close ranks in the spring; and in place of "Buck" and "Ball" and "Star," and "Bright" and "Tom" and "Jerry," who used to groan under the yoke, horses were hitched to the wagons, and stock followed after them, and thus Garrison County was settled, and Sycamore Ridge grew from three to five thousand people in three years. In the spring of '75 the Banner began to publish a daily edition, and Editor Brownwell went up and down the railroad on his pass, attending conventions and making himself a familiar figure in the state. Times were so prosperous that the people lost interest in the crime of '73, and General Ward had to stay in his law-office, but he joined the teetotalers and helped to organize the Good Templars and the state temperance society. Colonel Culpepper in his prosperity took to fancy vests, cut extremely low, and the Culpepper women became the nucleus of organized polite society in the Ridge.

The money that John Barclay made in that first wheat transaction was the foundation of his fortune. For that money gave him two important things needed in making money—confidence in himself, and prestige. He was twenty-five years old then, and he had demonstrated to his community thoroughly that he had courage, that he was crafty, and that he went to his end and got results, without stopping for overnice scruples of honour. Sycamore Ridge and Garrison County, excepting a few men like General Ward, who were known as cranks, regarded John as the smartest man in the county—smarter even than Lige Bemis. And the whole community, including some of the injured farmers themselves, considered Hendricks a sissy for his scruples, and thought Barclay a shrewd financier for claiming all that he could get. Barclay got hold of eight thousand acres of wheat land, in adjacent tracts, and went ahead with his business. In August he ploughed the ground for another crop. Also he persuaded his mother to let him build a new home on the site of the Barclay home by the Sycamore tree under the ridge, and when it was done that winter Mr. and Mrs. John Barclay moved out of their rooms at the Thayer House and lived with John's mother. The house they built cost ten thousand dollars when it was finished, and it may still be seen as part of the great rambling structure that he built in the nineties. John put five hundred dollars' worth of books into the new house—sets of books, which strangely enough he forced himself to wade through laboriously, and thus he cultivated a habit of reading that always remained with him. In those days the books with cracked backs in his library were Emerson, Browning, and Tennyson. And after a hard day's work he would come home to his poets and his piano. He thought out the whole plan of the Barclay Economy Car Door Strip about midnight, sitting in his night clothes at the piano after reading "Abt Vogler," and the central idea for the address on the "Practical Transcendentalist," which he delivered at the opening of the state university the next year, came to him one winter night after he had tried to compose a clanging march as an air to fit Emerson's "The Sphinx." After almost a quarter of a century that address became the first chapter of Barclay's famous book, which created such ribaldry in the newspapers, entitled "The Obligations of Wealth."