A Certain Rich Man | Page 2

as he could to draw it out to its finest strand;
and thus with his head on his arm and his arm on the tree root, he fell
asleep.
The noon sun was on his legs when he awoke, and a strange dog was
sniffing at him. As he started up, he heard the clatter of a horse's feet in
the road, and saw an Indian woman trotting toward him on a pony. In
an instant he was a-wing with terror, scooting toward the thick of the
woods. He screamed as he ran, for his head was full of Indian stories,
and he knew that the only use Indians had for little boys was to steal
them and adopt them into the tribe. He heard the brush crackling
behind him, and he knew that the woman had turned off the road to
follow him. A hundred yards is a long way for a terror-stricken little
boy to run through tangled underbrush, and when he had come to the
high bank of the stream, he slipped down among the tree roots and tried
to hide. His little heart beat so fast that he could not keep from panting,
and the sound of breaking brush came nearer and then stopped, and in a
moment he looked up and saw the squaw leaning over the bank,
holding to the tree above him. She smiled kindly at him and said:--
"Come on, boy--I won't hurt you. I as scared of you as you are of me."
She bent over and took him by the arm and lifted him to her. She got on
her pony and put him on before her and soothed his fright, as they rode
slowly through the wood to the road, where they came to a great band
of Indians, all riding ponies.
It seemed to the boy that he had never imagined there were so many
people in the whole world; there was some parley among them, and the
band set out on the road again, with the squaw in advance. They were
but a few yards from the forks of the road, and as they came to it she
said:--
"Boy--which way to town?"

He pointed the way and she turned into it, and the band followed. They
crossed the ford, climbed the steep red clay bank of the creek, and filed
up the hill into the unpainted group of cabins and shanties cluttered
around a well that men, in 1857, knew as Sycamore Ridge. The Indians
filled the dusty area between the two rows of gray houses on either side
of the street, and the town flocked from its ten front doors before half
the train had arrived. The last door of them all to open was in a slab
house, nearly half a mile from the street. A washing fluttered on the
clothes-line, and the woman who came out of the door carried a
round-bottomed hickory-bark basket, such as might hold clothes-pins.
Seeing the invasion, she hurried across the prairie, toward the town.
She was a tall thin woman, not yet thirty, brown and tanned, with a
strong masculine face, and as she came nearer one could see that she
had a square firm jaw, and great kind gray eyes that lighted her
countenance from a serene soul. Her sleeves rolled far above her
elbows revealed arms used to rough hard work, and her hands were red
from the wash-tub. As she came into the street, she saw the little boy
sitting on the horse in front of the squaw. Walking to them quickly, and
lifting her arms, as she neared the squaw's pony, the white woman
said:--
"Why, Johnnie Barclay, where have you been?"
The boy climbed from the pony, and the two women smiled at each
other, but exchanged no words. And as his feet touched the ground, he
became conscious of the rag in his hand, of his bleeding heel, of his
cramped legs being "asleep"--all in one instant, and went limping and
whining toward home with his mother, while the Indians traded in the
store and tried to steal from the other houses, and in a score of peaceful
ways diverted the town's attention from the departing figures down the
path.
That was the first adventure that impressed itself upon the memory of
John Barclay. All his life he remembered the covered wagon in which
the Barclays crossed the Mississippi; but it is only a curious memory of
seeing the posts of the bed, lying flat beside him in the wagon, and of
fingering the palm leaves cut in the wood. He was four years old then,

and as a man he remembered only as a tale that is told the fight at
Westport Landing, where his father was killed for preaching an
abolition