A Certain Rich Man | Page 3

sermon from the wagon tongue. The man remembered
nothing of the long ride that the child and the mother took with the
father's body to Lawrence, where they buried it in a free-state cemetery.
But he always remembered something of their westward ride, after the
funeral of his father. The boy carried a child's memory of the
prairie--probably his first sight of the prairie, with the vacant horizon
circling around and around him, and the monotonous rattle of the
wagon on the level prairie road, for hours keeping the same rhythm and
fitting the same tune. Then there was a mottled memory of the
woods--woods with sunshine in them, and of a prairie flooded with
sunshine on which he played, now picking flowers, now playing house
under the limestone ledges, now, after a rain, following little rivers
down rocky draws, and finding sunfish and silversides in the deeper
pools. But always his memory was of the sunshine, and the open sky,
or the deep wide woods all unexplored, save by himself.
The great road that widened to make the prairie street, and wormed
over the hill into the sunset, always seemed dusty to the boy, and
although in after years he followed that road, over the hills and far
away, when it was rutty and full of clods, as a child he recalled it only
as a great bed of dust, wherein he and other boys played, now battling
with handfuls of dust, and now running races on some level stretch of it,
and now standing beside the road while a passing movers' wagon
delayed their play. The movers' wagon was never absent from the boy's
picture of that time and place. Either the canvas-covered wagon was
coming from the ford of Sycamore Creek, or disappearing over the hill
beyond the town, or was passing in front of the boys as they stopped
their play. Being a boy, he could not know, nor would he care if he did
know, that he was seeing one of God's miracles--the migration of a
people, blind but instinctive as that of birds or buffalo, from old
pastures into new ones. All over the plains in those days, on a hundred
roads like that which ran through Sycamore Ridge, men and women
were moving from east to west, and, as often has happened since the
beginning of time, when men have migrated, a great ethical principle
was stirring in them. The pioneers do not go to the wilderness always in

lust of land, but sometimes they go to satisfy their souls. The spirit of
God moves in the hearts of men as it moves on the face of the waters.
Something of this moving spirit was in John Barclay's mother. For
often she paused at her work, looking up from her wash-tub toward the
highway, when a prairie schooner sailed by, and lifting her face
skyward for an instant, as her lips moved in silence. As a man the boy
knew she was thinking of her long journey, of the tragedy that came of
it, and praying for those who passed into the West. Then she would
bend to her work again; and the washerwoman's child who took the
clothes she washed in his little wagon with the cottonwood log wheels,
across the commons into the town, was not made to feel an inferior
place in the social system until he was in his early teens. For all the
Sycamore Ridge women worked hard in those days. But there were
Sundays when the boy and his mother walked over the wide prairies
together, and she told him stories of Haverhill--of the wonderful people
who lived there, of the great college, of the beautiful women and wise
men, and best of all of his father, who was a student in the college, and
they dreamed together--mother and child--about how he would board at
Uncle Union's and work in the store for Uncle Abner--when the boy
went back to Haverhill to school when he grew up.
On these excursions the mother sometimes tried to interest him in Mr.
Beecher's sermons which she read to him, but his eyes followed the
bees and the birds and the butterflies and the shadows trailing across
the hillside; so the seed fell on stony ground. One fine fall day they
went up the ridge far above the town where the court-house stands now,
and there under a lone elm tree just above a limestone ledge, they
spread their lunch, and the mother sat on the hillside, almost hidden by
the rippling prairie grass, reading the first number of the Atlantic
Monthly, while the boy cleared out a spring that bubbled from beneath
a rock in the shade, and after running for a few feet sank under a great
stone and did