A Certain Rich Man | Page 7

his mother in danger. Ward in his
undershirt was standing by a tree near the stage road above the bank.
The firing in the creek bed had stopped. His back was toward the town,
and then, out of some place dim in the child's mind--from the troop
southwest of town perhaps--came a charge of galloping horsemen,
riding down on Ward. The others with him had found cover, and he,
seeing the enemy before him and behind him, pistol in hand, alone
charged into the advancing horsemen. It was all confused in the child's
mind, though the histories say that the Sycamore Ridge people did not
know Ward was in danger, and that when he fell they did not
understand who had fallen. But the boy--John Barclay--saw him fall,
and his mother knew who had fallen, and the wife of the Westport
martyr groaned in anguish as she saw Freedom's champion writhing in
the dust of the road like a dying snake, after the troop passed over him.
And even when he was a man, the boy could remember the woe in her
face, as she stooped to kiss her child, and then huddling down to avoid
the bullets, ran across the field to the wounded man, with dust in his
mouth, twitching in the highway. Bullets were spitting in the dust about
her as the boy saw his mother roll the bleeding man over, pick him up,

get him on her back with his feet trailing on the earth beside her, and
then rising to her full height, stagger under her limp burden back to the
house. When she came in the door, her face and shoulders were
covered with blood and her skirt ripped with a bullet.
That is all of the battle that John Barclay ever remembered. After that it
seemed to end, though the histories say that it lasted all the long day,
and that the fire of the invaders was so heavy that no one from the
Ridge dared venture to the Barclay home. The boy saw his mother lay
the unconscious man on the floor, while she opened the back door, and
without saying a word, stepped to the spring, which was hidden from
the road. She put her knee, her broad chest, and her strong red hand to
the rock and shoved until her back bowed and the cords stood out on
her neck; then slowly the rock moved till she could see inside the cave,
could put her leg in, could squirm her body in. The morning light
flooded in after her, and in the instant that she stood there she saw
dimly a great room, through which the spring trickled. There were hay
inside, and candles and saddles; in another minute she had the wounded
man in the cave and was washing the dirt from him. A bullet had
ploughed its way along his scalp, his body was pierced through the
shoulder, and his leg was broken by a horse's hoof. She did what she
could while the shooting went on outside, and then slipped out, tugged
at the great rock again until it fell back in its place, and knowing that
Philemon Ward was safe from the Missourians if they should win the
day, she came into the house. Then as the mocking clouds of the
summer drouth rolled up at night, and belched forth their thunder in a
tempest of wind, the besiegers passed as a dream in the night. And in
the morning they were not.
CHAPTER II
And so on the night of the battle of Sycamore Ridge, John Barclay
closed the door of his childhood and became a boy. He did not
remember how Ward's wounds were dressed, nor how the town made a
hero of the man; but he did remember Watts McHurdie and Martin
Culpepper and the Hendricks boys tramping through the cave that night
with torches, and he was the hero of that occasion because he was the

smallest boy there and they put him up through the crack in the head of
the cave, and he saw the stars under the elm tree far above the town,
where he and his mother had spent a Sunday afternoon three years
before. He called to the men below and told them where he was, and
slipped down through, the hole again with an elm sprout in his hand to
prove that he had been under the elm tree at the spring. But he
remembered nothing of the night--how the men picketed the town; how
he sat up with them along with the other boys; how the women, under
his mother's direction and Miss Lucy's, cared for the wounded man,
who lapsed into delirium as the night wore on, and gibbered of liberty
and freedom as another man