g down the stairs. Ward walked
to the window, straightening his white tie, and stood looking into the
street at the young man shaking hands and bowing and raising his hat
as he went. Ward's hair was graying at the temples, and his thin
smooth face was that of a man who spends many hours considering many
things, and he sighed as he saw John turn a corner and disappear.

"No, Lucy, that's not it exactly," said the general that afternoon, as
he brought the sprinkler full of water to the flower bed for the
eighth time, and picketed little Harriet Beecher Ward out of the
watermelon patch, and wheeled the baby's buggy to the four-o'clocks,
where Mrs. Ward was working. "It isn't that he is conceited--the boy
isn't that at all. He just seems to have too little faith in God and
too much in the ability of John Barclay. He thinks he can beat the
game--can take out more happiness for himself than he puts in for
others."

The wife looked up and put back her sunbonnet as she said, "Yes, I
believe his mother thinks something of the kind."

One of the things that surprised John when he came home from the
university was the prominence of Lige Bemis in the town. When John
left Sycamore Ridge to go to school, Bemis was a drunken sign-painter
married to a woman who a few years before had been the scandal of half
a dozen communities. And now though Mrs. Bemis was still queen only of
the miserable unpainted Bemis domicile in the sunflowers at the edge
of town, Lige Bemis politically was a potentate of some power. General
Hendricks consulted Bemis about politics. Often he was found in the
back room of the bank, and Colonel Culpepper, although he was an
unterrified Democrat, in his campaign speeches referred to Bemis as "a
diamond in the rough." John was sitting on a roll of leather one day
in Watts McHurdie's shop talking of old times when Watts recalled the
battle of Sycamore Ridge, and the time when Bemis came to town with
the Red Legs and frightened Mrs. Barclay.

"Yes--and now look at him," exclaimed John, "dressed up like a
gambler, and referred to in the _Banner_ as 'Hon. E. W. Bemis'! How
did he do it?"

McHurdie sewed two or three long stitches in silence. He leaned over
from his bench to throw his tobacco quid in the sawdust box under the
rusty stove, then the little man scraped his fuzzy jaw reflectively
with his blackened hand as if about to speak, but he thought better of
it and waxed his thread. He showed his yellow teeth i