o wave his gloves
resignedly and exclaim, "Industry, thy name is Barclay." And Barclay
in return seemed never to warm up to Brownwell. "Colonel," replied
John to some encomium of his old friend's upon the new editor, "I'll
say this much. Certainly your friend is a prosperous talker!"

CHAPTER XI

The twenty-fifth of July, 1874, is a memorable day in the life of John
Barclay. For on that day the grasshoppers which had eaten off the
twenty thousand acres of wheat in the fields of the Golden Belt Wheat
Company, as though it had been cropped, rose and left the Missouri
Valley. They will never come back, for they are ploughed under in the
larva every year by the Colorado farmers who have invaded the plains
where once the "hoppers" had their nursery; but all this, even if he
had known it, would not have cheered up John that day. For he knew
that he owed one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to Eastern
stockholders of the company, and he had not a dollar to show for it.
He had expected to borrow the money needed for the harvesting in the
fall, and over and over and over again he had figured with paper and
pencil the amount of his debt, and again and again he had tried to
find some way to pay even the interest on the debt at six per cent,
which the bank had guaranteed. While the locusts were devouring the
vegetation, he walked the hemp carpet that ran diagonally across his
office, and chased phantom after phantom of hope that lured him up to
the rim of a solution of the problem, only to push him back into the
abyss. He walked with his hands deep in his trousers pockets and his
head down, and as General Ward was out organizing the farmers in a
revolt against the dominant party in the state, Barclay was alone most
of the time. The picture of that barren office, with its insurance
chromos, with its white, cobweb-marked walls, with its dirty floor
partly covered with an "X" of red-bordered hemp carpet reaching from
the middle to the four corners, the picture of the four tall unwashed
windows letting in the merciless afternoon sun to fade the grimy black
and white lithograph of William Lloyd Garrison above the general's
desk, never left John Barclay's memory. It was like a cell on a
prisoner's mind.

As he paced the room that last day of the visit of the grasshoppers,
General Hendricks came in. His hair had whitened in the summer. The
panic and the plague of the locusts had literally wrung the sap out of
his nerves. Old