o long after he had kissed it a
formal good night; for twenty-one is not as strong as its instincts.
It is such a little while to learn all about a number of important
things in a big and often wicked world that when a little man or a
little woman, so new to this earth as twenty-one years, gets a finger
pinched in the ruthless machinery, it is a time for tears and
mothering and not for punishment. And so when Adrian Brownwell pulled
the little girl off her feet and kissed her and asked her to marry him
all in a second, and she could only struggle and cry "No, no!" and beg
him to let her go--it is not a time to frown, but instead a time to
go back to our twenty-ones and blush a little and sigh a little, and
maybe cry and lie a little, and in the end thank God for the angel He
sent to guard us, and if the angel slept--thank God still for the
charity that has come to us.

The next day John Barclay had Colonel Martin Culpepper and Lige Bemis
in his office galvanizing them with his enthusiasm and coaching them
in their task. They were to promise three dollars an acre, August 15,
to every farmer who would put a mortgage on his land for six dollars
an acre. The other three dollars was to cover the amount paid by
Barclay as rent for the land the year before. They were also to offer
the landowner a dollar and a half an acre to plough and plant the land
by September 15, and another dollar to cultivate it ready for the
harvest, and the company was to pay the taxes on the land and furnish
the seed. Barclay had figured out the seed money from the sale of the
mortgages. The man was a dynamo of courage and determination, and he
charged the two men before him until they fairly prickled with the
scheme. He talked in short hard sentences, going over and over his
plan, drilling them to bear down on the hard times and that there
would be no other buyers or renters for the land, and to say that the
bank would not lend a dollar except in this way. Long after they had
left his office, Barclay's voice haunted them. His face was set and
his eyes steady and small, and the vertical wrinkle in his brow was as
firm as an old scar. He limped about the room quickly, but his strong
foot thumped the floor with a thud that punctuated his words.

They left, and he sat down to write a letter to Bob Hendricks telling
him the plan. He had finished two pages when General Hendricks came in
a-tremble and breathless. The eyes of the two men met, and Hendricks