m. At noon Fernald came back with his money,
and Barclay refused to take it. The town knew that also. Barclay did
not step out of the teller's cage during the whole day, but Lige Bemis
was his herald, and through him Barclay had Dolan refuse to give
Fernald protection for his money unless Fernald would consent to be
locked up in jail with it. In ten minutes the town knew that story,
and at three o'clock Barclay posted a notice saying the bank would
remain open until nine o'clock that night, to accommodate any
depositors who desired their money, but that it would be closed for
three days following until after the funeral of the president of the
bank.

The next day he sat in the back room of the bank and received
privately nearly all the money that had been taken out Monday, and
several thousand dollars besides that came through fear that Fernald's
cash would attract robbers from the rough country to the West who
might loot the town. To urge in that class of depositors, Barclay
asked Sheriff Dolan to detail a guard of fifty deputies about the bank
day and night, and the day following the cash began coming in with
mildew on it, and Adrian Brownwell appeared that night with a thousand
dollars of old bank-notes, issued in the fifties, that smelled of the
earth. Thursday John limped up and down the street inviting first one
business man and then another into the bank to help him count cash and
straighten out his balance. And each of a dozen men believed for years
that he was the man who first found the balance in the books of the
Exchange National Bank of Sycamore Ridge, after John Barclay had got
them tangled. And when Barclay was a great and powerful man in the
world, these men, being interviewed by reporters about the personality
of Barclay, took pride in telling this story of his blundering. But
when Bob Hendricks reached Sycamore Ridge Thursday noon, confidence in
the safety of the bank was founded upon a rock.

So when the town closed its stores that afternoon and took the body of
the general, its first distinguished citizen to die, out upon the
Hill, and laid it to rest in the wild prairie grass, John Barclay and
Jane, his wife, rode in the carriage with the mourners, and John stood
by his friend through the long service, and when the body was lowered
into the grave, the most remote thought in all the world from John's
mind was that he was responsible for the old man's death.

Bob Hendricks saw Molly Culpepper for t