cried Barclay. And when his wife had
pressed him, he broke forth: "Because Lige Bemis made Adrian kill Bob
and I helped--" he groaned, and sank into his chair, "and I helped."

When Neal Ward came to the office the next morning, he found Dolan
waiting for him. Ward opened the envelope that Dolan gave him, and
found in it the mortgage Hendricks had owned on the _Banner_ office,
assigned to Ward, and around the mortgage was a paper band on which
was written: "God bless you, my boy--keep up the fight; never say
die."

Then Ward read Adrian Brownwell's valedictory that was hanging on a
copy spike before him. It was the heart-broken sob of an old man who
had run away from failure and sorrow, and it need not be printed here.

On Memorial Day, when they came to the cemetery on the hill to
decorate the soldiers' graves, men saw that the great mound of lilacs
on Robert Hendricks' grave had withered. The seven days' wonder of his
passing was ended. The business that he had left prospered without
him, or languished and died; within a week in all but a dozen hearts
Hendricks' memory began to recede into the past, and so, where there
had been a bubble on the tide, that held in its prism of light for a
brief bit of eternity all of God's spectacle of life, suddenly there
was only the tide moving resistlessly toward the unknown shore. And
thus it is with all of us.

CHAPTER XXVIII

In the summer of 1904, following the death of Robert Hendricks, John
Barclay spent much time in the Ridge, more time than he had spent
there for thirty years. For in the City he was a marked man. Every
time the market quivered, reporters rushed to get his opinion about
the cause of the disturbance; the City papers were full of stories
either of his own misdeeds, or of the wrong-doings of other men of his
caste. His cronies were dying all about him of broken hearts or
wrecked minds, and it seemed to him that the word "indictment" was in
every column of every newspaper, was on every man's lips, and
literally floated in the air.

So he remained in Sycamore Ridge much of the time, and every fair
afternoon he rowed himself up the mill-pond to fish. He liked to be
alone; for when he was alone, he could fight the battle in his soul
without interruption. The combat had been gathering for a year; a
despair was rising in him, that he concealed from his womenkind--who
were his only intimate associates in those days--as if it had been a
crime. But out o