drivers on excavation
contracts. In his summer vacations he went to Topeka and worked his
two teams, and by some sharp practice got the title to a third. He was
rollicking, noisy, good-natured, but under the boyish veneer was a
hard indomitable nature. He was becoming a stickler for his rights in
every transaction.

"John," said Bob, one day after John had cut a particularly lamentable
figure, gouging a driver in a settlement, "don't you know that your
rights are often others' wrongs?"

John was silent a moment. He looked at the driver moving away, and
then the boy's face set hard and he said: "Well--what's the use of
blubbering over him? If I don't get it, some one else will. I'm no
charitable institution for John Walruff's brewery!" And he snapped the
rubber band on his wallet viciously, and turned to his books.

But on the other hand he wrote every other day to his mother and every
other day to Ellen Culpepper with unwavering precision. He told his
mother the news, and he told Ellen Culpepper the news plus some
Emerson, something more of "Faust," with such dashes of Longfellow and
Ruskin as seemed to express his soul. He never wrote to Ellen of
money, and so strong was her influence upon him that when he had
written to her after his quarrel with the driver, he went out in the
night, hunted the man up, and paid him the disputed wages. Then he
mailed Ellen Culpepper's letter, and was a lover living in an ethereal
world as he walked home babbling her name in whispers to the stars.
Often when this mood was not upon him, and a letter was due to Ellen,
he went downstairs in the house where he lived and played the piano to
bring her near to him. That never failed to change his face as by a
miracle. "When John comes upstairs," wrote Bob Hendricks to Molly, "he
is as one in a dream, with the mists of the music in his eyes. I never
bother him then. He will not speak to me, nor do a thing in the world,
until that letter is written, sealed, and stamped. Then he gets up,
yawns and smiles sheepishly and perhaps hits me with a book or punches
me with his fist, and then we wrestle over the room and the bed like
bear cubs. After the wrestle he comes back to himself. I wonder why?"

And Ellen Culpepper read those letters from John Barclay over and
over, and curiously enough she understood them; for there is a
telepathy between spirits that meet as these two children's souls had
met, and in that concord words drop out and only thou