and the three
spent the evening with the general and Miss Hendricks--a faded mousy
little woman in despairing thirties; and before the open fire they sat
and talked, and John played the piano for an hour, and thought out an
extra kink for the Golden Belt Wheat Company's charter. He jabbered
about it to Jane as they walked home, and the next day it became a
fact.

"That boy," said the colonel to his assembled family one evening as
they dined on mush and dried peaches, and coffee made of parched corn,
"that John Barclay certainly and surely is a marvel. Talk about
drawing blood from a turnip,--why, he can strike an artery in a
pumpkin." The colonel smiled reflectively as he proceeded: "Chicago
lawyer came in on the stage this afternoon,--kinder getting uneasy
about a little interest I owed to an Ohio man on that College Heights
property, and John took that Chicago lawyer up to his office, and
talked him into putting the interest in a second mortgage with all the
interest that will fall due till next spring, and then traded him
Golden Belt Wheat Company stock for the mortgage and a thousand
dollars besides."

"Well, did John give you back the mortgage, father?" asked Molly.

"No, sis,--that wouldn't be business," replied the colonel, as he
stirred his dried peaches into his third dish of mush for dessert;
"business is business, you know. John took the mortgage over to the
bank and discounted it for some money to buy more options with. John
surely does make things hum."

"Yes, and he's made Bob resign from the board of commissioners, and
won't let him come home Christmas, and keeps him on fifty dollars a
month there in New York--all the same," returned the girl.

The colonel looked at his daughter a moment in sympathetic silence;
then he put his thumbs in the armholes of his vest and tilted back in
his chair and answered: "Oh, well, my dear,--when you are living in a
brown-stone house on Fifth Avenue down in New York, stepping on a
nigger every which way you turn, you'll thank John that he did keep
Bob at work, and not bring him back here to pin on a buffalo tail,
drink crick water, eat tumble weeds, and run wild. I say, and I fear
no contradiction when I say it, that John Barclay is a marvel--a
living wonder in point of fact. And if Bob Hendricks wants to come
back here and live on the succulent and classic bean and the luscious,
and I may say tempting, flapjack, let him come, Molly Farquhar
Culpepper, let him come