nel had risen and was
pacing the floor. "What a damn disreputable business your commerce is,
anyway! John, I can't afford to lose that property--or I'd be a
pauper, sir, a pauper peddling organs and sewing-machines and maybe
teaching singing-school." The colonel's face caught a rift of sunshine
as he added, "You know I did that once before I was married and came
West--taught singing-school."

"Well, Colonel--let's see about it," said Barclay, absently. And the
two men sat at the table and figured up that the colonel's liabilities
were in the neighbourhood of twelve thousand, of which ten thousand
were pressing and the rest more or less imminent. At the end of their
conference, Barclay's mind was still full of his own affairs. But he
said, after looking a moment at the troubled face of the big
black-eyed man whose bulk towered above him, "Well, Colonel, I don't
know what under heavens I can do--but I'll do what I can."

The colonel did not feel Barclay's abstraction. But the colonel's face
cleared like a child's, and he reached for the little man and hugged
him off his feet. Then the colonel broke out, "May the Lord, who
heedeth the sparrow's fall and protects all us poor blundering
children, bless you, John Barclay--bless you and all your household."
There were tears in his eyes as he waved a grand adieu at the door,
and he whistled "Gayly the Troubadour" as he tripped lightly down the
stairs. And in another moment the large white plumes were dancing in
his eyes again. This time they waved and beckoned toward a
subscription paper which the colonel had just drawn up when the
annoying letter came from Chicago, reminding him of his debt. The
paper was for the relief of a farmer whose house and stock had been
burned. The colonel brought from his hip pocket the carefully folded
sheet of foolscap which he had put away when duty called him to
Barclay. He paused at the bottom of the stair, backed the paper on the
wall, and wrote under the words setting forth the farmer's
destitution, "Martin Culpepper--twenty-five dollars." He stood a
moment in the stairway looking into the street; the day was fair and
beautiful; the grasshoppers were gone, and with them went all the
vegetation in the landscape; but the colonel in his nankeen trousers
and his plaited white shirt and white suspenders, under his white
Panama hat, felt only the influence of the genial air. So he drew out
the subscription paper again and erased the twenty-five do