across the drouth-blighted fields. One night they
marched up to the Barclay home, and Ward with a crutch under his arm,
and with Mrs. Barclay and Miss Lucy beside him, stood in the door and
made a speech to the men. And then there were songs. Watts McHurdie
threw back his head and sang "Scots wha ha' wi' Wallace bled,"
following it with some words of his own denouncing slavery and calling
down curses upon the slaveholders; so withal it was a martial
occasion, and the boy's heart swelled with patriotic pride. But for a
vague feeling that Miss Lucy was neglecting him for her patient, John
would have begun making a hero of Philemon R. Ward. As it was, the boy
merely tolerated the man and silently suspected him of intentions and
designs.

But when school opened, Philemon Ward left Sycamore Ridge and John
Barclay made an important discovery. It was that Ellen Culpepper had
eyes. In Sycamore Ridge with its three hundred souls, only fifteen of
them were children, and five of them were ten years old, and John had
played with those five nearly all his life. But at ten sometimes the
scales drop from one's eyes, and a ribbon or a bead or a pair of new
red striped yarn stockings or any other of the embellishments which
nature teaches little girls to wear casts a sheen over all the world
for a boy. The magic bundle that charmed John Barclay was a scarlet
dress, "made over," that came in an "aid box" from the Culpeppers in
Virginia. And when the other children in Miss Lucy's school made fun
of John and his _amour_, the boy fought his way through it all--where
fighting was the better part of valour--and made horsehair chains for
Ellen and cut lockets for her out of coffee beans, and with a red-hot
poker made a ring for her from a rubber button as a return for the
smile he got at the sly twist he gave her hair as he passed her desk
on his way to the spelling class. As for Miss Lucy, who saw herself
displaced, she wrote to Philemon Ward, and told him of her jilting,
and railed at the fickleness and frailty of the sex.

And by that token an envelope in Ward's handwriting came to Miss Lucy
every week, and Postmaster Martin Culpepper and Mrs. Martin Culpepper
and all Sycamore Ridge knew it. And loyal Southerner though he was,
Martin Culpepper's interest in the affair between Ward and Miss Lucy
was greater than his indignation over the fact that Ward had carried
his campaign even into Virginia; nothing would have tempted him to
disclose t