o his political friends at home the postmarks of Ward's
letters. That was the year of the great drouth of '60, remembered all
over the plains. And as the winter deepened and the people of Sycamore
Ridge were without crops, and without money to buy food, they bundled
up Martin Culpepper and sent him back to Ohio seeking aid. He was a
handsome figure the day he took the stage in his high hat and his
ruffled shirt and broad coat tails, a straight lean figure of a man in
his early thirties, with fine black eyes and a shocky head of hair,
and when he pictured the sufferings of the Kansas pioneers to the
people of the East, the state was flooded with beans and flour, and
sheeted in white muslin. For Martin Culpepper was an orator, and
though he is in his grave now, the picture he painted of bleeding
Kansas nearly fifty years ago still hangs in many an old man's memory.
And after all, it was only a picture. For they were all young out here
then, and through all the drouth and the hardship that followed--and
the hardship was real--there was always the gayety of youth. The
dances on Deer Creek and at Minneola did not stop for the drouth, and
many's the night that Mrs. Mason, the tall raw-boned wife of Lycurgus,
wrapped little Jane in a quilt and came over to the Ridge from
Minneola to take part in some social affair. And while Martin
Culpepper was telling of the anguish of the famine, Watts McHurdie and
his accordion and Ezra Lane's fiddle were agitating the heels of the
populace. And even those pioneers who were moved to come into the
wilderness by a great purpose--and they were moved so--to come into
the new territory and make it free, nevertheless capered and romped
through the drouth of '60 in the cast-off garments of their kinsmen
and were happy; for there were buffalo meat and beans for the needy,
the aid room had flour, and God gave them youth.

Not drouth, nor famine, nor suffering, nor zeal of a great purpose can
burn out the sparkle of youth in the heart. Only time can do that, and
so John Barclay remembered the famous drouth of '60, not by his
mother's tears, which came as she bent over his little clothes, before
the aid box came from Haverhill, not by the long days of waiting for
the rain that never came, not even by the sun that lapped up the
swimming hole before fall, and left no river to freeze for their
winter's skating, not even by his mother's anguish when she had to go
to the aid store for flour and beans, tho