r a wood-cut picture in the
_Commonwealth_ newspaper, and in the article thereunto appended
Barclay was referred to as one of the "money kings of our young
state." That summer he turned his wheat into his elevator early and at
a low price, and borrowed money on it, and bought five new elevators
and strained his credit to the limit, and before the fall closed he
had ten more, and controlled the wheat in twenty counties. Strangers
riding through the state on the Corn Belt Railroad saw the words, "The
Golden Belt Elevator Company" on elevators all along the line. But few
people knew then that the "Company" had become a partnership between
John Barclay of Sycamore Ridge and less than half a dozen railroad
men, with Barclay owning seventy-five per cent of the partnership and
with State Senator Bemis the attorney for the company.

That year the railroad officials who were making money out of the
Golden Belt Elevator Company were obliging, and Barclay made a
contract with them to ship all grain from the Golden Belt Company's
elevators in cars equipped with the Barclay Economy Rubber Strip, and
he sold these strips to the railroads for four dollars apiece and put
them on at the elevators. He shipped ten thousand cars that year, and
Lycurgus Mason hired two men to help him in the strip factory. And
John Barclay, in addition to the regular rebate, made forty thousand
dollars that he did not have to divide. The next year he leased three
large mills and took over a score of elevators and paid Lycurgus
twenty dollars a week, and Lycurgus deposited money in the bank in his
own name for the first time in his life.

As the century clanged noisily into its busy eighties, Adrian P.
Brownwell creaked stiffly into his forties. And while all the world
about him was growing rich,--or thought it was, which is the same
thing,--Brownwell seemed to be struggling to keep barely even with
the score of life. The _Banner_ of course ran as a daily, but it was a
miserable, half-starved little sheet, badly printed, and edited, as
the printers used to say, with a pitchfork. It looked shiftless and
dirty-faced long before Brownwell began to look seedy. Editor
Brownwell was forever going on excursions--editorial excursions,
land-buyers' excursions, corn trains, fruit trains, trade trains,
political junkets, tours of inspection of new towns and new fields,
and for consideration he was forever writing grandiloquent accounts of
his adventures home to the _