Maybe so, Watts McHurdie, maybe so," returned Dolan, "but there won't
be a dry eye in the house, as the papers say, if they keep up with
him." And after delivering himself of this, Dolan rose and yawned, and
went out of the shop singing an old tune which recited the fact that
he had "a job to do down in the boulevard."

Looking over the years that have passed since John Barclay and
Sycamore Ridge were coming out of raw adolescence into maturity, one
sees that there was a miracle of change in them both, but where it was
and just how it came, one may not say. The town had no special
advantages. It might have been one of a thousand dreary brown
unpainted villages that dot the wind-swept plain to-day, instead of
the bright, prosperous, elm-shaded town that it is. John Barclay in
those days of his early thirties might have become a penny-pinching
dull-witted "prominent citizen" of the Ridge, with no wider sphere of
influence than the Sycamore Valley, or at most the Corn Belt Railroad.
But he and the town grew, and whether it was destiny that guided them,
or whether they made their own destiny, one cannot say. The town
seemed to be struggling and fighting its way to supremacy in the
Sycamore Valley; and the colonel and the general and Watts McHurdie,
sitting in the harness shop a score of years after those days of the
seventies, used to try to remember some episode or event that would
tell them how John fought his way up. But they could not do so. It was
a fight in his soul. Every time his hand reached out to steal a mill
or crush an opponent with the weapon of his secret railroad rebates,
something caught his hand and held it for a moment, and he had to
fight his way free. At first he had to learn to hate the man he was
about to ruin, and to pretend that he thought the man was about to
ruin him. Then he could justify himself in his greedy game. But at
last he worked almost merrily. He came to enjoy the combat for its own
sake. And sometimes he would play with a victim cat-wise, and after a
victory in which the mouse fought well, John would lick his chops with
some satisfaction at his business prowess. Mill after mill along the
valley and through the West came under his control. And his skin grew
leathery, and the brass lustre in his eyes grew hard and metallic.
When he knew that he was the richest man in Garrison County, he saw
that there were richer men in the state, and in after years when he
was the richest man in the sta