are with
the company's creditors in three years--or four at the most. So he
let the check stand, and did not try to borrow money of the banks to
make it good, but trusted to to-morrow's receipts to pay yesterday's
debts of the company. Knowing that several mortgages of more than
three thousand each would fall due in a few weeks, and that the men
carrying them, expected to pay them, the colonel wrote dilatory
letters to the Eastern creditors whose money he had taken, explaining
that there was some delay in the payment of the notes, and that the
matter would be straightened out in a few weeks. When the money came
in from the mortgages falling due the next month, he paid those
already due, and delayed the payment of Peter until Paul paid up. It
was a miserable business, and Colonel Culpepper knew that he was a
thief. The knowledge branded him as one, and bent his eyes to the
ground, and wrenched his proud neck so that his head hung loosely upon
it. Always when he spoke in public, or went among his poor on errands
of mercy, at his elbow stood the accusing spectre, and choked his
voice, and unnerved his hand. And trouble came upon the Culpeppers,
and the colonel's clothes, which, had always been immaculate, grew
shabby. As that year and the next passed and mortgages began falling
due, not only in the colonel's company but all over the county, all
over the state, all over the Missouri Valley, men found they could not
pay. The cycle of business depression moved across the world, as those
things come and go through the centuries. Moreover, General Ward was
riding on the crest of a wave of unrest which expressed in terms of
politics what the people felt in their homes. Debts were falling due;
crops brought small returns; capital was frightened; men in the mills
lost their work; men on the farms burned their corn; and Colonel
Martin Culpepper sank deeper and deeper into the mire.

Those years of the panic of the early nineties pressed all the youth
out of his step, dimmed the lustre of his eyes, and slowly broke his
heart. His keenest anguish was not for his own suffering, but because
his poor, the people at the Mission, came trooping to him for help,
and he had to turn so many away. The whole town knew that he was in
trouble, though no one knew or even suspected just what it was. For
the people had their own troubles in those days, and the town and the
county and the state and the whole world grew shabby.

One day in the summe