l went
as merrily as a wedding-bell. What covert tenderness or dream of gauzy
romance was in her memory, the town could never know; but the
Carnines' first boy was named Henry, and for many years after the war,
she was known among the men, who do not understand a woman's heart, as
the "War widow by brevet." Yet that was Henry's "deathless fame" in
Sycamore Ridge, for the town has long since forgotten him, and even
his name means nothing to our children, who see it on the bronze
statue set up by the rich John Barclay to commemorate our soldier
dead.

But John was our first war hero. And when he brought his battle scars
home that September night in '61, for hours before the stage drove
across Sycamore Creek the boy was filled with a nameless dread that he
might be spanked.

They carried him on a cot to his mother's house, and put him in the
great carved four-poster bed, and in the morning Miss Lucy came and
hovered over him, and they talked of Captain Ward to her heart's
content, and the boy told Miss Lucy the gossip of the hospital,--that
Captain Ward was to be made a major,--and she kissed him and petted
him until he was glad none of the boys was around to see the sickening
spectacle. And then Miss Lucy and Mrs. Barclay told the child of their
plans,--that Miss Lucy was going to war as a nurse, and that Mrs.
Barclay was to teach the Sycamore Ridge school during the winter. And
in a few weeks John was out of the hero business, working in
Culpepper's store after school, and getting used to a limp that stayed
with him all his life.

The next spring he traded a carbine that he brought home from the army
for an Indian pony, and then he began business for himself. He organized
the cows of the town into a town herd and took them every morning to
pasture on the prairie. All day he rode in the open air, and the town
boys came out to play with him, and they explored the cave by his
mother's house, and with their sling-shots killed quails and prairie
chickens and cooked them, and they played war through the long summer
days. But John did not grow as the other boys grew; he remained
undersized, and his limp put him at a disadvantage; so he had few
fights, but he learned cunning, and got his way by strategy rather than
by force--but he always had his way. He was strong; the memory of what
he had seen and what he had been that one awful day in the battle made
lines on his face; sometimes at night he would wake screaming, when he