chable distance of Urbana.
Far and wide had spread abroad the words of his personal creed,--that he
would rather it were recorded against him that he had been duped a
million times than that one human being had left his door hungering. His
widow was not only merely penniless, she was helpless but for the strong
arms of her son, who slaved for her as the father had slaved for the
Union. Those were the days when pensions were few. It was too soon after
the war, and facts were fresher in men's minds. Percy did all the
farm-work by day and taught school by night until, in his twenty-first
year, he was sent to the Military Academy by the President himself, who
had known his father from the days of Donelson. It was told of the tall,
taciturn young man that he seriously contemplated resigning during his
fourth class year when he found that he could not send home the little
savings from his cadet pay. If the rule of the sacred commandment could
but be made to work both ways, and days would be indeed long in the land
the Lord our God had given to him who most honored his father and
mother, no life insurance company in all America would have hesitated in
Percy Davies's case, had the policy been millions and the premium unity.
A gentle woman was Mrs. Davies, but a distressingly helpless and
dependent one, and it was an old saying in Urbana that Davies had
married poor Salome Percy because if he didn't nobody would; not because
he stood in need of her, but because she was much in need of him. And
when, not long after his father's death, Percy appealed to a well-to-do
citizen on the widow's behalf, he was refused, and the brawny son and
heir of the well-to-do citizen told of the incident, and was idiot
enough in Percy's presence to repeat this old village saw as the reason
of the refusal, it nearly led to tragedy. Seizing the first available
weapon, a flail, which he wielded with uncommon skill, in one mad moment
the indignant youth smote the other hip and thigh,--the first, and for
years the only, time he was ever known to lose control of himself. In
ten seconds the battered gossip was sprawled full length, and they who
would have rushed to tear his assailant away stood amazed to see him
tearfully imploring the pardon of the vanquished.

And then as Percy grew in years and grace, working day and night that he
might obey that last sacred whispered injunction, "Take care of poor
mother," and Urbana grew in population and importance, o