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Updated: May 21, 2025
And then, flash! the picture changed, and Barclay saw Watts McHurdie under his mushroom hat; Martin Culpepper in his long-tailed coat; Philemon Ward, tall, fair-skinned, blue-eyed, slim, and sturdy; skinny, nervous Lycurgus Mason and husky Gabriel Carnine from Minneola; Jake Dolan in his shirt sleeves, without adornment of any kind, except the gold horseshoe pinned on his shirt bosom; Daniel Frye, the pride of an admiring family, in his best home-made clothes; Henry Schnitzler, Oscar Fernald, and nearly a hundred other men, to the boy's eyes so familiar then, now forgotten, and all their faces blurred in the crowd that stood about the recruiting officer by the town pump in Sycamore Ridge that summer day of '61.
And I may say in point of fact, that the man with no wife is like a man with bad luck the Lord never gives him anything else, either!" The colonel slapped his right hand on his knee and exclaimed: "Watts McHurdie what's the matter with you, man? Don't you see Nellie's all ready and waitin' just fairly honin', and longin', I may say, for a home and a place to begin to live?"
So John Barclay, who tried for four years and more to live by his faith, was given the opportunity to die for it, and went to his duty with a glad heart. We will give our cinematograph one more whirl. A day, a week, a month, have gone, and we may glimpse the parliament for the last time. Watts McHurdie is reading aloud, slowly and rather painfully, a news item from the Banner.
McHurdie not to drag the poet into politics, "speaking of lunatics, you may remember that I was born in Boston, and 'twas my duty as a lad to drive the Cambridge car, and many a time I have heard Mr. Holmes the poet and Mr.
He stood in the door and said, as he went out of the store, "Well, you do look some like his pictures, Mister." There was a silence when the stranger went, and Barclay, whose face had grown red, cried, "Damn 'em damn 'em all kick a man when he is down!" Again the bell tinkled, and McHurdie went into the shop.
And when the boy refused to "bite," Watts went on: "If any one asks you what Watts McHurdie thinks about politics so long as he is in the harness business, you just take the fellow upstairs, and pull down the curtain, and lock the door, and tell him you don't know, and not to tell a living soul." With Bob Hendricks, John had little better success in solving the mystery of the rise of Bemis.
It was late in the afternoon of their third day's journey that the men from Sycamore Ridge rode in close order, singing, through the streets of Leavenworth. Watts McHurdie was playing his accordion, and the people turned to look at the uncouth crowd in civilian's clothes that went bellowing "O My Darling Nellie Gray," across the town and out to the Fort.
The bell tinkles, and the postman brings a letter. McHurdie opens it and says, as he looks at the heading: "It's from old Jake. It is to all of us" he adds as he looks at the top of the sheet of letter paper. He takes off his apron and ceremoniously puts on his coat; then seats himself, and unfolding the sheet, begins at the very top to read:
That evening the colonel sat with Watts McHurdie, on the broad veranda of the Culpepper home, and as the moon came out, General Ward wandered up the walk and Jake Dolan came singing down the street about "the relic of old dacincy the hat me father wore."
But he did not answer at first, and Watts McHurdie, bending over his work, chuckled out: "Ten miles from Springfield, madam ten miles from Springfield." And then John sloughed off thirty years and laughed. And the general laughed, and the colonel smiled, and Jake Dolan took John Barclay's hand from the colonel, and said:
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