In the pause that followed, Watts McHurdie's creaking lever was the
only sound that broke the silence. Then Watts, who had been sewing
away at his work with waving arms, spoke, after clearing his throat,
"I've heard many say that she was sich." And the old man cackled, and
it became a saying-among them and in the town.

One who goes back over the fifty years that have passed since Sycamore
Ridge became a local habitation and a name finds it difficult to
realize that one-third of its life was passed before the panic of '78,
which closed the Hendricks' bank. For those first nineteen years
passed as the life of a child passes, so that they seem only sketched
in; yet to those who lived at all, to those like Watts McHurdie and
Philemon Ward, who now pass their happiest moments mooning over tilted
headstones in the cemetery on the Hill, those first nineteen years
seem the longest and the best. And that fateful year of '73 to them
seems the most portentous. For then, perhaps for the first time, they
realized the cruel uncertainty of the struggle for existence. With the
terrible drouth of '60 this realization did not come; for the town was
young, and the people were young; only Ezra Lane was a graybeard in
all the town in the sixties; and youth is so sure; there is no hazard
under thirty. In the war they fought and marched and sang and starved
and died, and were still young. But when the financial panic of '73
spread its dread and its trouble over the land, youth in Sycamore
Ridge was gone; it was manhood that faced these things in the Ridge,
and manhood had cares, had given hostages to fortune, and life was
serious and hard; and big on the horizon was the fear of failure.
General Hendricks swayed in the panic of '73; and the time marked him,
took the best of the light from his eye, and put the slightest
perceptible hobble on his feet. To Martin Culpepper and Watts McHurdie
and Philemon Ward and Jacob Dolan and Oscar Fernald, the panic came in