their late thirties and early forties, a flash of lightning that
prophesied the coming of the storm and stress of an inexorable fate.

The wedding of John Barclay and Jane Mason occurred in September,
1873, two days after he had stood on the high stone steps of the
Exchange National Bank and made a speech to the crowd, telling them he
was the largest depositor in the bank, and begging them to stop the
run. But the run did not stop, and the day before John's wedding the
bank did not open; the short crop and the panic in the East were more
than Garrison County people could stand. But all the first day of the
bank's closing and all the next day John worked among the people,
reassuring them. So that it was five o'clock in the evening before he
could start to Minneola for his wedding.

And such a wedding! One would say that when hard times were staring
every one in the face, social forms would be observed most simply. But
one would say so without reckoning with Mrs. Lycurgus Mason. As the
groom and the bridesmaid and best man rode up from Sycamore Valley,
two miles from Minneola, in the early falling dusk that night, the
Mason House loomed through the darkness, lighted up like a steamboat.
"You'll have to move along, John," said Bob Hendricks; "I think I
heard her whistle."

On the sidewalk in front of the hotel they met Mrs. Mason in her black
silk with a hemstitched linen apron over it. She ushered them into the
house, took them to their rooms, and whirled John around on a pivot,
it seemed to him, with her interminable directions. His mother, who
had come over to Minneola the day before, came to his room and quieted
her son, and as he got ready for what he called the "ordeal," he could
hear Mrs. Mason swinging doors below stairs, walking on her heels