A Certain Rich Man by William Allen White
page 20 of 517 (03%)
page 20 of 517 (03%)
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vague feeling that Miss Lucy was neglecting him for her patient, John
would have begun making a hero of Philemon R. Ward. As it was, the boy merely tolerated the man and silently suspected him of intentions and designs. But when school opened, Philemon Ward left Sycamore Ridge and John Barclay made an important discovery. It was that Ellen Culpepper had eyes. In Sycamore Ridge with its three hundred souls, only fifteen of them were children, and five of them were ten years old, and John had played with those five nearly all his life. But at ten sometimes the scales drop from one's eyes, and a ribbon or a bead or a pair of new red striped yarn stockings or any other of the embellishments which nature teaches little girls to wear casts a sheen over all the world for a boy. The magic bundle that charmed John Barclay was a scarlet dress, "made over," that came in an "aid box" from the Culpeppers in Virginia. And when the other children in Miss Lucy's school made fun of John and his _amour_, the boy fought his way through it all--where fighting was the better part of valour--and made horsehair chains for Ellen and cut lockets for her out of coffee beans, and with a red-hot poker made a ring for her from a rubber button as a return for the smile he got at the sly twist he gave her hair as he passed her desk on his way to the spelling class. As for Miss Lucy, who saw herself displaced, she wrote to Philemon Ward, and told him of her jilting, and railed at the fickleness and frailty of the sex. And by that token an envelope in Ward's handwriting came to Miss Lucy every week, and Postmaster Martin Culpepper and Mrs. Martin Culpepper and all Sycamore Ridge knew it. And loyal Southerner though he was, Martin Culpepper's interest in the affair between Ward and Miss Lucy was greater than his indignation over the fact that Ward had carried |
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