got a little scratch too--didn't you, Watts?" Watts and the boy
smiled at each other, but John did not see Bob again for years. Miss
Hendricks came and took him to their father's people in Ohio.

One day some one came in the hospital where John and Watts and Martin
Culpepper were lying, and began to call out mail for the men, and the
third name the corporal called was "Captain Martin Culpepper"; and
when they brought him a long official envelope with General Frémont's
name on it, Martin Culpepper held it in his hands, looked at the
inscription, read the word "captain" again and again, and could not
speak for choked joy. And tears so dimmed his eyes that he could not
see the "large white plumes" of chivalry, but the men in the beds
cheered as they heard the words the corporal read.

With such music as that in his ears, and with his soul stirred by the
events about him, Watts McHurdie, lying in the hospital, wrote the
song that made him famous. They know in Sycamore Ridge that Watts is
not much of a poet, that his rhymes are sometimes bad and his metre
worse. But once his heart took fire and burned for a day sheer white,
and in that day he wrote words that a nation sang, and now all the
world is singing. And they are proud of him, and when people come to
Sycamore Ridge on pilgrimages to see the author of the song, men do
not smile in wonder; they show the visitors his shop, and point out
the bowed little man bending over his bench, stretching his arms out
as he sews, and they point him out with pride. Not even John Barclay
with all his millions, or Bob Hendricks, who once refused a place in
the President's cabinet, are more esteemed in Sycamore Ridge than the
little harness maker who set the world to singing.

And curiously enough, John Barclay was with Watts McHurdie when he