the Hendricks family were coming back to the Ridge to live,--the
general to look after his neglected property, and Dolan to start a
livery-stable,--John heard the news with a throb of great joy. When a
letter from Bob confirmed the news, John began to count the days. For
the love of boys is the most unselfish thing in a selfish world. They
met awkwardly and sheepishly at the stage, and greeted each other with
grunts, and became inseparable. Bob came back tall, lanky, grinny, and
rather dumb, and he found John undersized, wiry, masterful, and rather
mooney, but strong and purposeful, for a boy. But each accepted the
other as perfect in every detail.

Nothing Bob did changed John's attitude, and nothing John did made Bob
waver in his faith in John. Did the boys come to John with a sickening
story that Bob's sister made him bring a towel to the swimming hole,
John glared at them a moment and then waved them aside with, "Well,
you big brutes,--didn't you know what it was for?" When they reported
to John that Bob's father was making him tip his hat to the girls,
they got, instead of the outbreak of scorn they expected, "Well--did
the girls tip back?" And when Bob's sister said that the Barclay
boy--barefooted, curly-headed, dusty, and sunburned--looked like
something the old cat had dragged into the house, the boy-was impudent
to his sister and took a whipping from his father.

That fall the children of Sycamore Ridge assembled for the first time
in their new seven-room stone schoolhouse, and the two boys were in
the high school. The board hired General Philemon Ward to teach the
twenty high school pupils, and it was then he first began to wear the
white neckties which he never afterwards abandoned. Ward's first clash
with John Barclay occurred when Ward organized a military company.
John's limp kept him out of it, so he broke up the company and