When John repeated his question the third time, McHurdie said:-- "I know a way you can get rich mighty quick, sonny." And when the boy refused to "bite," Watts went on: "If any one asks you what Watts McHurdie thinks about politics so long as he is in the harness business, you just take the fellow upstairs, and pull down the curtain, and lock the door, and tell him you don't know, and not to tell a living soul." With Bob Hendricks, John had little better success in solving the mystery of the rise of Bemis. "Father says he's effective, and he would rather have him for him than against him," was the extent of Bob's explanation. Ward's answer was more to the point. He said: "Lige Bemis is a living example of the power of soft soap in politics. We know--every man in this county knows--that Lige Bemis was a horse thief before the war, and that he was a cattle thief and a camp-follower during the war; and after the war we know what he was--he and the woman he took up with. Yet here he has been a member of the legislature and is beginning to be a figure in state politics,--at least the one to whom the governor and all the fellows write when they want information about this county. Why? I'll tell you: because he's committed every crime and can't denounce one and goes about the country extenuating things and oiling people up with his palaver. Now he says he is a lawyer--yes, sir, actually claims to be a lawyer, and brought his diploma into court two years ago, and they accepted it. But I know, and the court knows, and the bar knows it was forged; it belonged to his dead brother back in Hornellsville, New York. But Hendricks downstairs said we needed Lige in the county-seat case, so he is a member of the bar, taking one hundred per cent for collecting accounts for Eastern people, and giving the country a black eye. A man told me he was on over fifty notes for people at the bank; he signs with every one, and Hendricks never bothers him. He managed to get into all the lodges, right after the war when they were reorganized, and he sits up with the sick, and is pall-bearer--regular professional pall-bearer, and I don't doubt gets a commission for selling coffins from Livingston." Ward rose from the table his full six feet and put his hands in his pocket and stretched his legs as he added, "And when you think how many Bemises in the first, second, or third degree there are in this government, you wonder if the Democrats weren't right when they declared the war was a failure." The general spoke as he did to John partly in anger and partly because he thought the youth needed the lesson he was trying to implant. "You know, Martin," explained the general, a few days later, to Colonel Culpepper, "John has come home a Barclay--not a Barclay of his father's stripe. He has taken back, as they say. It's old Abijah--with the mouth and jaw of a wolf. I caught him palavering with a juror the other day while we had a case trying."