answer. Walking home from the meeting through Mary Barclay Park, Barclay's mind wandered back to the days when he won his first important lawsuit--the suit brought by Minneola to prevent the collection of taxes under the midnight levy to build the court-house. It was that lawsuit which brought him to the attention of the legal department of the Fifth Parallel Railroad Company, and his employment by that company to defeat the bonds of its narrow-gauged competitor, that was seeking entrance into Garrison County, was the beginning of his career. And in that fight to defeat the narrow-gauged railroad, the people of Garrison County learned something of Barclay as well. He and Bemis went over the county together,--the little fox and the old coyote, the people called them,--and where men were for sale, Bemis bought them, and where they were timid, John threatened them, and where they were neither, both John and Bemis fought with a ferocity that made men hate but respect the pair. And so though the Fifth Parallel Railroad never came to the Ridge, its successor, the Corn Belt Road, did come, and in '74 John spoke in every schoolhouse in the county, urging the people to vote the bonds for the Corn Belt Road, and his employment as local attorney for the company marked his first step into the field of state politics. For it gave him a railroad pass, and brought him into relations with the men who manipulated state affairs; also it made him a silent partner of Lige Bemis in Garrison County politics. But even when he was county commissioner, less than two dozen years old, he was a force in Sycamore Ridge, and there were days when he had four or five thousand dollars to his credit in General Hendricks' bank. The general used to look over the daily balances and stroke his iron-gray beard and say: "Robert, John is doing well to-day. Son, I wish you had the acquisitive faculty. Why don't you invest something and make something?" But Bob Hendricks was content to do his work in the bank, and read at home one night and slip over to the Culpeppers' the next night, and so long as the boy was steady and industrious and careful, his father had no real cause for complaint, and he knew it. But the town knew that John was getting on in the world. He owned half of Culpepper's second addition, and his interest in College Heights was clear; he never dealt in equities, but paid cash and gave warranty deeds for what he sold. It was believed around the Ridge that he could "clean up," for fifteen or twenty thousand dollars, and when he called Mrs. Mason of the Mason House, Minneola, into the dining room one afternoon to talk over a little matter with her, he found her most willing. It was a short session. After listening and punctuating his remarks with "of courses" and "yeses" and "so's," Mrs. Mason's reply was:--