"Was he going with Jane Mason then, Watts,--I forget?" queried the general. "Yes--yes," replied McHurdie. "Don't you remember that very next night she sang in the choir--well, John had brought her over from Minneola two days before, and that Sunday when the little devil went in the culvert across Main Street and blew up the Minneola wagons, Jane was in town that day--I remember that; and man--man--I heard her voice say things to him in the duet that night that she would have been ashamed to put in words." The two old men were silent. "That was youth, too, Watts,--fighting and loving, and loving and fighting,--that's youth," sighed the general. "Well, Johnnie got his belly full of it in his day, as old Shakespeare says, Phil--and in your day you had yours, too. Every dog, General--every dog--you know." The two voices were silent, as two old men looked back through the years. McHurdie put the strap he was working upon in the water, and turned with his spectacles in his hands to his comrade. "Maybe it's this way: with a man, it's fighting and loving before we get any sense; and with a town it's the same way, and I guess with the race it's the same way--fighting and loving and growing sensible after it's over. Maybe so--maybe so, Phil, comrade, but man, man," he said as he climbed on his bench, "it's fine to be a fool!" CHAPTER VII In Sycamore Ridge every one knows Watts McHurdie, and every one takes pride in the fact that far and wide the Ridge is known as Watts McHurdie's town, and this too in spite of the fact that from Sycamore Ridge Bob Hendricks gained his national reputation as a reformer and the further fact that when the Barclays went to New York or Chicago or to California for the winter in their private car, they always registered from Sycamore Ridge at the great hotels. One would think that the town would be known more as Hendricks' town or Barclay's town; but no--nothing of the kind has happened, and when the rich and the great go forth from the Ridge, people say: "Oh, yes, Sycamore Ridge--that's Watts McHurdie's town, who wrote--" but people from the Ridge let the inquirers get no farther; they say: "Exactly--it's Watts McHurdie's town--and you ought to see him ride in the open hack with the proprietor of a circus when it comes to the Ridge and all the bands and the calliope are playing Watts' song. The way the people cheer shows that it is really Watts McHurdie's town." So when