The spirit of God moves in the hearts of men as it moves on the face of the waters.
Something of this moving spirit was in John Barclay's mother.

For often she paused at her work, looking up from her wash-tub toward the highway, when a prairie schooner sailed by, and lifting her face skyward for an instant, as her lips moved in silence.

As a man the boy knew she was thinking of her long journey, of the tragedy that came of it, and praying for those who passed into the West.

Then she would bend to her work again; and the washerwoman's child who took the clothes she washed in his little wagon with the cottonwood log wheels, across the commons into the town, was not made to feel an inferior place in the social system until he was in his early teens.

For all the Sycamore Ridge women worked hard in those days.