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Updated: June 24, 2025
And before they came out of that road into the upland, Fate turned a screw that changed the lives of all of them. For in a turn of the road, in a deep cut made by a ravine, Gabriel Carnine, making the last stand for Minneola, stepped into the path and took the horses by the bridles. The shock that John felt that night when he realized what had happened came back even across the years.
The next day when the inspector came, "all the daughters of music were brought low" and the feeble, bent, stricken man piped and wheezed and stammered his confused answers to the young man's questions, and stood paralyzed with unspeakable horror while the inspector glanced at the Carnine note and asked some casual question about it.
For Carnine and Barclay were more of a mind than were Barclay and Hendricks; Carnine was bent on getting rich, and he had come to regard Barclay as the most remarkable man in the world. Hendricks, on the other hand, knew Barclay to the core, and since the quarrel of the seventies, while they had maintained business relations, they were merely getting along together.
Carnine paused a moment and then added, "Good old Mart he's got a heart just like a woman's." They were passing the court-house square, and Bailiff Jacob Dolan, with a fist full of legal papers, caught step with Carnine and McHurdie. "We were talking about Mart Culpepper and his Mission Church," said Carnine.
"Man man," he cries, "what a saddle I could make when I wrote that!" And he turns wearily to his task again. Oscar Fernald paces in busily, and in half an hour Lycurgus Mason, who has been thrown out of the current of life, drifts into his place in the back-water, and the parliament is ready for business. They see Gabriel Carnine totter by, chasing after pennies to add to his little pile.
"Well, Mart certainly is proud; he's been too busy to loaf in the shop for six months," said McHurdie. Carnine smiled, and stroked his chestnut beard reflectively before he added: "Probably that's why he hasn't been in to renew his last two notes. But I guess he does a lot of good to the poor people over there along the river. Though I shouldn't wonder if he was encouraging them to be paupers."
The Texan came running from the barn, which was beginning to blaze. Dolan and Carnine still were in it. Then from the wood back of the camp fifty men appeared, riding at a gallop. Lige Bemis and General Ward rode in front of the troop of horsemen. Carnine was still in the burning barn asleep, and there was no leader to give command to the dazed guards.
All that is important to know of the battle of Sycamore Ridge is that Philemon Ward, called out of bed with the town to fight that summer morning, took command before he had dressed, and when the town was threatened with a charge from a second division of the enemy, Bemis and Captain Lee of the Red Legs, Watts McHurdie, Madison Hendricks, Oscar Fernald, and Gabriel Carnine, under the command of Philemon Ward, ran to the top of the high bank of the Sycamore, and there held a deep cut made for the stage road, held it as a pass against a half-hundred horsemen, floundering under the bank, in the underbrush below, who dared not file up the pass.
And then, flash! the picture changed, and Barclay saw Watts McHurdie under his mushroom hat; Martin Culpepper in his long-tailed coat; Philemon Ward, tall, fair-skinned, blue-eyed, slim, and sturdy; skinny, nervous Lycurgus Mason and husky Gabriel Carnine from Minneola; Jake Dolan in his shirt sleeves, without adornment of any kind, except the gold horseshoe pinned on his shirt bosom; Daniel Frye, the pride of an admiring family, in his best home-made clothes; Henry Schnitzler, Oscar Fernald, and nearly a hundred other men, to the boy's eyes so familiar then, now forgotten, and all their faces blurred in the crowd that stood about the recruiting officer by the town pump in Sycamore Ridge that summer day of '61.
"All right, take my name off; and out comes my account. I don't care." And thereupon the agony of Mr. Carnine was unutterable. If he had been a natural man, he would have howled in pain; as it was, he merely purred. But Barclay's skin was thin that day, sensitive to every touch, and he felt the rough hand of Carnine and winced.
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