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Well, read this clipping from the Banner of this week: 'The wealth, beauty, and fashion of Minneola fairest village of the plain were agog this week over the birth of a daughter to Lord and Lady Lee, whose prominence in our social circles makes the event one of first importance in our week's annals.
The little boy, who had just turned into Main Street for the second time, remembered all his life how the news that the Minneola men brought, thrilled Sycamore Ridge. It seemed to the boy but an instant till the town was in the street, and then he and a group of boys were running to the swimming hole to call the Army of the Border.
And his mind went back thirty years to the twilight in June after he had set off the powder keg in the culvert under Main Street in Sycamore Ridge, and he tried to remember how Jane Mason got over from Minneola did he bring her over the day before, or was she visiting at the Culpeppers', or did she come over that day?
And in a crisis where craft and cunning would not help him, courage came out of John Barclay's soul for the first time and into his life as he limped through the guns into the open to explain to the men from Minneola when they finally arrived that Lycurgus Mason had not betrayed them, but had rushed into the town, thinking his friends were there ahead of him.
Dolan was made sheriff, and Bemis county attorney, and with those two officers and a majority of the county commissioners the Ridge had the forces of administration with her. And so one night Minneola came with her wrinkled front of war; viz., forty fighting men under Gabriel Carnine and an ox team, prepared to take the county records by force and haul them home by main strength.
I'd never seen him before in my whole life, but I knew by the bold free gay way he had with his tongue that he was from Minneola and bent on trouble. 'Keep still, says I, calm and dignified like, bent on preserving the peace, as was my duty. 'I'll not, says he. 'You will, says I. 'Tis a free country, says he, coming toward me with one shoulder wiggling.
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.
Youths and maidens came from Minneola to the Ridge for parties and dances, and from the Ridge young men went to Minneola to weddings and festivals of a social nature unmolested, for it takes a real war and sometimes more than that to put a bar across the mating ground of youth.
Do you remember that night the Minneola fellows came up with their ox team and their band of killers to take the county records " and there was more of it the old story of the town's wild days that need not be recorded, and in the end, in answer to some query from the general on John's courage, Watts replied, "John was always a bold little fice he never lacked brass."
At four o'clock, after the Sunday council, John and Bob drove out of Sheriff Jake Dolan's stable with his best two-seated buggy, and told him they would be back from Minneola at midnight or thereabout after taking Jane Mason home, and the two boys drove down Main Street with the girls, waving to every one with their hats, while the girls waved their parasols, and the town smiled; for though all the world loves a lover, in Sycamore Ridge it has been the custom, since the days when Philemon Ward first took Miss Lucy out to drive, for all the town to jeer at lovers as they pass down street in buggies and carriages!
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