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And so when there was to be special music at the church, or when any other musical event was expected, John and Bob would get a two-seated buggy, and drive to Minneola and bring the soloist back with them. And there would be dances and parties, and coming from Minneola and going back there would be much singing.
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.
And when Bemis got Minneola township for fifty dollars, and everybody in the convention knew it, he was declared the nominee of the party with a whoop. But behind Bemis was the sinister figure of young John Barclay working for his Elevator Company. He needed Bemis in politics, and Bemis needed Barclay in business.
The dances on Deer Creek and at Minneola did not stop for the drouth, and many's the night that Mrs. Mason, the tall raw-boned wife of Lycurgus, wrapped little Jane in a quilt and came over to the Ridge from Minneola to take part in some social affair.
He bent closely over his work, and the general went on: "I was mighty mad when Hendricks defeated me for the state senate in '72, just to get that law passed cheating Minneola out of a fair vote on the court-house question. But it's come out all right." The harness maker sewed on, and the general reflected.
But Lycurgus Mason, whose wife had locked him in the cellar that night to keep him from danger, was the cackling goose that saved Rome; for when, having escaped his wife's vigilance, he came riding down the wind from Minneola to catch up with his fellow-townsmen, his clatter aroused the men of the Ridge, and they hurried to the court-house and greeted the invaders with half a thousand armed men in the court-house yard.
It seems that Gabriel Carnine was assigned by President John Barclay of the Association to prepare and read a paper on "The Rise, Decline, and Fall of Minneola." Certainly that was a proper subject considering the fact that corn has been growing over the site of Minneola for twenty years.
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