with excitement, while his mother told him that the drunken visitor
was Lige Bemis, who had come to revisit a cave, a horse thief's cave,
he had said, back of the big rock that seemed to have slipped down
from the ledge behind the house, right by the spring. She told the boy
that Bemis had said that the cave contained a room wherein they used
to keep their stolen horses, and that he tried to move the great slab
door of stone and, being drunk, could not do so.

When the men of Sycamore Ridge who left the stage without waiting to
see what human seed it would shuck out arrived at Main Street, the
stage was in the barn, the driver was eating his supper, and the
passenger was in bed at the Thayer House. But his name was on the
dog-eared hotel register, and it gave the town something to talk about
as Martin Culpepper was distributing the mail. For the name on the
book was Philemon R. Ward, and the town after his name, Cambridge,
Massachusetts. Every man and woman and most of the children in
Sycamore Ridge knew who Philemon Ward was. He had been driven out of
Georgia in '58 for editing an abolition newspaper; he had been mobbed
in Ohio for delivering abolition lectures; he had been led out of
Missouri with a rope around his neck, and a reward was on his head in
a half-dozen Southern states for inciting slaves to rebellion. His
picture had been in _Harper's Weekly_ as a General Passenger Agent of
the Underground Railway. Naturally to Sycamore Ridge, where more than
one night the town had sat up all night waiting for the stage to bring
the _New York Tribune_, Philemon R. Ward was a hero, and his presence
in the town was an event. When the little Barclay boy heard it at the
store that morning before sunrise, he ran down the path toward home to
tell his mother and had to go back to do the errand on which he was
sent. By sunrise every one in town had the news; men were shaken out
of their morning naps to hear, "Philemon Ward's in town--wake up,