man; did you hear what I say? Philemon Ward came to town last night on
the stage." And before the last man was awake, the town was startled
by the clatter of horses' hoofs on the gravel road over the hill south
of town, and Gabriel Carnine and Lycurgus Mason of Minneola came
dashing into the street and yelling, "The Missourians are coming, the
Missourians are coming!"

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. The horse
weeds scratched his face as he plunged through the timber cross-lots
with his message. He was the first boy to reach the camp. What they
did or what he did, he never remembered. He has heard men say many
times that he whispered his message, grabbed a carbine, and came
tearing through the brush back to the town.

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.

The little boy standing at the window of his mother's house saw this.