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. 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. 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. It was a plucky thing for John to do, considering that his death
would stop the making of the levy for the court-house that was to be
recorded in a few days. But the young man's blood tingled with joy as
he jumped the court-house fence and went back to his men. There was
something like a smile from Jane Mason in his joy, but chiefly it was
the joy that youth has in daring, that thrilled him. And the next day,
or perhaps it was the next,--at any rate, it was a Sunday late in
June,--when an armed posse from Minneola came charging down on the
town at noon, John ran from his office unseen, over the roofs of
buildings upon which as a boy he had romped, and ducking through a
second-story window in Frye's store, got two kegs of powder, ran out
of the back door, under the exposed piling supporting the building,
put the two kegs of powder in a wooden culvert under the ammunition
wagons of the Minneola men, who were battling with the town in the