into its nostrils like a balsam. For all the world of Sycamore Ridge was young then, and all the trees were green in the eyes of the men who kept up the town. Each town had its hired desperadoes, and there were pickets about each village, and drills in the streets of the two towns, and a martial spirit all over the county. And as John limped about his tasks in those stirring spring days, he felt that he was coming into his own. But it was all a curious mock combat,--that between the towns,--for though the pickets drilled, and the bad men swaggered on the streets, and the bullies roared their anathemas, the social relations between the towns were not seriously disturbed. 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. So Bob and Molly and John drove to Minneola time and again for Jane Mason, and other boys and girls came and went from town to town, while the bitterness and the bickering and the mimic war between the rival communities went on. 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. 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 street, and taking a long fuse in his teeth, crawled back to the