Mason didn't believe anything of the kind and proposed to get at the facts. So Barclay sat down on the platform; but his mind went back to the old days, and the ride through the woods along the Sycamore that Sunday night in July came to him, with all its fragrance and stillness and sweetness. He recalled that they came into the prairie just as the meadow-lark was crying its last plaintive twilight trill, and the western sky was glowing with a rim of gold upon the tips of the clouds. The beauty of the prairie and the sky and the calm of the evening entered into their hearts, and they were silent. Then they left the prairie and went into the woods again, on the river road. And before they came out of that road into the upland, Fate turned a screw that changed the lives of all of them. For in a turn of the road, in a deep cut made by a ravine, Gabriel Carnine, making the last stand for Minneola, stepped into the path and took the horses by the bridles. The shock that John felt that night when he realized what had happened came back even across the years. And as the headlight far up in the mountain above the desert slipped into a tunnel, though it flashed out again in a few seconds, while it was gone, all the details of the kidnapping of the young people in the buggy hurried across his mind. Even the old anxiety that he felt lest Sycamore Ridge would think him a traitor to their cause, when they should find that he was not there to sign the tax levy and save the court-house and the county-seat, came back to him as he gazed at the mountain, waiting for the headlight, and he remembered how he made a paper trail of torn bits from a Congregational hymn-book, left in Bob's pocket from the morning service, dropping the bits under the buggy wheels in the dust so that the men from the Ridge would see the trail and follow the captives. In his memory he saw Jake Dolan, who had followed the trail where it led to Carnine's farm, come stumbling into the farm-house Tuesday where they were hidden, and John, in memory, heard Jake whisper that he had left his dog with the rescuing party to lead the rescuers to him if he was on the right trail and did not return. And then as Barclay's mind went back to the long Tuesday, when he should have been at the Ridge to sign the tax levy, the headlight flashed out of the tunnel. But these were fading pictures. The one image that was in his mind--clear through all the years--was of a wood and a tree,--a great, spreading, low-boughed elm, near Carnine's house where the young people were held prisoners, and Jane Mason sitting with her back against the tree, and lying on the dry grass at her feet his own slight figure; sometimes he was looking up at her over his brow, and sometimes his head rested on the roots of the tree beside her, and she looked down at him and they talked, and no one was near. For through youth into middle life, and into the dawn of old age, That Day was marked in his life. The day of the month--he forgot which it was. The day of the week--that also left him, and there came a time when he had to figure back to recall the year; but for all that, there was a radiance in his life, an hour of calm joy that never left him, and he called it only--That Day. That Day is in every heart; in yours, my dear fat Mr. Jones, and in yours, my good dried-up Mrs. Smith; and in yours, Mrs. Goodman, and in yours, Mr. Badman;