A Certain Rich Man | Page 6

come over and
visit the sycamore tree by the spring."
The crowd knew Lige and laughed and turned away. The men trudged
slowly back to the cluster of lights that marked the town, and the
woman closed her door, and she and the child went to bed. Instead of
sleeping, they talked over their adventure. He sat up in bed, big-eyed
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, 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.
But all the firing in the town, all the forming and charging and
skirmishing that was done that hot August day in '60, either he did not
see, or if he saw it, the memory faded under the great terror that
gripped his soul when he saw