it to Lige if he would pretend to be sick
and quit work on the Sycamore Ridge county-seat bill. He could have
fooled us, and could have taken the money, which was certainly more
than he could expect to get from Sycamore Ridge. Did he take it? Not
at all. A million would not have tempted him. He was in that game; yet
ten days after he refused the offer of Minneola, he tried to blackmail
his United States senator out of fifty dollars, and sold his vote to a
candidate for state printer for one hundred dollars and flashed the
bill around Sycamore Ridge proudly for a week before spending it.

So Gabriel Carnine must not be blamed if in that paper on Minneola,
before the Old Settlers' Association, he let out the pent-up wrath of
thirty years; and also if in the discussion General Ward unsealed his
lips for the first time and blighted the myth that told how a hundred
Minneola men had captured the court-house yard on the night that John
Barclay and Bob Hendricks rode home from their captivity to sign the
tax levy. Legend has always said that Lige Bemis, riding half a mile
ahead of the others that night, came to the courtyard; found it
guarded by Minneola men, rode back, met John and Bob and the general
crossing the bridge over the old ford of the Sycamore, and told them
that they could not get into the court-house until the men came up who
had ridden out to rescue the commissioners,--perhaps a quarter of an
hour behind the others,--and that even then there must be a fight of
doubtful issue; and further that it was after eleven o'clock, and soon
would be too late to sign the levy. The forty thousand people in
Garrison County have believed for thirty years that finding the
court-house yard in possession of the enemy, Bemis suggested going
through the cave by the Barclays' home, which had its west opening in
the wall of the basement of the court-house; and furthermore,
tradition has said that Bemis led John and Bob through the cave, and
with crowbars and hammers they made a man-sized hole in the wall,
crawled through it, mounted the basement stairs, unlocked the
commissioners' room, held their meeting in darkness, and five minutes
before twelve o'clock astonished the invading forces by lighting a
lamp in their room, signing the levy that Bemis, as county attorney,
had prepared the Sunday before, and slipping with it into the
basement, through the cave and back to the troop of horsemen as they
were jogging across the bridge on thei