highway, but in the
direction of the river, the sound of a man running over the ploughed
ground might be heard as he stumbled and grunted and panted in fear.
She shook her head reassuringly as the men from the town came into the
radius of the light from her lantern, and as they stepped on the hard
clean-swept earth of her doorway, she said, smiling:

"He won't come back. I'm sorry I bothered you. Only--I was frightened
a little at first--when I sent Johnnie out of the back door." She
paused a moment, and answered some one's question about the man, and
went on, "He was just drunk. He meant no harm. It was Lige Bemis--"

"Oh, yes," said Watts McHurdie, "you know--the old gang that used to
be here before the town started. He's with the Red Legs now."

"Well," continued Mrs. Barclay, "he said he wanted to 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 s