there she saw dimly a great room, through which the spring
trickled. There were hay inside, and candles and saddles; in another
minute she had the wounded man in the cave and was washing the dirt
from him. A bullet had ploughed its way along his scalp, his body was
pierced through the shoulder, and his leg was broken by a horse's
hoof. She did what she could while the shooting went on outside, and
then slipped out, tugged at the great rock again until it fell back in
its place, and knowing that Philemon Ward was safe from the
Missourians if they should win the day, she came into the house. Then
as the mocking clouds of the summer drouth rolled up at night, and
belched forth their thunder in a tempest of wind, the besiegers passed
as a dream in the night. And in the morning they were not.

CHAPTER II

And so on the night of the battle of Sycamore Ridge, John Barclay
closed the door of his childhood and became a boy. He did not remember
how Ward's wounds were dressed, nor how the town made a hero of the
man; but he did remember Watts McHurdie and Martin Culpepper and the
Hendricks boys tramping through the cave that night with torches, and
he was the hero of that occasion because he was the smallest boy there
and they put him up through the crack in the head of the cave, and he
saw the stars under the elm tree far above the town, where he and his
mother had spent a Sunday afternoon three years before. He called to
the men below and told them where he was, and slipped down through,
the hole again with an elm sprout in his hand to prove that he had
been under the elm tree at the spring. But he remembered nothing of
the night--how the men picketed the town; how he sat up with them
along with the other boys; how the women, under his mother's direction
and Miss Lucy's, cared for the wounded man, who lapsed into delirium
as the night wore on, and gibbered of liberty and freedom as another
man would go over his accounts in his dreams.

His mother and Miss Lucy took turns nursing Ward night after night
during the hot dry summer. As the sick man grew better, many men came
to the house, and great plans were afloat. Philemon Ward, sitting up
in bed waiting for his leg to heal, talked much of the cave as a
refuge for fugitive slaves. There was some kind of a military
organization; all the men in town were enlisted, and Ward was their
captain, drums were rattling and men were drilling; the dust clouds
rose as they marched