ir strong
wet arms about the necks of the plunging horses and dived under them,
and rolled across them and played with them like young satyrs in the
cool water under the overhanging elms with the stars twinkling in the
shining mahogany as Barclay folded the paper and put it away. He
thrummed the polished surface a moment and looked back into the past
to see Philemon Ward straight, lean, and glistening like a god
standing on a horse ready to dive, and as he huddled, crouched for the
leap, Barclay said, "Well, come on, Senator, we must go to lunch now."

It was late in the afternoon of their third day's journey that the men
from Sycamore Ridge rode in close order, singing, through the streets
of Leavenworth. Watts McHurdie was playing his accordion, and the
people turned to look at the uncouth crowd in civilian's clothes that
went bellowing "O My Darling Nellie Gray," across the town and out to
the Fort. Ezra Lane promised to call at the Fort for the two boys and
with drivers for the teams early the next morning--but to Sycamore
Ridge, Leavenworth in those days was the great city with its pitfalls,
and when Ezra Lane, grizzled though he was, came to a realizing sense
of his responsibilities, the next day was gone and the third was
waning. When he went to the Fort, he found the Sycamore Ridge men had
been hurried into Missouri to meet General Price, who was threatening
Springfield, and no word had been left for him about the boys. As he
left the gate at the Fort, a troop of cavalry rode by gaily, and a
boy, a big overgrown fourteen-year-old boy in a blue uniform, passed
and waved his hand at the befuddled old man, and cried, "Good-by, Mr.
Lane,--tell 'em you saw me." He knew the boy was from Sycamore Ridge,
but he knew also that he was not one of the boys who had come with the
soldiers; and being an old man, far removed from the boy world, he
could not place the child in his blue uniform, so he drove away
puzzled.

The afternoon the men from Sycamore Ridge came to Leavenworth they
were hurriedly examined again, signed the muster rolls, and were sent
away without uniforms all in twenty-four hours. But not before they
had found time to have their pictures taken in borrowed regimentals.
For twenty years after the war the daguerreotypes of the soldiers
taken at Leavenworth that day were the proudest adornments of the
centre-tables of Sycamore Ridge, and even now on Lincoln Avenue, in a
little white cottage with green blinds,