At half-past one the Army of the Border had either gone back to camp, or propped itself up against the sides of the buildings in peaceful sleep, when the screech of the brakes on the wheels of the stage was heard half a mile away as it lumbered down the steep bank of the Sycamore, and then the town woke up.

As the stage rolled down Main Street, the male portion of Sycamore Ridge lined up before the Thayer House to see who would get out and to learn the news from the gathering storm in the world outside.

As the crowd stood there, and while the driver was climbing from his box, little John Barclay, white-faced, clad in his night drawers, came flying into the crowd from behind a building.
"Mother--" he gasped, "mother--says--come--mother says some one come quick--there's a man there--trying to break in!" And finding that he had made himself understood, the boy darted back across the common toward home.

The little white figure kept ahead of the men, and when they arrived, they found Mrs.Barclay standing in the door of her house, with a lantern in one hand and a carbine in the crook of her arm.

In the dark, somewhere over toward the 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.