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, that sits in a broad smooth lawn with elm trees on it, stands an easel.

On the easel is a picture--an enlarged crayon drawing of a straight, handsome young fellow in a captain's uniform.

One hand is in his coat, and the other at his hip.