As the spring of '73 opened, there were alarms and rumours of strife on every breeze, and youth was happy and breathed the fight into its nostrils like a balsam.

For all the world of Sycamore Ridge was young then, and all the trees were green in the eyes of the men who kept up the town.

Each town had its hired desperadoes, and there were pickets about each village, and drills in the streets of the two towns, and a martial spirit all over the county.

And as John limped about his tasks in those stirring spring days, he felt that he was coming into his own.

But it was all a curious mock combat,--that between the towns,--for though the pickets drilled, and the bad men swaggered on the streets, and the bullies roared their anathemas, the social relations between the towns were not seriously disturbed.
Youths and maidens came from Minneola to the Ridge for parties and dances, and from the Ridge young men went to Minneola to weddings and festivals of a social nature unmolested, for it takes a real war--and sometimes more than that--to put a bar across the mating ground of youth.