So Bob and Molly and John drove to Minneola time and again for Jane Mason, and other boys and girls came and went from town to town, while the bitterness and the bickering and the mimic war between the rival communities went on.
Dolan was made sheriff, and Bemis county attorney, and with those two officers and a majority of the county commissioners the Ridge had the forces of administration with her.

And so one night Minneola came with her wrinkled front of war; viz., forty fighting men under Gabriel Carnine and an ox team, prepared to take the county records by force and haul them home by main strength.

But Lycurgus Mason, whose wife had locked him in the cellar that night to keep him from danger, was the cackling goose that saved Rome; for when, having escaped his wife's vigilance, he came riding down the wind from Minneola to catch up with his fellow-townsmen, his clatter aroused the men of the Ridge, and they hurried to the court-house and greeted the invaders with half a thousand armed men in the court-house yard.

And in a crisis where craft and cunning would not help him, courage came out of John Barclay's soul for the first time and into his life as he limped through the guns into the open to explain to the men from Minneola when they finally arrived that Lycurgus Mason had not betrayed them, but had rushed into the town, thinking his friends were there ahead of him.

It was a plucky thing for John to do, considering that his death would stop the making of the levy for the court-house that was to be recorded in a few days.