The beauty of the prairie and the sky and the calm of the evening entered into their hearts, and they were silent.

Then they left the prairie and went into the woods again, on the river road.

And before they came out of that road into the upland, Fate turned a screw that changed the lives of all of them.

For in a turn of the road, in a deep cut made by a ravine, Gabriel Carnine, making the last stand for Minneola, stepped into the path and took the horses by the bridles.
The shock that John felt that night when he realized what had happened came back even across the years.

And as the headlight far up in the mountain above the desert slipped into a tunnel, though it flashed out again in a few seconds, while it was gone, all the details of the kidnapping of the young people in the buggy hurried across his mind.
Even the old anxiety that he felt lest Sycamore Ridge would think him a traitor to their cause, when they should find that he was not there to sign the tax levy and save the court-house and the county-seat, came back to him as he gazed at the mountain, waiting for the headlight, and he remembered how he made a paper trail of torn bits from a Congregational hymn-book, left in Bob's pocket from the morning service, dropping the bits under the buggy wheels in the dust so that the men from the Ridge would see the trail and follow the captives.