It was five hours after the soldiers had gone when Mrs. Barclay came home from her work in the aid room, and the first thing that attracted her attention was her son's letter, lying folded on the table. When she read it, she ran with the open letter across the common to the town. It was a woman's town that morning,--not a man was left in it,--for Ezra Lane, the only old man living in the Ridge, had left _Freedom's Banner_ to shift for itself while he rode to Leavenworth with the soldiers to bring back the teams; and when Mrs. Barclay came into the street, she found some small stir there, made by Miss Hendricks--the only mother the Hendricks boys remembered--who was inquiring for her lost boys. Mrs. Barclay displayed her note, and in a moment the whole population of Sycamore Ridge, with hands under its aprons, was standing in front of the post-office. Then Ellen Culpepper found her tongue, and Mrs. Barclay began to look for a horse. Elmer Hendricks' pony in the pasture was the only horse Ward had left within twenty miles. When Ellen Culpepper and her little sister Molly came back from the pasture and announced that Elmer's pony was gone also, the women surmised that he had taken it with him, for they could not know that after he was spanked from the provision wagon, he had slipped out to the pasture and ridden by a circuitous route to the main road. It was Captain Ward, dismounting from his driver's seat on the provision wagon at noon, who discovered two boys: a little boy eleven years old in a dead faint, and a bigger boy panting with the heat. They threw cold spring water on John Barclay's face, and finally his eyes opened, and he grinned as he whispered, "Hullo, Captain," to the man bending over him. The man held water to the boy's lips, and he sipped a little and swam out into the blackness again, and then the man reappeared and the boy tried to smile and whispered, "Aw--I'm all right." They saw he was coming out of his faint, and one by one the crowd dropped away from him; but Ward stayed, and when the child could speak, he replied to Ward's question, "'Cause I wanted to." And then again when the question was repeated, the boy said, "I tell you 'cause I wanted to." He shook his head feebly and grinned again and tried to rise, but the man gently held him down, and kept bathing his temples with cold water from the spring beside them. Finally, when the man seemed a little harsh in his questions, the boy's eyes brimmed and he said: "Whur'd my pa be if he was alive to-day? I just guess I got as much right here as you have." He made a funny little picture lying on the lush grass by the spring in the woods; his browned face, washed clean on the forehead and temples, showed almost white under the dirt. There were tear-stained rings about the eyes, and his pink shirt and blue trousers were grimy with dust, and the red clay of the Sycamore still was on the sides of his dust-brown bare feet. Around a big toe