ecause he was in a mood for it, the flying sparks
trailing across the night sky reminded him of the fireworks that
Fourth of July in 1873, when he and Jane Mason and Bob and Molly spent
the day together, picnicking down in the timber and coming home to
dance on the platform under the cottonwood-bough pavilion in the
evening. It was a riotous day, and Bob and Molly being lovers of long
acceptance assumed a paternal attitude to John and Jane that was
charming in the main, but sometimes embarrassing. And of all the
chatter he only remembered that Jane said: "Think how many years these
old woods have been here--how many hundred years--maybe when the
mound-builders were here! Don't you suppose that they are used to--to
young people--oh, maybe Indian lovers, and all that, and don't you
suppose the trees see these young people loving and marrying, and
growing old and ugly and unhappy, and that they some way feel that
they are just a little tired of it all?"

If any one replied to her, he had no recollection of it, for after
that he saw the dance and heard the music, and then events seemed to
slip along without registering in his memory. There must have been the
fifth and the sixth of July in 1873, for certainly there was the
seventh, and that was Sunday; he remembered that well enough, for in
the morning there was a council in his office to discuss ways and
means for the week's work in the county-seat trouble. Tuesday was the
day which the new law designated as the one when the levy must be made
for the court-house improvements that would hold the county-seat in
Sycamore Ridge. At four o'clock, after the Sunday council, John and
Bob drove out of Sheriff Jake Dolan's stable with his best two-seated
buggy, and told him they would be back from Minneola at midnight or
thereabout after taking Jane Mason home, and the two boys drove down
Main Street with the girls, waving to every one with their hats, while
the girls waved their parasols, and the town smiled; for though all
the world loves a lover, in Sycamore Ridge it has been the custom,
since the days when Philemon Ward first took Miss Lucy out to drive,
for all the town to jeer at lovers as they pass down street in buggies
and carriages! And so thirty years slipped from Barclay as he stood in
the doorway of his car looking at the Arizona stars. A flicker of
light high up in the sky-line seemed to move. It was the headlight of
a train coming over the mountain. A switchman with a