And while the street is deserted, let us turn the film of events forward, letting them flit by unnoticed past the wedding of Molly Culpepper and Adrian Brownwell until we come to the August day when the railroad came to Sycamore Ridge.
Jacob Dolan, sheriff in and for Garrison County for four years, beginning with 1873, remembered the summer of 1875 to his dying day, as the year when he tore his blue soldier coat, and for twenty-five years, after the fight in which the coat was torn, Dolan never put it on for a funeral or a state occasion, that he did not smooth out the seam that Nellie Logan McHurdie made in mending the rent place, and recall the exigencies of the public service which made it necessary to tear one's clothes to keep the peace.
"You may state to the court in your own way," said the judge at the trial of the sheriff for assault, "just how the difficulty began." "Well, sir," answered Dolan, "there was a bit of a celebration in town, on August 30, it being the day the railroad came in, and in honour of the occasion I put on my regimentals, and along about--say eleven o'clock--as the crowd began to thicken up around the bank corner, and in front of the hardware store, I was walking along, kind of shoving the way clear for the ladies to pass, when some one behind me says, 'General Hendricks was an old thief, and his son is no better,' and I turned around and clapt my eye on this gentleman here.
I'd never seen him before in my whole life, but I knew by the bold free gay way he had with his tongue that he was from Minneola and bent on trouble.

'Keep still,' says I, calm and dignified like, bent on preserving the peace, as was my duty.

'I'll not,' says he.

'You will,' says I.'Tis a free country,' says he, coming toward me with one shoulder wiggling.

'But not for cowards who malign the dead,' says I.
'Well, they were thieves,' says he, shaking his fist and getting more and more into contempt of court every minute.