Lige Bemis, who was county attorney, did not try to claim credit for the work, and when the last acre of the great wheat crop of the Golden Belt Wheat Company was cut, and threshed, there was a big celebration and the elevator of the Golden Belt Wheat Company was formally turned over to the company, and John Barclay was the hero of another happy occasion.

For the elevator, standing on a switch by the railroad track, was his "proposition." And every one in town knew that the railroad company had made a rate of wheat to Barclay and his associates, so low that Minneola could not compete, even if she hauled her wheat to another station on the road, so Minneola teams lined up at Barclay's elevator.

That autumn Minneola, without a railroad, without a chance for the county-seat, and without a grain market, began to fag, and during the last of September, the Mason House came moving out over the hill road, from Minneola to Sycamore Ridge, surrounded by a great crowd of enthusiastic men from the Ridge.

Every evening, of the two weeks in which the house was moving, people drove out from Sycamore Ridge to see it, and Lycurgus Mason, sitting on the back step smoking,--he could not get into the habit of using the front steps even in his day of triumph,--was a person of considerable importance.
Money was plentiful, and the Exchange National Bank grew with the country.

The procession of covered wagons, that had straggled and failed the year before, began to close ranks in the spring; and in place of "Buck" and "Ball" and "Star," and "Bright" and "Tom" and "Jerry," who used to groan under the yoke, horses were hitched to the wagons, and stock followed after them, and thus Garrison County was settled, and Sycamore Ridge grew from three to five thousand people in three years.