He looked up sharply at her as she rose to her feet, and he understood that she had said the last word that was to be said. He saw something in her face with which he did not dare to argue.

He got up saying:

"I have to be gone. I'm glad I found you here at the old place. I'll be back to-night to help you eat the trout."

"Where are you going?"

"Over to Wilbur's Fork. There's a couple of men over there that are shaky. I've had to keep after them or they'd be listening to Rafe Gadbeau and letting their land go."

"But," Ruth exclaimed, "now when they know, can't they see what is to their own interest! Are they blind?"

"I know," said Jeffrey dully. "But you know how it is with those people. Their land is hard to work. It is poor land. They have to scratch and scrape for a little money. They don't see many dollars together from one year's end to the other. Even a little money, ready, green money, shaken in their faces looks awful big to them."

"Good luck, then, Jeff," she said cheerily; "and get back early if you can."

"Sure," he said easily as he picked up his hat.

"And, say, Ruth." He turned back quietly to her. "If—if I shouldn't be back to-night, or to-morrow; why, watch Rafe Gadbeau. Will you? I wouldn't say anything to mother. And Uncle Catty, well, he's not very sharp sometimes. Will you?"

"Of course I will. But be careful, Jeff, please."

"Oh, sure," he sang back, as he walked quickly around the edge of the pond and slipped into the alder bushes through which ran the trail that went up over the ridge to the Wilbur Fork country on the other side.

Ruth stood watching him as he pushed sturdily up the opposite slope, his grey felt hat and wide shoulders showing above the undergrowth.

This boy was a different being from the Jeffrey that she had left when she went down to the convent five months before. She could see it in his walk, in the way he shouldered the bushes aside just as she had seen it in his face and his talk. He was fighting with a power that he had found to be stronger and bigger than himself. He was not discouraged. He had no thought of giving up. But the airy edge of his boyish confidence in himself was gone. He had become grim and thoughtful and determined. He had settled down to a long, dogged struggle.

He had asked her to watch Rafe Gadbeau. How much did he mean? Why should he have said this to her? Would it not have been better to have warned some of the men that were associated with him in his fight? And what was there to be feared? She laughed at the idea of physical fear in connection with Jeffrey. Why, nothing ever happened in the hills, anyway. Crimes of violence were never heard of. It was true, the lumber jacks were rough when they came down with the log drives in the spring. But they only fought among themselves. And they did not stop in the hills. They hurried on down to the towns where they could spend their money.

What had Jeffrey to fear?

Yet, he must have meant a good deal. He would not have spoken to her unless he had good reason to think that something might happen to him.

Withal, Ruth was not deceived. She knew the temper of the hills. The men were easy-going. They were slow of speech. They were generally ruled by their more energetic women. But they or their fathers had all been fighting men, like her own father. And they were rooted in the soil of the hills. Any man or any power that attempted to drive them from the land which their hands had cleared and made into homes, where the bones of their fathers and mothers lay, would have to reckon with them as bitter, stubborn fighting men.

Jeffrey Whiting was just coming to the bare top of the ridge. In another moment he would drop down the other side out of sight. She wondered whether he would turn and wave to her; or had he forgotten that she would surely be standing where he had left her?

He had not forgotten. He turned and waved briskly to her. Then he stepped down quickly out of sight. His act was brusque and businesslike. It showed that he remembered. He could hardly have seen her standing there in all the green by the pond. He had just known that she was there. But it showed something else, too. He had plunged down over the edge of the hill upon a business with which his mind was filled, to the exclusion, almost, of her and of everything else.

The girl did not feel any of the little pique or resentment that might have been very natural. It was so that she would wish him to go about the business that was going to be so serious for all of them. But it gave her a new and startling flash of insight into what was coming.

She had always thought of her hills as the place where peace lived. Out in the great crowded market places of the world she knew men fought each other for money. But why do that in the hills? There was a little for all. And a man could only get as much as his own labour and good judgment would make for him out of the land.

Now she saw that it was not a matter of hills or of cities. Wherever, in the hills or the city or in the farthest desert, there was wealth or the hope of wealth, there greedy men with power would surely come to look for it and take it. That was why men fought. Wealth, even the scent of wealth whetted their appetites and drew them on to battle.

A cloud passed between her and the morning sun. She felt the premonition of tragedy and suffering lowering down like a storm on her hills. How foolishly she had thought that all life and all the great, seething business of life was to be done down in the towns and the cities. Here was life now, with its pressure and its ugly passions, pushing right into the very hills.

She shivered as she picked up her prize of the morning and her fishing tackle and started slowly up the hill toward her home.

Her farm had been rented to Norman Apgarth with the understanding that Ruth was to spend the summer there in her own home. The rent was enough to give Ruth what little money she needed for clothes and to pay her modest expenses at the convent at Athens. So her life was arranged for her at least up to the time when she should have finished school.

It seemed very strange to come home and find her home in the hands of strangers. It was odd to be a sort of guest in the house that she had ruled and managed from almost the time that she was a baby. It would be very hard to keep from telling Mrs. Apgarth where things belonged and how other things should be done. It would be hard to stand by and see others driving the horses that had never known a hand but hers and Daddy Tom's. Still she had been very glad to come home. It was her place. It held all the memories and all the things that connected her with her own people. She wanted to be able always to come back to it and call it her own. Looking down over it from the crest of the hill, at the little clump of trees under which lay her Daddy Tom and her mother, at the little house that had seen their love and in which she had been born, she could understand the fierceness with which men would fight to hold the farms and homes which were threatened.

Until now she had hardly realised that those men whom people vaguely called "the railroad" would want to take her home and farm away from her. Now it came suddenly home to her and she felt a swelling rage of indignation rising in her throat. She hurried down the hill to the house, as though she saw it already threatened.

She deftly threw her fishpole up on to the roof of the wood shed and went around to the front of the house. There she found Mrs. Apgarth weeding in what had been Ruth's own flower beds.

"Why, what a how-dye-do you did give us, Miss Ruth!" the woman exclaimed at sight of her. "I called you three times, and when you didn't answer I went to your door; and there you were gone! I told Norman Apgarth somebody must have took you off in the night."

"Oh, no," said Ruth. "No danger. I'm used to getting up early, you see. So I just took some cakes—Didn't you miss them?—and some milk and slipped out without waking any one. I wanted to catch this fish. Jeffrey Whiting and I tried to catch him for four years. And I had to do it myself this morning."

"So young Whiting's gone away, eh?"

"Why, no," said Ruth quickly. "He went over to Wilbur's Fork about half an hour ago. Who said he'd gone away?"

"Oh, nobody," said the woman hastily; "it's only what they was sayin' up at French Village yesterday."

"What were they saying?" Ruth demanded.

"Oh, just talk, I suppose," Mrs. Apgarth evaded. "Still, I dunno's I blame him. I guess if I got as much money as they say he's got out of it, I'd skedaddle, too."

Ruth stepped over and caught the woman sharply by the arm.

"What did they say? Tell me, please. Mrs. Apgarth saw that the girl was trembling with excitement and anxiety. She saw that she herself had said too much, or too little. She could not stop at that. She must tell everything now.

"Well," she began, "they say he's just fooled the people up over their eyes."

"How?" said Ruth impatiently. "Tell me."

"He's been agoin' round holdin' the people back and gettin' them to swear that they won't sign a paper or sell a bit of land to the railroad. Now it turns out he was just keepin' the rest of the people back till he could get a good big lot of money from the railroad for his own farm and for this one of yours. Oh, yes, they say he's sold this farm and his own and five other ones that he'd got hold of, for four times what they're worth. And that gives the railroad enough to work on, so the rest of the people'll just have to sell for what they can get. He's gone now; skipped out."

"But he has not gone!" Ruth snapped out indignantly. "I saw him only half an hour ago."

"Oh, well, of course," said the woman knowingly, "you'd know more about it than anybody else. It's all talk, I suppose."

Ruth blushed and dropped the fish forgotten on the grass. She said shortly:

"I'm going to spend the day with Mrs. Whiting."

"Oh, then, don't say a word to her about this. She's an awful good neighbour. I wouldn't for the world have her think that I—"

"Why, it doesn't matter at all," said Ruth, as she turned toward the road. "You only said what people were saying."

"But I wouldn't for anything," the woman called nervously after her, "have her think that— And what'll I do with this?"

"Eat it," said Ruth over her shoulder. The prize for which she had fought so desperately in the early morning meant nothing to her now.

Jeffrey Whiting did not come home that night. Through the long twilight of one of the longest days of the year, Ruth sat reading in the old place on the hill, where Jeffrey would be sure to find her. Suddenly, when it was full dark, she knew that he would not come.

She did not try to argue with herself. She did not fight back the nervous feeling that something had happened. She was sure that she had been all day expecting it. When the moon came up over the hill and the long purple shadows of the elm trees on the crest came stalking down in the white light, she went miserably into the house and up to the little room they had fitted up for her in the loft of her own home.

She cried herself into a wearied, troubled sleep. But with the elasticity of youth and health she was awake at the first hint of morning, and the cloud of the night had passed.

She dressed and hurried down into the yard where Norman Apgarth was just stirring about with his milk pails. She was glad to face daylight and action. A man had put his trust in her before all others. She was eager to answer to his faith.

"Where is Brom Bones?" she demanded of the still drowsy Apgarth as she caught him crossing the yard from the milk house.

"The colt? He's up in the back pasture, just around the knob of the mountain. What was you calc'latin' to do with him, Miss?"

"I want to use him," said Ruth. "May I?"

"Use him? Certainly, if you want to. But, say, Miss, that colt ain't been driv' since the Spring's work. An' he's so fat an' silky he's liable to act foolish."

"I'm going to ride him," said Ruth briefly, as she stepped to the horse barn door for a bridle.

"Now, say, Miss," the man opposed feebly, "you could take the brown pony just as well; I don't need her a bit. And I tell you that colt is just a lun-at-ic, when he's been idle so long."

"Thank you," said Ruth, as she started up the hill. "But I think I'll find work enough to satisfy even Brom Bones to-day."

The big black colt followed her peaceably down the mountain, and stood champing at the door while she went in to get something to eat. When she brought out a shining new side saddle he looked suspiciously at the strange thing, but he made no serious objection as she fastened it on. Ruth herself, when she had buckled it tight, stood looking doubtfully at it. A side saddle was as new to her as it was to the horse. She had bought it on her way home the other day, as a concession to the fact that she was now a young lady who could no longer go stampeding over the hills on a bare-backed horse.

She mounted easily, but Brom Bones, seeming to know in the way of his kind that she was uneasy and uncomfortable, began at once to act badly. His intention seemed to be to walk into the open well on his hind feet. The girl caught a short hold on her lines and cut him sharply across the ear. He wheeled on two feet and bolted for the hill, clearing the woodshed by mere inches.

The path led straight up to the top of the slope. Ruth did not try to hold him. The sooner he ran the conceit out of himself, she thought, the better.

He hurled himself down the other slope, past the pool, and into the trail which Jeffrey had taken yesterday. It was break-neck riding, in a strange saddle. But the girl's anxiety rose with the excitement of the horse's wild rush, so that when they reached the top of the divide where she had last seen Jeffrey it was the horse and not the girl that was ready to settle down to a sober and safer pace.

Her common sense told her that she was probably foolish; that Jeffrey had merely stayed over night somewhere and that she would meet him on the way. But another and a subtler sense kept whispering to her to hurry on, that she was needed, that the good name, if not the life, of the boy she loved was in danger!

She had found out from Mrs. Whiting just who were the men whom Jeffrey had gone to see. But she did not know how she could dash up to their doors and demand to know where he was. It was eleven miles up the stony trail that followed Wilbur's Fork, and the girl's nerves now keyed up to expect she knew not what jangled at every turn of the road. Jeffrey had meant to come straight back this way to her. That he had not done so meant that something had stopped him on the way. What was it?

On one side the trail was flanked by giant hemlocks and the underbrush was grown into an impenetrable wall. On the other it ran sheer along the edge of Wilbur's Fork, a rock-bottomed, rushing stream that tumbled and brawled its way down the long slope of the country.

Time after time the girl shuddered and gripped her saddle as she pushed on past a place where the undergrowth came right down to the trail, and six feet away the path dropped off thirty feet to the rock bed of the stream. She caught herself leaning across the saddle to look down. A man might have stood in the brush as Jeffrey came carelessly along. And that man might have swung a cant-stick once—a single blow at the back of the head—and Jeffrey would have gone stumbling and falling over the edge of the path. There would not be even the sign of a struggle.

Once she stopped and took hold of her nerves.

"Ruth Lansing," she scolded aloud, "you're making a little fool of yourself. You've been down there in that convent living among a lot of girls, and you're forgetting that these hills are your own, that there never was and never is any danger in them for us who belong here. Just keep that in your mind and hustle on about your business."

When she came out into the open country near the head of the Fork she met old Darius Wilbur turning his cattle to pasture. The old man did not know the girl, but he knew the Lansing colt and he looked sharply at the steaming withers of Brom Bones before he would give any attention to her question.

"What's the tarnation hurry, young lady?" he inquired exasperatingly. "Jeff Whiting? Yes, he was here yest'day. Why?"

"Did he start home by this trail?" asked Ruth eagerly. "Or did he go on up country?"

"He went on up country."

Ruth headed Brom Bones up the trail again without a word.

"But stay!" the old man yelled after her, when she had gone twenty yards. "He came back again."

Ruth pulled around so sharply that she nearly threw Brom Bones to his knees.

"Didn't ask me that," the old man chortled, as she came back, "but if I didn't tell you I reckon you'd run that colt to death up the hills."

"Then he did take the Forks trail back."

"Didn't do that, nuther."

"Then where did he go? Please tell me!" cried the girl, the tears of vexation rising into her voice.

"Why, what's the matter, girl? He crossed the Fork just there," said the old man, pointing, "and he took over the hill for French Village. You his wife? You're mighty young."

But Ruth did not hear. She and Brom Bones were already slipping down the rough bank in a shower of dirt and stones.

In the middle of the ford she stopped and loosened the bridle, let the colt drink a little, then drove him across, up the other bank and on up the stiff slope.

She did not know the trail, but she knew the general run of the country that way and had no doubt of finding her road.

Now she told herself that it was certainly a wild goose chase. Jeffrey had merely found that he had to see some one in French Village and had gone there and, of course, had spent the night there.

By the time she had come over the ridge of the hill and was dropping down through the heavily wooded country toward French Village, she had begun to feel just a little bit foolish. But she suddenly remembered that it was Saint John the Baptist's day. It was not a holy day of obligation but she knew it was a feast day in French Village. There would be Mass. She should have gone, anyway. And she would hear with her own ears the things they were saying about Jeffrey Whiting.

Arsene LaComb sat on the steps of his store in French Village in the glory of a stiff white shirt and a festal red vest. The store was closed, of course, in honour of the day. In a few minutes he would put on his black coat, in his official capacity of trustee of the church, and march solemnly over to ring the bell for Mass.

The spectacle of a smartly-dressed young lady whom he seemed to know vaguely, riding down the dusty street on a shiny yellow side saddle on the back of a big, vicious-looking black colt, made the little man reach hastily for his coat of ceremony.

"M'm'selle Lansing!" he said, bowing in friendly pomp as Ruth drove up.

"How do you do, Mr. LaComb? I came down to go to Mass. Can you tell me what time it begins?"

"I shall ring the bell when I have put away your horse, M'm'selle." Now no earthly power could have made Arsene LaComb deviate a minute from the exact time for ringing that bell. But, he was a Frenchman. His manner intimated that the ringing of all bells whatsoever must await her convenience.

He stepped forward jauntily to help her down. Ruth kicked her feet loose and slid down deftly.

"I am glad to see you again, Mr. LaComb," said Ruth as she took his hand. "Did you see Jeffrey Whiting in the Village last night?"

A girl of about Ruth's own age had come quietly up the street and stood beside them, recording in one swift inspection every detail of Ruth from her little riding cap to the tips of her brown boots.

"'Cynthe," said the little man briskly, "you show Miss Lansing on my pew for Mass." He took the bridle from Ruth's hand and led the horse away to the shed in the rear of the store.

The fear and uneasiness of the early morning leaped back to Ruth. The little man had certainly run away from her question. Why should he not answer?

She would have liked to linger a while among the people standing about the church door. She knew some of them. She might have asked questions of them. But her escort led her straight into the church and up to a front pew.

At the end of the Mass the people filed out quietly, but at the church door they broke into volleys of rapid-fire French chatter of which Ruth could only catch a little here and there.

"You will come by the fete, M'm'selle. You will not dance non, I s'pose. But you will eat, and you will see the fun they make, one jolie time! Till I ring the Vesper bell they will dance." Arsene led Ruth and the other girl, whom she now learned was Hyacinthe Cardinal, across the road to a little wood that stood opposite the church. There were tables, on which the women had already begun to spread the food that they had brought from home, and a dancing platform. On a great stump which had been carved rudely into a chair sat Soriel Brouchard, the fiddler of the hills, twiddling critically at his strings.

It seemed strange to Ruth that these people who had a moment before been so devout and concentrated in church should in an instant switch their whole thought to a day of eating and merrymaking. But she soon found their light-hearted gaiety very infectious. Before she knew it, she was sputtering away in the best French she had and entering into the fun with all her heart.

"Which is Rafe Gadbeau?" she suddenly asked Cynthe Cardinal. "I want to know him."

"Why for you want to know him?" the girl asked sharply in English.

"Oh, nothing," said Ruth carelessly, "only I've heard of him."

The other girl reached out into the crowd and plucked at the sleeve of a tall, beak-nosed man. The man was evidently flattered by Ruth's request, and wanted her to dance with him immediately.

"No," said Ruth, "I do not know how to dance your dances, and we'd only break up the sets if I tried to learn now. We've heard a lot about you, Mr. Gadbeau, so, of course, I wanted to know you. And we've heard some things about Jeffrey Whiting. I'm sure you could tell me if they are true."

"You don' dance? Well, we sit then. I tell you. One rascal, this young Whiting!"

Ruth bit back an angry protest, and schooled herself to listen quietly as he led her to a seat.

As they left the other girl standing in the middle of the platform, Ruth, looking back, caught a swift glance of what she knew was jealous anger in her eyes. Ruth was sorry. She did not want to make an enemy of this girl. But she felt that she must use every effort to get this man to tell her all he would.

"One rascal, I tell you," repeated Gadbeau. "First he stop all the people. He say don' sell nodding. Den he sell his own farm, him. He sell some more; he got big price. Now he skip the country, right out. An' he leave these poor French people in the soup.

"But I"—he sat back tapping himself on the chest—"I got hinfluence with that railroad. They buy now from us. To-morrow morning, nine o'clock, here comes that railroad lawyer on French Village. We sell out everything on the option to him."

"But," objected Ruth, trying to draw him out, "if Jeffrey Whiting should come back before then?"

"He don' come back, that fellow."

"How do you know?"

"I know, I— He don' come back. I tell you that."

"Jeffrey Whiting will be here before nine o'clock to-morrow," she said, turning suddenly upon him.

"Eh? M'm'selle, what you mean? What you know?" he questioned excitedly.

"Never mind. I see Miss Cardinal looking at us," she smiled as she arose, "and I think you are in for a lecture."

Through all the long day, while she ate and listened to the fun and talked to Father Ponfret about her convent life, she did not let Rafe Gadbeau out of her sight or mind for an instant. She knew that she had alarmed him. She was certain that he knew what had happened to Jeffrey Whiting. And she was waiting for him to betray himself in some way.

When Arsene LaComb rang the bell for Vespers, she waited by the bell ringer to see that Gadbeau came into the church. He took his place among the men, and then Ruth dropped quietly into a pew near the door. When the people rose to sing the Tantum Ergo, she saw Gadbeau slip unnoticed out of the church. She waited tensely until the singing was finished, then she almost ran to the door.

Gadbeau, mounted on one of the ponies that had been standing all day in the little woods, was riding away in the direction of the trail which she had come down this morning. She fairly flew down the street to Arsene LaComb's store. There was not a pony in the hills that Brom Bones could not overtake easily, but she must see by what trail the man left the Village.

Brom Bones was very willing to make a race for home, and she let him have his head until she again caught sight of the man. She pulled up sharply and forced the colt down to a walk. The man was still on the main road, and he might turn any moment. Finally she saw him pull into the trail that led over to Wilbur's Fork. Then she knew. Jeffrey was somewhere on the trail between French Village and Wilbur's Fork. And he was alive! The man was going now to make sure that he was still there.

For an hour, the long, high twilight was enough to assure her that the man was still following the trail. Then, just when the real darkness had fallen, she heard a pony whinny in the woods at her left. The man had turned off into the woods! She had almost passed him! She threw herself out upon Brom Bones' neck and caught him by the nose. He threw up his head indignantly and tried to bolt, but she blessed him for making no noise. She drove on quietly a couple of hundred yards, slipped down, and drew Brom Bones into the bushes away from the road and tied him. She talked to him, patting his head and neck, pleading with him to be quiet. Then she left him and stole back to where she had heard the pony.

In the gloom of the woods she could see nothing. But her feet found themselves on what seemed to be a path and she followed it blindly. She almost walked into a square black thing that suddenly confronted her. Within what seemed a foot of her she heard voices. Her heart stopped beating, but the blood rang in her ears so that she could not distinguish a word. One of the voices was certainly Gadbeau's. The other— It was!— It was! Though it was only a mumble, she knew it was Jeffrey Whiting who tried to speak!

She took a step forward, ready to dash into the place, whatever it was. But the caution of the hills made her back away noiselessly into the brush. What could she do? Why? Oh, why had she not brought a rifle? Gadbeau was sure to be armed. Jeffrey was a prisoner, probably wounded and bound.

She backed farther into the bushes and started to make a circuit of the place. She understood now that it was a sugar hut, built entirely of logs, even the roof. It was as strong as a blockhouse. She knew that she was helpless. And she knew that Jeffrey would not be a prisoner there unless he were hurt.

She could only wait. Gadbeau had not come to injure Jeffrey further. He had merely come to make himself sure that his prisoner was secure. He would not stay long.

As she stole around away from the path and the pony she saw a little stream of light shoot out through a chink between the logs of the hut. Gadbeau had made a light. Probably he had brought something for Jeffrey to eat. She pulled off the white collar of her jacket, the only white thing that showed about her and settled down for a long wait.

First she had thought that she ought to steal away to her horse and ride for help. But she could not bear the thought of even getting beyond the sound of Jeffrey's voice. She knew where he was now. He might be taken away while she was gone. And, besides, Ruth Lansing had always learned to do things for herself. She had always disliked appealing for help.

Hour after hour she sat in the darkest place she could find, leaning against the bole of a great tree. The light, candles, of course, burned on; and the voices came irregularly through the living silence of the woods. She did not dare to creep nearer to hear what was being said. That did not matter. The important thing was to have Gadbeau go away without any suspicion that he had been followed. Then she would be free to release Jeffrey. She had no fear but that she would be able to get him down to French Village in the morning. She could easily have him there before nine o'clock.

When she saw by the stars that it was long past midnight she began to be worried. Just then the light went out. Ah! The man was going away at last! She waited a long, nervous half hour. But there was no sound. She dared not move, for even when she shifted her position against the tree the oppressive silence seemed to crackle with her motion.

Would he never come out? It seemed not. Was he going to stay there all night?

Noiseless as a cat, she rose and crept to the door of the cabin. Apparently both men were asleep within. She pushed the door ever so quietly. It was firmly barred on the inside.

What could she do? Nothing, absolutely nothing! Oh, why, why had she not brought a rifle? She would shoot. She would, if she had it now, and that man opened the door! It was too late now to think of riding for help, too late!

She sank down again beside her tree and raged helplessly at herself, at her conceit in herself that would not let her go for help in the first place, at her foolishness in coming on this business without a gun. The hours dragged out their weary minutes, every minute an age to the taut, ragged nerves of the girl.

The dawn came stealing across the tree-tops, while the ground still lay in utter darkness. Ruth rose and slipped farther back into the bushes.

Suddenly she found herself upon her knees in the soft grass, and the hot, angry tears of desperation and rage at herself were softened. Her heart was lighted up with the glow of dawn and sang its prayer to God; a thrilling, lifting little prayer of confidence and wonder. The words that the night before would not form themselves for her now sprang up ready in her soul—the words of all the children of earth, to Our Father Who Art in Heaven—paused an instant to bless her lips, then sped away to God in His Heaven. Fear was gone, and doubt, and anxiety. She would save Jeffrey, and she would save the poor, befooled people from ruin. God had told her so, as He walked abroad in the Glow of Dawn.

Two long hours more she waited, but now with patience and a sure confidence. Then Rafe Gadbeau came out of the hut and strode down the path to his pony.

Ruth rose stiff and wet from the ground and ran to the door, and called to Jeffrey. The only answer was a moan. The door was locked with a great iron clasp and staple joined by a heavy padlock. She reached for the nearest stone and attacked the lock frantically. She beat it out of all semblance to a lock, but still it defied her. There was no window in the hut. She had to come back again to the lock. Her hands, softened by the months in the convent, left bloody marks on the tough brass of the lock. In the end it gave, and she threw herself against the door.

Jeffrey was lying trussed, face down, on a bunk beside the furnace where they boiled the sugar sap. His arms were stretched out and tied together down under the narrow bunk. She saw that his left arm was broken. For an instant the girl's heart leaped back to the rage of the night when she had almost prayed for her rifle. But pity swallowed up every other feeling as she cut the cords from his hands and loosened the rope that they had bound in between his teeth.

"Don't talk, Jeff," she commanded. "I can see just what happened. Lie easy and get your strength. I've got to take you to French Village at once."

She ran out to bring water. When she returned he was sitting dizzily on the edge of the bunk. While she bathed his head with the water and gave him a little to drink, she talked to him and crooned over him as she would over a baby for she saw that he was shaken and half delirious with pain.

Brom Bones was standing munching twigs where she had left him. He had never before been asked to carry double and he did not like it. But the girl pleaded so pitifully and so gently into his silky black ear that he finally gave in.

When they were mounted, she fastened the white collar of her jacket into a sling for the boy's broken arm, and with a prayer to the heathen Brom Bones to go tenderly they were off down the trail.

When they were half way down the trail Jeffrey spoke suddenly:

"Say, Ruth, what's the use trying to save these people? Let's sell out while we can and take mother and go away."

"Why, Jeff, dear," she said lightly, "this fight hasn't begun yet. Wait till we get to French Village. You'll say something different. You'll say just what you said to the Shepherd of the North; remember?"

Jeffrey said no more. The girl's heart was weak with the pain she knew he was bearing, but she knew that they must go through with this.

All French Village and the farmers of Little Tupper country were gathered in front of Arsene Lacomb's store. Rafe Gadbeau was standing on the steps haranguing them. He had stayed with his prisoner as he thought up to the last possible moment, so he stammered in his speech when he saw a big black horse come tearing down the street carrying a girl and a white-faced, black-headed boy behind her. Rogers, the railroad lawyer beside him, said:

"Go on, man. What's the matter with you?"

The girl drove the horse right in through the crowd until Jeffrey Whiting faced Rogers. Then Jeffrey, gritting his teeth on his pain, took up his fight again.

"Rogers," he shouted, "you did this. You got Rafe Gadbeau and the others to knock me on the head and put me out of the way, so that you could spread your lies about me. And you'd have won out, too, if it hadn't been for this brave girl here.

"Now, Rogers, you liar," he shouted louder, "I dare you, dare you, to tell these people here that I or any of our people have sold you a foot of land. I dare you!"

Rogers would have argued, but Rafe Gadbeau pulled him away. Gadbeau knew that crowd. They were a crowd of Frenchmen, volatile and full of potential fury. They were already cheering the brave girl. In a few minutes they would be hunting the life of the man who had lied to them and nearly ruined them.

A hundred hands reached up to lift Ruth from the saddle, but she waved them away and pointed to Jeffrey's broken arm. They helped him down and half carried him into Doctor Napoleon Goodenough's little office.

Ruth saw that her business was finished. She wheeled Brom Bones toward home, and gave him his head.

For three glorious miles they fairly flew through the pearly morning air along the hard mountain road, and the girl never pulled a line. Breakfastless and weary in body, her heart sang the song that it had learned in the Glow of Dawn.



IV

THE ANSWER

The Committee on Franchises was in session in one of the committee rooms outside the chamber of the New York State Senate. It was not a routine session. A bill was before it, the purpose of which was virtually to dispossess some four or five hundred families of their homes in the counties of Hamilton, Tupper and Racquette. The bill did not say this. It cited the need of adequate transportation in that part of the State and proposed that the U. & M. Railroad should be granted the right of eminent domain over three thousand square miles of the region, in order to help the development of the country.

The committee was composed of five members, three of the majority party in the Senate and two of the minority. A political agent of the railroad who drew a salary from Racquette County as a judge had just finished presenting to the committee the reasons why the people of that part of the State were unanimous in the wish that the bill should become a law. He had drawn a pathetic picture of the condition of the farmers, so long deprived of the benefits of a railroad. He had almost wept as he told of the rich loads of produce left to rot up there in the hills because the men who toiled to produce it had no means of bringing it down to the starving thousands of the cities. The scraggy rocks and thinly soiled farms of that region became in his picture vast reservoirs of cheap food, only waiting to be tapped by the beneficent railroad for the benefit of the world's poor.

When the judge had finished, one minority member of the committee looked at his colleague, the other minority member, and winked. It was a grave and respectful wink. It meant that the committee was not often privileged to listen to quite such bare-faced effrontery. If the hearing had been a secret one they would not have listened to it. But the bill had already aroused a storm. So the leader of the majority had given orders that the hearing should be public.

So far not a word had been said as to the fact which underlay the motives of the bill. Iron had been found in workable quantities in those three thousand square miles of hill country. Not a word had been said about iron.

No one in the room had listened to the speech with any degree of interest. It was intended entirely for the consumption of the outside public. Even the reporters had sat listless and bored during its delivery. They had been furnished with advance copies of it and had already turned them in to their papers. But with the naming of the next witness a stir of interest ran sharply around the room.

Bishop Joseph Winthrop of Alden rose from his place in the rear of the room and walked briskly forward to the chair reserved. A tall, spare figure of a man coming to his sixty years, his hair as white as the snow of his hills, with a large, firm mouth and the nose of a Puritan governor, he would have attracted attention under almost any circumstances.

Nathan Gorham, the chairman of the committee, had received his orders from the leader of the majority in the Senate that the bill should be reported back favourably to that body before night. He had anticipated no difficulty. The form of a public hearing had to be gone through with. It was the most effective way of disarming the suspicions that had been aroused as to the nature of the bill. The speech of the Racquette County Judge was the usual thing at public hearings. The chairman had expected that one or two self-advertising reformers of the opposition would come before the committee with time-honoured, stock diatribes against the rapacity and greed of railroads in general and this one in particular. Then he and his two majority colleagues would vote to report the bill favourably, while the two members of the minority would vote to report adversely. This, the chairman said, was about all a public hearing ever amounted to. He had not counted on the coming of the Bishop of Alden.

"The committee would like to hear, sir," began the chairman, as the Bishop took his place, "whom you represent in the matter of this bill."

The reporters, scenting a welcome sensation in what had been a dull session of a dull committee, sat with poised pencils while the Bishop turned a look of quiet gravity upon the chairman and said:

"I represent Joseph Winthrop, a voter of Racquette County."

"I beg pardon, sir, of course. The committee quite understands that you do not come here in the interest of any one. But the gentleman who has just been before us spoke for the farmers who would be most directly affected by the prosperity of the railroad, including those of your county. Are we to understand that there is opposition in your county to the proposed grant?"

"Your committee," said the Bishop, "cannot be ignorant that there is the most stubborn opposition to this grant in all three counties. If there had not been that opposition, there would have been no call for the bill which you are now considering. If the railroad could have gotten the options which it tried to get on those farms the grant would have been given without question. Your committee knows this better than I."

"But," returned the chairman, "we have been advised that the railroad was not able to get those options because a boy up there in the Beaver River country, who fancied that he had some grievance against the railroad people, banded the people together to oppose the options in unfair and unlawful ways."

The chairman paused an impressive moment.

"In fact," he resumed, "from what this committee has been able to gather, it looks very much as though there were conspiracy in the matter, against the U. & M. Railroad. It almost would seem that some rival of the railroad in question had used the boy and his fancied grievance to manufacture opposition. Conspiracy could not be proven, but there was every appearance."

The Bishop smiled grimly as he dropped his challenge quietly at the feet of the committee.

"The boy, Jeffrey Whiting," he said, "was guided by me. I directed his movements from the beginning."

The whole room sat up and leaned forward as one man, alive to the fact that a novel and stirring situation was being developed. Everybody had understood that the Bishop had come to plead the cause of the French-Canadian farmers of the hills.

They had supposed that he would speak only on what was a side issue of the case. No one had expected that he would attack the main question of the bill itself. And here he was openly proclaiming himself the principal in that silent, stubborn fight that had been going on up in the hills for six months!

The reporters doubled down to their work and wrote furiously. They were trying to throw this unusual man upon a screen before their readers. It was not easy. He was an unmistakable product of New England, and what was more he had been one of the leaders of that collection of striking men who made the Brook Farm "Experiment." He had endeared himself to the old generation of Americans by his war record as a chaplain. To some of the new generation he was known as the Yankee Bishop. But in the hill country, from the Mohawk Valley to the Canadian line and to Lake Champlain, he had one name, The Shepherd of the North. From Old Forge to Ausable to North Creek men knew his ways and felt the beating of the great heart of him behind the stern, ascetic set of his countenance.

As much as they could of this the reporters were trying to put into their notes while Nathan Gorham was recovering from his surprise. That well-trained statesman saw that he had let himself into a trap. He had been too zealous in announcing his impression that the opposition to the U. & M. Railroad was the work of a jealous rival. The Bishop had taken that ground from under him by a simple stroke of truth. He could neither go forward with his charge nor could he retract it.

"Would you be so kind, then, as to tell this committee," he temporised, "just why you wished to arouse this opposition to the railroad?"

"There is not and has never been any opposition whatever to the railroad," said the Bishop. "The bill before your committee has nothing to do with the right of way of the railroad. That has already been granted. Your bill proposes to confiscate, practically, from the present owners a strip of valuable land forty miles wide by nearly eighty miles long. That land is valuable because the experts of the railroad know, and the people up there know, and, I think, this committee knows that there is iron ore in these hills.

"I have said that I do not represent any one here," the Bishop went on. "But there are four hundred families up there in our hills who stand to suffer by this bill. They are a silent people. They have no voice to reach the world. I have asked to speak before your committee because only in this way can the case of my people reach the great, final trial court of publicity before the whole State.

"They are a silent people, the people of the hills. You will have heard that they are a stubborn people. They are a stubborn people, for they cling to their rocky soil and to the hillside homes that their hands have made just as do the hardy trees of the hills. You cannot uproot them by the stroke of a pen.

"These people are my friends and my neighbours. Many of them were once my comrades. I know what they think. I know what they feel. I would beg your committee to consider very earnestly this question before bringing to bear against these people the sovereign power of the State. They love their State. Many of them have loved their country to the peril of their lives. They live on the little farms that their fathers literally hewed out of a resisting wilderness.

"Not through prejudice or ignorance are they opposing this development, which will in the end be for the good of the whole region. They are opposed to this bill before you because it would give a corporation power to drive them from the homes they love, and that without fair compensation.

"They are opposed to it because they are Americans. They know what it has meant and what it still means to be Americans. And they know that this bill is directly against everything that is American.

"They are ever ready to submit themselves to the sovereign will of the State, but you will never convince them that this bill is the real will of the State. They are fighting men and the sons of fighting men. They have fought the course of the railroad in trying to get options from them by coercion and trickery. They have been aroused. Their homes, poor and wretched as they often are, mean more to them than any law you can set on paper. They will fight this law, if you pass it. It will set a ring of fire and murder about our peaceful hills.

"In the name of high justice, in the name of common honesty, in the name—to come to lower levels—of political common sense, I tell you this bill should never go back to the Senate.

"It is wrong, it is unjust, and it can only rebound upon those who are found weak enough to let it pass here."

The Bishop paused, and the racing, jabbing pencils of the reporters could be plainly heard in the hush of the room.

Nathan Gorham broke the pause with a hesitating question which he had been wanting to put from the beginning.

"Perhaps the committee has been badly informed," he began to the Bishop; "we understood that your people, sir, were mostly Canadian immigrants and not usually owners of land."

"Is it necessary for me to repeat," said the Bishop, turning sharply, "that I am here, Joseph Winthrop, speaking of and for my neighbours and my friends? Does it matter to them or to this committee that I wear the badge of a service that they do not understand? I do not come before you as the Catholic bishop. Neither do I come as an owner of property. I come because I think the cause of my friends will be served by my coming.

"The facts I have laid before you, the warning I have given might as well have been sent out direct through the press. But I have chosen to come before you, with your permission, because these facts will get a wider hearing and a more eager reading coming from this room.

"I do not seek to create sensation here. I have no doubt that some of you are thinking that the place for a churchman to speak is in his church. But I am willing to face that criticism. I am willing to create sensation. I am willing that you should say that I have gone far beyond the privilege of a witness invited to come before your committee. I am willing, in fact, that you should put any interpretation you like upon my use of my privilege here, only so that my neighbours of the hills shall have their matter put squarely and fully before all the people of the State.

"When this matter is once thoroughly understood by the people, then I know that no branch of the lawmaking power will dare make itself responsible for the passage of this bill."

The Bishop stood a moment, waiting for further questions. When he saw that none were forthcoming, he thanked the committee and begged leave to retire.

As the Bishop passed out of the room the chairman arose and declared the public hearing closed. Witnesses, spectators and reporters crowded out of the room and scattered through the corridors of the Capitol. Four or five reporters bunched themselves about the elevator shaft waiting for a car. One of them, a tow-haired boy of twenty, summed up the matter with irreverent brevity.

"Well, it got a fine funeral, anyway," he said. "Not every bad bill has a bishop at the obsequies."

"You can't tell," said the Associated Press man slowly; "they might report it out in spite of all that."

"No use," said the youngster shortly. "The Senate wouldn't dare touch it once this stuff is in the papers." And he jammed a wad of flimsy down into his pocket.

* * * * *

Three weeks of a blistering August sun had withered the grasses of the hills almost to a powder. The thin soil of the north country, where the trees have been cut away, does not hold moisture; so that the heat of the short, vicious summer goes down through the roots of the vegetation to the rock beneath and heats it as a cooking stone.

Since June there had been no rain. The tumbling hill streams were reduced to a trickle among the rocks of their beds. The uplands were covered with a mat of baked, dead grass. The second growth of stunted timber, showing everywhere the scars of the wasting rapacity of man, stood stark and wilted to the roots. All roving life, from the cattle to the woodchucks and even the field mice, had moved down to hide itself in the thicker growths near the water courses or had stolen away into the depths of the thick woods.

Ruth Lansing reined Brom Bones in under a scarred pine on the French Village road and sat looking soberly at the slopes that stretched up away from the road on either side. Every child of the hills knew the menace that a hot dry summer brought to us in those days. The first, ruthless cutting of the timber had followed the water courses. Men had cut and slashed their way up through the hills without thought of what they were leaving behind. They had taken only the prime, sound trees that stood handiest to the roll-ways. They had left dead and dying trees standing. Everywhere they had strewn loose heaps of brush and trimmings. The farmers had come pushing into the hills in the wake of the lumbermen and had cleared their pieces for corn and potatoes and hay land. But around every piece of cleared land there was an ever-encroaching ring of brush and undergrowth and fallen timber that held a constant threat for the little home within the ring.

A summer without rain meant a season of grim and unrelenting watchfulness. Men armed themselves and tramped through the woods on unbidden sentry duty, to see that no campfires were made. Strangers and outsiders who were likely to be careless were watched from the moment they came into the hills until they were seen safely out of them again. Where other children scouted for and fought imaginary Indians, the children of our hills hunted and fought imaginary fires. The forest fire was to them not a tradition or a bugaboo. It was an enemy that lurked just outside the little clearing of the farm, out there in the underbrush and fallen timber.

Ruth was waiting for Jeffrey Whiting. He had ridden up to French Village for mail. For some weeks they had known that the railroad would try to have its bill for eminent domain passed at the special session of the Legislature. And they knew that the session would probably come to a close this week.

If that bill became a law, then the resistance of the people of the hills had been in vain: Jeffrey had merely led them into a bitter and useless fight against a power with which they could not cope. They would have to leave their homes, taking whatever a corrupted board of condemnation would grant for them. It would be hard on all, but it would fall upon Jeffrey with a crushing bitterness. He would have to remember that he had had the chance to make his mother and himself independently rich. He had thrown away that chance, and now if his fight had failed he would have nothing to bring back to his mother but his own miserable failure.

Ruth remembered that day in the Bishop's house in Alden when Jeffrey had said proudly that his mother would be glad to follow him into poverty. And she smiled now at her own outburst at that time. They had both meant it, every word; but the ashes of failure are bitter. And she had seen the iron of this fight biting into Jeffrey through all the summer.

She, too, would lose a great deal if the railroad had succeeded. She would not be able to go back to school, and would probably have to go somewhere to get work of some kind, for the little that she would get for her farm now would not keep her any time. But that was a little matter, or at least it seemed little and vague beside the imminence of Jeffrey's failure and what he would consider his disgrace. She did not know how he would take it, for during the summer she had seen him in vicious moods when he seemed capable of everything.

She saw the speck which he made against the horizon as he came over Argyle Mountain three miles away and she saw that he was riding fast. He was bringing good news!

It needed only the excited, happy touch of her hand to set Brom Bones whirling up the road, for the big colt understood her ways and moods and followed them better than he would have followed whip or rein of another. Half-way, she pulled the big fellow down to a decorous canter and gradually slowed down to a walk as Jeffrey came thundering down upon them. He pulled up sharply and turned on his hind feet. The two horses fell into step, as they knew they were expected to do and their two riders gave them no more heed than if they had been wooden horses.

"How did you know it was all right, Ruth?"

"I saw you coming down Argyle Mountain," Ruth laughed. "You looked as though you were riding Victory down the top side of the earth. How did it all come out?"

"Here's the paper," he said, handing her an Albany newspaper of the day previous; "it tells the story right off. But I got a letter from the Bishop, too," he added.

"Oh, did you?" she exclaimed, looking up from the headline—U. & M. Grab Killed in Committee—which she had been feverishly trying to translate into her own language. "Please let me hear. I'm never sure what headlines mean till I go down to the fine print, and then it's generally something else. I can understand what the Bishop says, I'm sure."

"Well, it's only short," said Jeffrey, unfolding the letter. "He leaves out all the part that he did himself."

"Of course," said Ruth simply. "He always does."

"He says:

"'You will see from the Albany papers, which will probably reach you before this does, that the special session of the Legislature closed to-night and that the railroad's bill was not reported to the Senate. It had passed the Assembly, as you know. The bill aroused a measure of just public anger through the newspapers and its authors evidently thought it the part of wisdom not to risk a contest over it in the open Senate. So there can be no legislative action in favour of the railroad before December at the earliest, and I regard it as doubtful that the matter will be brought up even then.'

"You see," said Jeffrey, "from this you'd never know that he was there present at all. And it was just his speech before the committee that aroused that public anger. Then he goes on:

"'But we must not make the mistake of presuming that the matter ends here. You and your people are just where you were in the beginning. Nothing has been lost, nothing gained. It is not in the nature of things that a corporation which has spent an enormous amount of money in constructing a line with the one purpose of getting to your lands should now give up the idea of getting them by reason of a mere legislative setback. They have not entered into this business in any half-hearted manner. They are bound to carry it through somehow—anyhow. We must realise that.

"'We need not speculate upon the soul or the conscience of a corporation or the lack of those things. We know that this corporation will have an answer to this defeat of its bill. We must watch for that answer. What their future methods or their plans may be I think no man can tell. Perhaps those plans are not yet even formed. But there will be an answer. While rejoicing that a fear of sound public opinion has been on your side, we must never forget that there will be an answer.

"'In this matter, young sir, I have gone beyond the limits which men set for the proper activities of a priest of the church. I do not apologise. I have done this, partly because your people are my own, my friends and my comrades of old, partly because you yourself came to me in a confidence which I do not forget, partly—and most, perhaps—because where my people and their rights are in question I have never greatly respected those limits which men set. I put these things before you so that when the answer comes you will remember that you engaged yourself in this business solely in defence of the right. So it is not your personal fight and you must try to keep from your mind and heart the bitterness of a quarrel. The struggle is a larger thing than that and you must keep your heart larger still and above it. I fear that you will sorely need to remember this.

"'My sincerest regards to your family and to all my friends in the hills, not forgetting your friend Ruth.' That's all," said Jeffrey, folding the letter. "I wish he'd said more about how he managed the thing."

"Isn't it enough to know that he did manage it, without bothering about how? That is the way he does everything."

"I suppose I ought to be satisfied," said Jeffrey as he gathered up his reins. "But I wonder what he means by that last part of the letter. It sounds like a warning to me."

"It is a warning to you," said Ruth thoughtfully.

"Why, what does it mean? What does he think I'm likely to do?"

"Maybe he does not mean what you are likely to do exactly," said Ruth, trying to choose her words wisely; "maybe he is thinking more of what you are likely to feel. Maybe he is talking to your heart rather than to your head or about your actions."

"Now I don't know what you mean, either," said Jeffrey a little discontentedly.

"I know I oughtn't to try to tell you what the Bishop means, for I don't know myself. But I've been worried and I'm sure your mother has too," said Ruth reluctantly.

"But what is it?" said Jeffrey quickly. "What have I been doing?"

"I'm sure it isn't anything you've done, nor anything maybe that you're likely to do. I don't know just what it is, or how to say it. But, Jeffrey, you remember what you said that day in the Bishop's house at Alden?"

"Yes, and I remember what you said, too."

"We both meant it," Ruth returned gravely, not attempting to evade any of the meaning that he had thrown into his words. "And we both mean it now, I'm sure. But there's a difference, Jeffrey, a difference with you."

"I don't know it," he said a little shortly. "I'm still doing just the thing I started out to do that day."

"Yes. But that day you started out to fight for the people. Now you are fighting for yourself— Oh, not for anything selfish! Not for anything you want for yourself! I know that. But you have made the fight your own. It is your own quarrel now. You are fighting because you have come to hate the railroad people."

"Well, you wouldn't expect me to love them?"

"No. I'm not blaming you, Jeff. But—but, I'm afraid. Hate is a terrible thing. I wish you were out of it all. Hate can only hurt you. I'm afraid of a scar that it might leave on you through all the long, long years of life. Can you see? I'm afraid of something that might go deeper than all this, something that might go as deep as life. After all, that's what I'm afraid of, I guess—Life, great, big, terrible, menacing, Life!"

"My life?" Jeffrey asked gruffly.

"I have faced that," the girl answered evenly, "just as you have faced it. And I am not afraid of that. No. It's what you might do in anger—if they hurt you again. Something that would scar your heart and your soul. Jeffrey, do you know that sometimes I've seen the worst, the worst—even murder in your eyes!"

"I wish," the boy returned shortly, "the Bishop would keep his religion out of all this. He's a good man and a good friend," he went on, "but I don't like this religion coming into everything."

"But how can he? He cannot keep religion apart from life and right and wrong. What good would religion be if it did not go ahead of us in life and show us the way?"

"But what's the use?" the boy said grudgingly. "What good does it do? You wouldn't have thought of any of this only for that last part of his letter. Why does that have to come into everything? It's the Catholic Church all over again, always pushing in everywhere."

"Isn't that funny," the girl said, brightening; "I have cried myself sick thinking just that same thing. I have gone almost frantic thinking that if I once gave in to the Church it would crush me and make me do everything that I didn't want to do. And now I never think of it. Life goes along really just as though being a Catholic didn't make any difference at all."

"That's because you've given in to it altogether. You don't even know that you want to resist. You're swallowed up in it."

The girl flushed angrily, but bit her lips before she answered.

"It's the queerest thing, isn't it, Jeff," she said finally in a thoughtful, friendly way, "how two people can fight about religion? Now you don't care a particle about it one way or the other. And I—I'd rather not talk about it. And yet, we were just now within an inch of quarrelling bitterly about it. Why is it?"

"I don't know. I'm sorry, Ruth," the boy apologised slowly. "It's none of my business, anyway."

They were just coming over the long hill above Ruth's home. Below them stretched the long sweep of the road down past her house and up the other slope until it lost itself around the shoulder of Lansing Mountain.

Half a mile below them a rider was pushing his big roan horse up the hill towards them at a heart-breaking pace.

"That's 'My' Stocking's roan," said Jeffrey, straightening in his saddle; "I'd know that horse three miles away."

"But what's he carrying?" cried Ruth excitedly, as she peered eagerly from under her shading hand. "Look. Across his saddle. Rifles! Two of them!"

Brom Bones, sensing the girl's excitement, was already pulling at his bit, eager for a wild race down the hill. But Jeffrey, after one long, sharp look at the oncoming horseman, pulled in quietly to the side of the road. And Ruth did the same. She was too well trained in the things of the hills not to know that if there was trouble, then it was no time to be weakening horses' knees in mad and useless dashes downhill.

The rider was Myron Stocking from over in the Crooked Lake country, as Jeffrey had supposed. He pulled up as he recognised the two who waited for him by the roadside, and when he had nodded to Ruth, whom he knew by sight, he drew over close to Jeffrey. Ruth, eager as she was to hear, pushed Brom Bones a few paces farther away from them. They would not talk freely in her hearing, she knew. And Jeffrey would tell her all that she needed to know.

The two men exchanged a half dozen rapid sentences and Ruth heard Stocking conclude:

"Your Uncle Catty slipped me this here gun o' yours. Your Ma didn't see."

Jeffrey nodded and took the gun. Then he came to Ruth.

"There's some strangers over in the hills that maybe ought to be watched. The country's awful dry," he added quietly. He knew that Ruth would need no further explanation.

He pulled the Bishop's letter from his pocket and handed it to Ruth, saying:

"Take this and the paper along to Mother. She'll want to see them right away. And say, Ruth," he went on, as he looked anxiously at the great sloping stretches of bone-dry underbrush that lay between them and his home on the hill three miles away, "the country's awful dry. If anything happens, get Mother and Aunt Letty down out of this country. You can make them go. Nobody else could."

The girl had not yet spoken. There was no need for her to ask questions. She knew what lay under every one of Jeffrey's pauses and silences. It was no time for many words. He was laying upon her a trust to look after the ones whom he loved.

She put out her hand to his and said simply:

"I'm glad we didn't quarrel, Jeff."

"I was a fool," said Jeffrey gruffly, as he wrung her hand. "But I'll remember. Forgive me, please, Ruth."

"There's nothing to forgive—ever—between us, Jeffrey. Go now," she said softly.

Jeffrey wheeled his horse and followed the other man back over the hill on the road which he and Ruth had come. Ruth sat still until they were out of sight. At the very last she saw Jeffrey swing his rifle across the saddle in front of him, and a shadow fell across her heart. She would have given everything in her world to have had back what she had said of seeing murder in Jeffrey's eyes.

Jeffrey and Myron Stocking rode steadily up the French Village road for an hour or so. Then they turned off from the road and began a long winding climb up into the higher levels of the Racquette country.

"We might as well head for Bald Mountain right away," said Jeffrey, as they came about sundown to a fork in their trail. "The breeze comes straight down from the east. That's where the danger is, if there is any."

"I suppose you're right, Jeff. But it means we'll have to sleep out if we go that way."

"I guess that won't hurt us," Jeffrey returned. "If anything happens we might have to sleep out a good many nights—and a lot of other people would have to do the same."

"All right then," Stocking agreed. "We'll get a bite and give the horses a feed and a rest at Hosmer's, that's about two miles over the hills here; and then we can go on as far as you like."

At Hosmer's they got food enough for two days in the hills, and having fed and breathed the horses they rode on up into the higher woods. They were now in the region of the uncut timber where the great trees were standing from the beginning, because they had been too high up to be accessible to the lumbermen who had ravaged the lower levels. Though the long summer twilight of the North still lighted the tops of the trees, the two men rode in impenetrable darkness, leaving the horses to pick their own canny footing up the trail.

"Did anybody see Rogers in that crowd?" Jeffrey asked as they rode along. "You know, the man that was in French Village this summer."

"I don't know," Stocking answered. "You see they came up to the end of the rails, at Grafton, on a handcar. And then they scattered. Nobody's sure that he's seen any of 'em since. But they must be in the hills somewhere. And Rafe Gadbeau's with 'em. You can bet on that. That's all we've got to go on. But it may be a-plenty."

"It's enough to set us on the move, anyway," said Jeffrey. "They have no business in the hills. They're bound to be up to mischief of some sort. And there's just one big mischief that they can do. Can we make Bald Mountain before daylight?"

"Oh, certainly; that'll be easy. We'll get a little light when we're through this belt of heavy woods and then we can push along. We ought to get up there by two o'clock. It ain't light till near five. That'll give us a little sleep, if we feel like it."

True to Stocking's calculation they came out upon the rocky, thinly grassed knobs of Bald Mountain shortly before two o'clock. It was a soft, hazy night with no moon. There was rain in the air somewhere, for there was no dew; but it might be on the other side of the divide or it might be miles below on the lowlands.

Others of the men of the hills were no doubt in the vicinity of the mountain, or were heading toward here. For the word of the menace had gone through the hills that day, and men would decide, as Jeffrey had done, that the danger would come from this direction. But they had not heard anything to show the presence of others, nor did they care to give any signals of their own whereabouts.

As for those others, the possible enemy, who had left the railroad that morning and had scattered into the hills, if their purpose was the one that men feared, they, too, would be near here. But it was useless to look for them in the dark: neither was anything to be feared from them before morning. Men do not start forest fires in the night. There is little wind. A fire would probably die out of itself. And the first blaze would rouse the whole country.

The two hobbled their horses with the bridle reins and lay down in the open to wait for morning. Neither had any thought of sleep. But the softness of the night, the pungent odour of the tamarack trees floating up to them from below, and their long ride, soon began to tell on them. Jeffrey saw that they must set a watch.

"Curl up and go to sleep, 'My,'" he said, shaking himself. "You might as well. I'll wake you in an hour."

A ready snore was the only answer.

Morning coming over the higher eastern hills found them stiff and weary, but alert. The woods below them were still banked in darkness as they ate their dry food and caught their horses for the day that was before them. There was no water to be had up here, and they knew their horses must be gotten down to some water course before night.

A half circle of open country belted by heavy woods lay just below them. Eagerly, as the light crept down the hill, they scanned the area for sign of man or horse. Nothing moved. Apparently they had the world to themselves. A fresh morning breeze came down over the mountain and watching they could see the ripple of it in the tops of the distant trees. The same thought made both men grip their rifles and search more carefully the ground below them, for that innocent breeze blowing straight down towards their homes and loved ones was a potential enemy more to be feared than all the doings of men.

Down to the right, two miles or more away, a man came out of the shadow of the woods. They could only see that he was a big man and stout. There was nothing about him to tell them whether he was friend or foe, of the hills or a stranger. Without waiting to see who he was or what he did, the two dove for their saddles and started their horses pell-mell down the hill towards him.

He saw them at once against the bare brow of the hill, and ran back into the wood.

In another instant they knew what he was and what was his business.

They saw a light moving swiftly along the fringe of the woods. Behind the light rose a trail of white smoke. And behind the smoke ran a line of living fire. The man was running, dragging a flaming torch through the long dried grass and brush!

The two, riding break-neck down over the rocks, regardless of paths or horses' legs, would gladly have killed the man as he ran. But it was too far for even a random shot. They could only ride on in reckless rage, mad to be at the fire, to beat it to death with their hands, to stamp it into the earth, but more eager yet for a right distance and a fair shot at the fiend there within the wood.

Before they had stumbled half the distance down the hill, a wave of leaping flame a hundred feet long was hurling itself upon the forest. They could not stamp that fire out. But they could kill that man!

The man ran back behind the wall of fire to where he had started and began to run another line of fire in the other direction. At that moment Stocking yelled:

"There's another starting, straight in front!"

"Get him," Jeffrey shouted over his shoulder. "I'm going to kill this one."

Stocking turned slightly and made for a second light which he had seen starting. Jeffrey rode on alone, unslinging his rifle and driving madly. His horse, already unnerved by the wild dash down the hill, now saw the fire and started to bolt off at a tangent. Jeffrey fought with him a furious moment, trying to force him toward the fire and the man. Then, seeing that he could not conquer the fright of the horse and that his man was escaping, he threw his leg over the saddle, and leaping free with his gun ran towards the man.

The man was dodging in and out now among the trees, but still using his torch and moving rapidly away.

Jeffrey ran on, gradually overhauling the man in his zigzag until he was within easy distance. But the man continued weaving his way among the trees so that it was impossible to get a fair aim. Jeffrey dropped to one knee and steadied the sights of his rifle until they closed upon the running man and clung to him.

Suddenly the man turned in an open space and faced about. It was Rogers, Jeffrey saw. He was unarmed, but he must be killed.

"I am going to kill him," said Jeffrey under his breath, as he again fixed the sights of his rifle, this time full on the man's breast.

A shot rang out in front somewhere. Rogers threw up his hands, took a half step forward, and fell on his face.

Jeffrey, his finger still clinging to the trigger which he had not pulled, ran forward to where the man lay.

He was lying face down, his arms stretched out wide at either side, his fingers convulsively clutching at tufts of grass.

He was dying. No need for a second look.

His hat had fallen off to a little distance. There was a clean round hole in the back of the skull. The close-cropped, iron grey hair showed just the merest streak of red.

Just out of reach of one of his hands lay a still flaming railroad torch, with which he had done his work.

Jeffrey peered through the wood in the direction from which the shot had come. There was no smoke, no noise of any one running away, no sign of another human being anywhere.

Away back of him he heard shots, one, two, three; Stocking, probably, or some of the other men who must be in the neighbourhood, firing at other fleeing figures in the woods.

He grabbed the burning torch, pulled out the wick and stamped it into a patch of burnt ground, threw the torch back from the fire line, and started clubbing the fire out of the grass with the butt of his rifle.

He was quickly brought to his senses, when the forgotten cartridge in his gun accidentally exploded and the bullet went whizzing past his ear. He dropped the gun nervously and finding a sharp piece of sapling he began to work furiously, but systematically at the line of fire.

The line was thin here, where it had really only that moment been started, and he made some headway. But as he worked along to where it had gotten a real start he saw that it was useless. Still he clung to his work. It was the only thing that his numbed brain could think of to do for the moment.

He dug madly with the sapling, throwing the loose dirt furiously after the fire as it ran away from him. He leaped upon the line of the fire and stamped at it with his boots until the fire crept up his trousers and shirt and up even to his hair. And still the fire ran away from him, away down the hill after its real prey. He looked farther on along the line and saw that it was not now a line but a charging, rushing river of flame that ran down the hill, twenty feet at a jump. Nothing, nothing on earth, except perhaps a deluge of rain could now stop that torrent of fire.

He stepped back. There was nothing to be done here now, behind the fire. Nothing to be done but to get ahead of it and save what could be saved. He looked around for his horse.

Just then men came riding along the back of the line, Stocking and old Erskine Beasley in the lead. They came up to where Jeffrey was standing and looked on beyond moodily to where the body of Rogers lay.

Jeffrey turned and looked, too. A silence fell upon the little group of horsemen and upon the boy standing there.

Myron Stocking spoke at last:

"Mine got away, Jeff," he said slowly.

Jeffrey looked up quickly at him. Then the meaning of the words flashed upon him.

"I didn't do that!" he exclaimed hastily. "Somebody else shot him from the woods. My gun went off accidental."

Silence fell again upon the little group of men. They did not look at Jeffrey. They had heard but one shot. The shot from the woods had been too muffled for them to hear.

Again Stocking broke the silence.

"What difference does it make," he said. "Any of us would have done it if we could."

"But I didn't! I tell you I didn't," shouted Jeffrey. "The shot from the woods got ahead of me. That man was facing me. He was shot from behind!"

Old Erskine Beasley took command.

"What difference does it make, as Stocking says. We've got live men and women and children to think about to-day," he said. "Straighten him out decent. Then divide and go around the fire both ways. The alarm can't travel half fast enough for this breeze, and it's rising, too," he added.

"But I tell you—!" Jeffrey began again. Then he saw how useless it was.

He looked up the hill and saw his horse, which even in the face of this unheard-of terror had preferred to venture back toward his master.

He caught the horse, mounted, and started to ride south with the party that was to try to get around the fire from that side.

He rode with them. They were his friends. But he was not with them. There was a circle drawn around him. He was separated from them. They probably did not feel it, but he felt it. It is a circle which draws itself ever around a man who, justly or unjustly, is thought guilty of blood. Men may applaud his deed. Men may say that they themselves would wish to have done it. But the circle is there.

Then Jeffrey thought of his Mother. She would not see that circle.

Also he thought of a girl. The girl had only a few hours before said that she had sometimes seen even murder in his eyes.



V

MON PERE JE ME 'CUSE

Down the wide slope of Bald Mountain the fire raved exultingly, leaping and skipping fantastically as it ran. It was a prisoner released from the bondage of the elements that had held it. It was a spirit drunk with sudden-found freedom. It was a flood raging down a valley. It was a maniac at large.

The broad base of the mountain where it sat upon the backs of the lower hills spread out fanwise to a width of five miles. The fire spread its wings as it came down until it swept the whole apron of the mountain. A five-mile wave of solid flame rolled down upon the hills.

Sleepy cattle on the hills rising for their early browse missed the juicy dew from the grass. They looked to where the sun should be coming over the mountain and instead they saw the sun coming down the side of the mountain in a blanket of white smoke. They left their feed and began to huddle together, mooing nervously to each other about this thing and sniffing the air and pawing the earth.

Sleepy hired men coming out to drive the cattle in to milking looked blinking up at the mountain, stood a moment before their numb minds understood what their senses were telling them, then ran shouting back to the farm houses, throwing open pasture gates and knocking down lengths of fence as they ran. Some, with nothing but fear in their hearts, ran straight to the barns and mounting the best horses fled down the roads to the west. For the hireling flees because he is a hireling.

Sleepy men and women and still sleeping children came tumbling out of the houses, to look up at the death that was coming down to them. Some cried in terror. Some raged and cursed and shook foolish fists at the oncoming enemy. Some fell upon their knees and lifted hands to the God of fire and flood. Then each ran back into the house for his or her treasure; a little bag of money under a mattress, or a babe in its crib, or a little rifle, or a dolly of rags.

Frantic horses were hastily hitched to farm wagons. The treasures were quickly bundled in. Women pushed their broods up ahead of them into the wagons, ran back to kiss the men standing at the heads of the sweating horses, then climbed to their places in the wagons and took the reins. For twenty miles, down break-neck roads, behind mad horses, they would have to hold the lives of the children, the horses, and, incidentally, of themselves in their hands. But they were capable hands, brown, and strong and steady as the mother hearts that went with them.

They would have preferred to stay with the men, these women. But it was the law that they should take the brood and run to safety.

Men stood watching the wagons until they shot out of sight behind the trees of the road. Then they turned back to the hopeless, probably useless fight. They could do little or nothing. But it was the law that men must stay and make the fight. They must go out with shovels to the very edge of their own clearing and dig up a width of new earth which the running fire could not cross. Thus they might divert the fire a little. They might even divide it, if the wind died down a little, so that it would roll on to either side of their homes.

This was their business. There was little chance that they would succeed. Probably they would have to drop shovels at the last moment and run an unequal foot race for their lives. But this was the law, that every man must stay and try to make his own little clearing the point of an entering wedge to that advancing wall of fire. No man, no ten thousand men could stop the fire. But, against all probabilities, some one man might be able, by some chance of the lay of the ground, or some freak of the wind, to split off a sector of it. That sector might be fought and narrowed down by other men until it was beaten. And so something would be gained. For this men stayed, stifled and blinded, and fought on until the last possible moment, and then ran past their already smoking homes and down the wind for life.

Jeffrey Whiting rode southward in the wake of four other men down a long spiral course towards the base of the mountain. Yesterday he would have ridden at their head. He would have taken the place of leadership and command among them which he had for months been taking in the fight against the railroad. Probably he could still have had that place among them if he had tried to assert himself, for men had come to have a habit of depending upon him. But he rode at the rear, dispirited and miserable.

They were trying to get around the fire, so that they might hang upon its flank and beat it in upon itself. There was no thought now of getting ahead of it: no need to ride ahead giving alarm. That rolling curtain of smoke would have already aroused every living thing ahead of it. They could only hope to get to the end of the line of fire and fight it inch by inch to narrow the path of destruction that it was making for itself.

If the wind had held stiff and straight down the mountain it would have driven the fire ahead in a line only a little wider than its original front. But the shape of the mountain caught the light breeze as it came down and twisted it away always to the side. So that the end of the fire line was not a thin edge of scattered fire that could be fought and stamped back but was a whirling inverted funnel of flame that leaped and danced ever outward and onward.

Half way down the mountain they thought that they had outflanked it. They slid from their horses and began to beat desperately at the brush and grasses among the trees. They gained upon it. They were doing something. They shouted to each other when they had driven it back even a foot. They fought it madly for the possession of a single tree. They were gaining. They were turning the edge of it in. The hot sweat began to streak the caking grime upon their faces. There was no air to breathe, only the hot breath of fire. But it was heartsome work, for they were surely pushing the fire in upon itself.

A sudden swirl of the wind threw a dense cloud of hot white smoke about them. They stood still with the flannel of their shirt-sleeves pressed over eyes and nostrils, waiting for it to pass.

When they could look they saw a wall of fire bearing down upon them from three sides. The wind had whirled the fire backward and sidewise so that it had surrounded the meagre little space that they had cleared and had now outflanked them. Their own manoeuvre had been turned against them. There was but one way to run, straight down the hill with the fire roaring and panting after them. It was a playful, tricky monster that cackled gleefully behind them, laughing at their puny efforts.

Breathless and spent, they finally ran themselves out of the path of the flames and dropped exhausted in safety as the fire went roaring by them on its way.

Their horses were gone, of course. The fire in its side leap had caught them and they had fled shrieking down the hill, following their instinct to hunt water.

The men now began to understand the work that was theirs. They were five already weary men. All day and all night, perhaps, they must follow the fire that travelled almost as fast as they could run at their best. And they must hang upon its edge and fight every inch of the way to fold that edge back upon itself, to keep that edge from spreading out upon them. A hundred men who could have flanked the fire shoulder to shoulder for a long space might have accomplished what these five were trying to do. For them it was impossible. But they hung on in desperation.

Three times more they made a stand and pushed the edge of the fire back a little, each time daring to hope that they had done something. And three times more the treacherous wind whirled the fire back behind and around them so that they had to race for life.

Now they were down off the straight slope of the mountain and among the broken hills. Here their work was entirely hopeless and they knew it. They knew also that they were in almost momentary danger of being cut off and completely surrounded. Here the fire did not keep any steady edge that they could follow and attack. The wind eddied and whirled about among the broken peaks of the hills in every direction and with it the fire ran apparently at will.

When they tried to hold it to one side of a hill and were just beginning to think that they had won, a sudden sweep of the wind would send a ring of fire around to the other side so that they saw themselves again and again surrounded and almost cut off.

Ahead of them now there was one hope: to hold the fire to the north side of the Chain. The Chain is a string of small lakes running nearly east and west. It divides the hill country into fairly even portions. If they could keep the fire north of the lakes they would save the southern half of the country. Their own homes all lay to the north of the lakes and they were now doomed. But that was a matter that did not enter here. What was gone was gone. Their loved ones would have had plenty of warning and would be out of the way by now. The men were fighting the enemy merely to save what could be saved. And as is the way of men in fight they began to make it a personal quarrel with the fire.