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 pocke