ettybone and Elder Hooper, who owned it in partnership, had not
been on speaking terms for twenty years. So bitter was the feud that
either would have borne cheerfully a loss to prevent the other from
making a profit. The stage line was a worry and an annoyance to both of
them, but neither of them would sell, because he was afraid his enemy
might derive some advantage.

As Scattergood well knew, the feud had its inception in religion as
religion is practiced in that community. Deacon Pettybone had been born
a Congregationalist. Elder Hooper was the sturdiest pillar of the
Congregationalist church. They had grown up together from boyhood, as
chums, and later as business partners, but at the mature age of forty
Deacon Pettybone had attended a revival service in the Baptist church.
When he came out of that service the mischief was done--he had been
converted to the tenets of immersion and straightway withdrew from the
church of his birth to enter the fold of its bitterest rival in
Coldriver, if it were possible for the Baptists to be bitterer rivals of
the Congregationalist than the Methodists and Universalists were.
Coldriver's population was less than four hundred. It required a great
deal of religion to get that four hundred safely past the snares and
pitfalls of Coldriver, for there were no fewer than five full-grown
churches, of which the Roman Catholic was the fifth, and a body of folks
who met in one another's houses of a Sabbath under the denomination of
the United Brethren. Five churches worshiped God through the crackling
parchment of their mortgages, when one, or at most two, might have
pointed the way to heaven free and clear, and with no worries over
semiannual interest.

When Pettybone turned apostate there was such a commotion as had never
before disturbed Coldriver; it subsided, and was forgotten as the years
dragged on, by all but Pettybone and Hooper, who continued tenaciously
to hate each other with a bitter hatred--and the more so that their
financial affairs were so inextricably mingled.

Even when Pettybone's leg was mashed by a log, and he lay between life
and death, there was no hint of a reconciliation; and when Pettybone
appeared again on Coldriver's streets, hobbling on a peg leg of his own
fashioning, the fires of vindictiveness burned higher and hotter than
ever.

The situation would have been hopeless to anybody not possessed of
Scattergood's optimism and resource. It is reported that Scat