in the cloud of his own anxiety. Tenney, not waiting to be addressed,
walked straight up to him. He spoke, as soon as he was within hearing
distance of a tone of ordinary volume, and what he said surprised Raven
even more than the catamount calls of yesterday:

"Be you saved?"

Raven knew the salient country phrases, but, so alien was the question
to his conception of the man, that he answered perplexedly:

"What do you mean by saved?"

Tenney set down his dinner pail, as if it hampered him, and began
rhythmically, in the voice of the exhorter:

"Saved by the blood of the Lamb."

Raven stepped back a pace.

"No," he said coldly, "not that I'm aware of."

Tenney came forward a step and Raven again backed. There was something
peculiarly distasteful in being exhorted by a fellow of unbridled temper
and a bestial mind.

"You are a sinner," said Tenney. "If you reject the great atonement, you
are lost. Don't you know you be?"

"No," said Raven. He was on the point of turning away, when he
remembered it was an ill-judged impetuosity he could not afford. It was
more important, in this world of persecution and unstable defense, to
keep your antagonist busy, cutting gray birches.

"Do you reject Him?" Tenney, too, had his day's work on his mind and he
spoke rapidly, with a patent show of getting his exhortation done in
time to fall into step with Jerry, appearing, at the moment, axe in
hand. He picked up his dinner pail. "Do you reject Him?" he repeated, in
his former singsong. "Do you reject Christ crucified?"

And in spite of the prudence his inner self had counseled, Raven found
he was, perhaps only from force of habit augmented by his distaste for
the man, answering truthfully:

"Yes," he said, "as you mean it, I do."

Jerry, in the road, had halted and was looking back inquiringly. Tenney
started after him. Instead of being rebuffed by Raven's attitude, he
seemed to be exhilarated. Raven concluded, as he saw the light of a
perhaps fanatical zeal playing over his face, that the fellow took it
for a challenge, an incentive to bring one more into the fold. It was
something in the nature of a dare.

When he went in, Charlotte was about her tasks at the kitchen stove.

"You're not going to fodder the cattle, you know," he said to her,
passing through. "I'll see to that. Jerry showed me the mow he is using
from."

"I always do," said Charlotte, "when he's away all day. I admire to git
out there an' smell the