g tree, too small to
be climbed by any wild-cat and far enough from the ground to be out of
reach of the wolves and foxes. "Now we'll git right out o' here, lad,"
Bolderwood said, picking up his rifle and starting for the ford. "We've
got to hurry," and Enoch, nothing loath, followed him across the creek
and into the forest on the other bank.

"Do you r'ally think there'll be fightin', Master Bolderwood?" he asked.

"I hope God'll forbid that," responded the ranger, with due reverence.
"But if the Yorkers expect ter walk in an' take our farms the way this
sheriff wants ter take Master Breckenridge's, we'll show 'em diff'rent!"
He increased his stride and Enoch had such difficulty in keeping up with
his long-legged companion that he had no breath for rejoinder and they
went on in silence.

The controversy between the New York colony and the settlers of the
Hampshire Grants who had bought their farms of Governor Benning
Wentworth, of New Hampshire, was a very important incident of the
pre-Revolutionary period. The not always bloodless battles over the
Disputed Ground arose from the claim of New York that the old patent of
King Charles to the Duke of York, giving to him all the territory lying
between the Connecticut River on the east and Delaware Bay on the west,
was still valid north of the Massachusetts line.

In 1740 King George II had declared "that the northern boundary of
Massachusetts be a similar curved line, pursuing the course of the
Merrimac River at three miles distant on the north side thereof,
beginning at the Atlantic Ocean and ending at a point due north of a
place called Pawtucket Falls, and by a straight line from thence due
west till it meets with his Majesty's other governments." Nine years
later Governor Wentworth made the claim that, because of this
established boundary between Massachusetts and New Hampshire, the
latter's western boundary was the same as Massachusetts'--a line
parallel with and twenty miles from the Hudson River--and he informed
Governor Clinton, of New York, that he should grant lands to settlers as
far west as this twenty-mile line. Therewith he granted to William
Williams and sixty-one others the township of Bennington (named in his
honor) and it was surveyed in October of that same year. But the
outbreak of the French and Indian troubles made the occupation of this
exposed territory impossible until 1761, when there came into the rich
and fertile country lying about what is