Percy before them when they were merely a gathering of half-armed farmers; and when drilled and properly equipped, they will prove their worth to General Gage, his army and the hostile King.”

Several times he left the road and crossed some fields at sight of chimney-stacks or shingled roofs; and each time he talked earnestly with the householders and left one or more of the circulars printed by the Committee of Safety. But each time he returned to the wagon road.

“It’s not because I expect to come upon any great number of people,” he said, as the question as to why he did this presented itself to him. “And it is not because it is an easy road to travel.” He paused for a moment and then added: “I wonder just how much this stranger, who lives so oddly and in such a queer place, has to do with it?”

He laughed as the tall bay took a fence and landed once more in the much-cut road.

“That’s it,” he continued. “It’s curiosity. I want to see the man who has made those two, back there, fear him so.”

He had perhaps gone a mile and a half in a straight course, when the fences began to thin; trees lined the roadside and grew in thick clumps upon every hand; the ground looked rough and stony; apparently no plow had ever broken it, no axe had ever been leveled against the timber.

Heavy boughs, showing the first green of spring, hung so low that Ezra was forced to bend low in his saddle in order to avoid them. He was riding in this fashion when he was suddenly startled by a voice, apparently only a few yards away, calling to him.

“Hullo, you, sir!”

Ezra drew in the bay and turned in his saddle. A tall, strongly-built young man in long leather boots, and wearing a hat with a plume in it, was standing beside a fallen horse.

“A moment of your time, if you please,” commanded this personage, in a voice that was not to be denied.

“You have met with an accident, I see,” remarked Ezra, with a glance at the prostrate beast. “Is he badly hurt?”

“I think he is all but finished,” replied the young man in the long boots. “He was recommended to me as a nag of perfect quality; but I have found none such in this sadly deserted corner of the earth.”

The speaker wore moustaches, something seldom or never seen in 

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