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 Scattergood propounded a saying early in his career at Coldriver, to this effect: 

“Anybody kin git anythin’ done if he wants it hard enough.  Trouble is, most folks hain’t got a sufficient capacity for wantin’.”

Scattergood’s capacity for wanting was abnormal, and his ability to want until he got was what made him the remarkable figure in the life of his state that he was destined to become.

Scattergood was sitting on the piazza of his hardware store, basking in the sunshine, and gazing up the dusty road which passed between Coldriver’s business structures, and disappeared over the hill.  His eyes were half closed, and his bulk, which later became phenomenal, filled comfortably the specially reinforced chair which came to be called his throne.  Pliny Pickett slouched around the corner, and, as he approached, the unmistakable odor of horses became noticeable.  Inhabitants of Coldriver knew when Pliny came into a room even if their backs were turned.