"Gimme that gun!" he said, in brusque command. Then covering Mose from head to foot, he added, slowly, "I'd ruther have starved a hundred times over than had you do this sort o' thing!"

Mose had sheepishly laid the weapon on the table. He walked now with a sullen air to the door, lifted the hook, and put his hand on the latch.

"Let me in out of the cold, can't ye?" a shrill voice complained outside. "It's only me, you gump!"

Mose's face brightened. "Why, it's only young Job Parshall, after all!" he said, and threw the door wide open.

The boy pushed past Mose without a word, and marching across the room to the stove held his red fingers over the griddles. He lifted them a little for inspection after a minute's silence, and screwed his shoulders about in token of the pain they gave him.

"I couldn't run with my hands in my pockets," he said. "I shouldn't wonder if they was froze. That's just my luck."

Mose advanced to the stove, and looked at Job's hands critically. "That little finger there is a trifle tetched, I guess," he said. "It'll be sore for a day or two, that's all. The rest are all right." Then he added, noting the boy's crimson cheeks and panting breast, "Why, sonny, you must 'a' run the whole way!"

Job nodded assent, and turned his hands palm upward. "Every inch of the way," he said between heavy breaths.

Old Asa had sunk again into a chair, and sat gazing in turn at Mose and the boy. The fire which had glowed in his eyes when he had confronted his son had died away again. He was visibly striving not to tremble, and the glance he bent from one to the other was wistful and shame-faced.

"I suppose you've brought some news," he remarked at last to Job.

The boy nodded again, twisting his fingers experimentally in the heat. "When I catch my breath, I'll tell ye," he said.

There was a moment's awkward silence; then Asa Whipple, speaking in low, deliberate tones, rid his mind of some of its burden.

"My son Mose here," he said gravely, "didn't use to be a coward. I didn't bring him up to be no coward. Seems to me you can bring up a boy so't he'll be honest and straightforward and square right up to the last minute, and then lo and behold! he cuts up some low-down, mean dido or other that makes you 'shamed to look folks in the face.

"My father fit in the Revolution, and so did my mother's father and his brothers,—their name was Lapham, and they lived in Rhode Island,—and my older brother, Jason, he was killed up at Sackett's Harbor in the 1812 War before he come of age; and they ain't one of 'em but 'ud turn in his grave to think they was a coward and a deserter in the family!"

Mose stood behind the stove, stealing furtive glances at the old man during this harangue. Once or twice he opened his lips as if to speak, but either no words would come, or he thought better of it.

But Job listened with obvious impatience. He had quite regained his breath. "Mose ain't no coward!" he broke in vehemently. "It took a mighty sight more pluck to light out there, of a night, and come way off up here just to see how you were gettin' on, and have to hide for his life, than it would to have stayed right still where he was, with no fightin' and no work, and three square meals a day."

"You might say four, a'most, countin' supper," Mose suggested softly.

Old Asa Whipple seemed impressed with this view of the situation, and pondered it for a little in silence.

"What I come over to say was," remarked Job, more placidly, "that they're out lookin' for you, Mose. Two men drove up in a cutter just after breakfast—one of 'em's Norm' Hazzard, the deputy marshal down at Octavius, and the other fellow's name is Moak, I b'lieve, and they've stopped to Teachout's to breakfast. They started from Octavius before daylight, and they was about froze solid by the time they got to 'Lishe's. They took out their horse, and they've got so much thawin' out to do themselves, I reckon they ain't more'n about started now, if they have that."

"You come straight?" asked Mose.

"Well, you'd better believe I did! I scooted 'cross lots like greased lightnin' the minute they went in t' the house. It's a good hour 'round by the road, even when it's all open. It's drifted now all the way from the sash factory down to Taft's place, and it's slow work gettin' through the fields. As I figure it, you've got more'n an hour's leeway."

The two men looked at each other as they listened, and they kept up the mutual gaze after the boy had stopped.

"'Pears to me, dad," Mose finally ventured in a deferential way, "that you don't seem to take this thing quite in the right spirit. I tell you straight out, if it was the last word I ever spoke, I ain't done nothin' I'm ashamed of. A man can't say no more'n that."

"Accordin' to the way I was brought up," replied old Asa, doggedly, "they ain't no other such an all-fired, pesky mean name for a man in the dictionary as 'desarter.'"

"Well, anyway," retorted Mose, "I'd ruther be called 'desarter' myself than have you be called 'starved to death.' So far's I can make out, if it hadn't ben one, it 'ud ben t'other."

The old man's glance abruptly sought the floor, and lingered there. The others, as they watched him, could see the muscles of his down-bent face twitching.

"Besides, they didn't need me down there just now," Mose went on in more voluble self-defence, "no more'n a frog needs a tail. An' besides that, they played it monstrous low-down on me. That German fellow that used to work at the tannery, he was my sergeant, and he kept them big eyes of his skinned for me all day long. Him and me never hitched very well down at the mills, you know, and he took it out of me whenever he got a chance.

"He got all the officers down on me. One day they'd say I'd burnt the coffee, and the next day that my gun was dirty, and after that that I was a 'malingerer,'—that's officers' slang for a shirk,—and so on; and every time it meant that some of my pay got stopped. That's why I never sent you any money.

"They worked it so't I never got more'n about ten shillings out of my thirteen dollars, and that I owed twice over before I got it."

Old Asa was looking into his son's face once more, and he nodded comprehendingly as the other paused. "We never did git a fair show, like other men," he remarked.

"But I could 'a' stood all that," continued Mose. "What riled me was when Bill Rood got a letter sayin' that you was poorly, and you stopped writin'; and then I took pains and behaved extra well, so't even the Dutchman couldn't put his finger on me. And then I got a chance one day, and I asked one of the lieutenants that I'd kind o' curried favor with, doin' odd jobs for him and so on, if he couldn't git me a furlough, just to run home and see how you was gittin' on."

"I reckon you never got that, Mose."

"No, dad. They was givin' 'em right and left to other fellows, and the lieutenant said he guessed he could manage it. I don't know how hard he tried, but a few days after that I see the Dutchman grinnin' at me, and I felt in my bones that the jig was up. Sure enough, they wouldn't let me have a furlough because I'd been euchred out of my pay. They wa'n't no other reason."

"No," said the old man, "that was always the way. I guess me and you ought to be pretty well used to gittin' the worst of it, by this time. There's a text in the Bible that's our own private family property, as much as if it had 'Whipple' marked on it in big letters. It's that one that says that when a man ain't got anything, he gits took away from him even what he's got. That's me, Mose, and it's you, too."

Mose had quite recovered his confidence now.

"Of course, if there'd ben any fightin' goin' on, it'd ben different," he explained, "but right in the middle of our winnin' everything along in November, after we'd chased the Johnnies across the Rappahannock and the Rapidan, and was havin' it all our own way—and in spite of the rain freezin' as it fell, and no shelter and marchin' till your feet was ready to fall off, we all liked it first-rate—along come orders for us to go back again to winter quarters around Brandy Station. So far as I could see, it was all station and no brandy. And then the new drafted men, they behaved like sin in camp, and orders got stricter, and my Dutchman piled it onto me thicker and thicker, and I got to frettin' about you—and so—so I—I lit out."

"You'd better begin figgerin' on lightin' out agin," said the practical Job. "I suppose you'll take to the woods, won't you?"

Mose nodded, and reached his hand out for the gun. "Yes," he said, "five minutes' start'll be all I need. Once I git across the creek I'm all right. One thing's lucky, there's plenty of powder and shot in the cupboard there, I see. I suppose, if worst comes to worst, I could get through the woods up to Canada. But see here,—this is a good deal more important,—what are you going to do, dad, after I'm gone?"

Old Asa had hardly given this important question a thought before. As it was forced upon him now, his mind reverted mechanically to that strange awakening, when he lay in the starved half-stupor on the very threshold of death, and Mose came in, like some good angel of a dream, to bring him back to life again. A rush of tenderness, almost of pride, suddenly suffused the old man's brain.

"Mose," he said, all at once, "I guess I talked more or less like a fool, here awhile back. Perhaps some folks are entitled to blame you for turnin' up here, this mornin'—but I ain't one of 'em, and I ought to known better. I'm stronger, my boy, ever so much stronger, for seein' you and—eatin' a good meal again. You'll see—I'll be as sound again as a butternut. I bet I could walk this minute to the bridge without a break."

"But that wouldn't feed you, after you got there," objected Mose. "Of course if I could hang around in the neighborhood, and drop in every now and then to keep an eye on you, it 'ud be different. But they're sure to watch the place, and with me caught you'd be worse off than ever. I'd give myself up this minute if only I knew you'd be all right. But that's the hang of it. There's no mistake, dad," he added, with a rueful sort of grin, "the last bell was a-ringin' for you when I turned up here, this mornin'."

It was characteristic of these two men, born and bred here in the robust air of the forest's borders, that as they confronted this dilemma, not the shadow of a notion of that standing alternative, the county-house, crossed either mind. Even if Mose could have thought of it, he would never have dared suggest it to Asa.

"Come, you'd better be gittin' together what you're goin' to take with you," broke in Job, peremptorily. "You've got none too much time to spare."

"Yes, I know," said Mose, with hesitation; "but the old man here—that worries me."

"You just 'tend to your own knittin'," was the boy's reply. "Asa and me'll manage for ourselves all right."

Old Asa Whipple opened his eyes wide—not at surprise at hearing his Christian name fall so glibly from the boy's tongue, for that is the custom of the section, but with bewilderment at his meaning.

"What on earth are you drivin' at?" demanded Mose, no whit less puzzled.

"Well," said Job, with deliberation, "I've kind o' soured on that Teachout job of mine. I've had it in my mind to quit all along, when I got the chance, and I guess this is about as good as any. I've got along toward twenty dollars saved up, and there's three days' work a week for me at the cheese-factory whenever I want to take it, and I could go to school the other days, and both places are handier to git at from here than they are from Teachout's. So I'll rig up a bed and so on here, and I'll look out for the old man. But do you go ahead, and git out!"

It is another custom of these parts to be undemonstrative in the face of the unexpected.

Mose merely clapped his hand on Job's shoulder, and said, "You won't ever be sorry for it, sonny," which had much more of loose prediction than of pledge about it, yet seemed quite sufficient for them both.

The old man said nothing at all, but sat bending forward in his chair, his gaze fastened upon every move his son made about the room. For everything Mose did now spoke plainly of another parting, more sombre and sinister than the last. A soldier may come back, but how can one hope for the return of a deserter?

Mose's old instincts as a woodsman rose superior to the exigencies of a life and death flight. He prepared as if for a holiday camping jaunt into the wilderness—in a hurried manner, but forgetting nothing.

He made a pile of things on the table—all the powder and shot in the house, most of the salt, some old stockings, a tin cup, fork and spoon, and what matches he could find—and then stowed them away in flasks and his pockets, along with a whole tangled mass of lines, hooks and catgut fishing gear.

From under the snow in the dismantled shed he unearthed a smaller frying-pan and two steel traps, and slung these with a string through handle and chains across his shoulder. Then he took up the gun and was ready.

"I guess this'll see me through," he said lightly.

Old Asa gazed at him through dimmed eyes. "No, you must take a blanket, Mose," he said. "I won't hear no for an answer—you must! There's plenty more for us. If they ain't, we can git more. They're cheap as dirt. And Mose," the old man rose from his chair as he spoke, "I was a-goin' to ask you to sing for me afore you went, but I—I guess we'd better let that go till we meet again. You'll be all right in the woods——"

"Why, I know twenty places," put in Mose, "where I'll be as snug as a bug in a rug. I'll make straight for a deer yard. Mebbe"—he chuckled at the thought—"I'll be bringing you in some venison some o' these nights. Prob'ly I'll hang it up on a tree—the old butternut by the fork—so't Job can come out and git it in the mornin'. And in the spring—why you must come in the spring and—and be with me in the woods."

The old man's strength had waned once more, and he seated himself.

"Mebbe," was all he said, in a dubious voice, and with his head bowed on his breast.

He did not lift his head, when Mose shook hands with him; he did not raise his glance to follow him, either, when, with the traps and frying-pan clattering about his neck, Mose let himself out by the shed door and was gone.

He did not even seem to hear when, two or three minutes later, the reverberating crack of revolver shots—one! two! three! four! five!—set the echoes clamoring all around the Whipple house.

  CHAPTER V.

THE DEPUTY MARSHAL.

As soon as Job Parshall heard the sound of firearms outside the Whipple cabin, he darted to the nearer of the front windows, scratched away some of the thick frost from one of its panes, and put his eye to the aperture.

A horse and cutter had come to a halt on the road, a few rods short of the house. The animal had been frightened by the firing, and was still showing signs of excitement, with lifted ears and stiffened forelegs.

The man, whom Job understood to be Moak, stood at the horse's head, holding the bridle tightly, but looking intently the other way across the fields in the direction of his companion, the redoubtable deputy marshal, who was not in sight.

The boy stole to the other end of the room, and cautiously opened the shed door by as much as the width of his face. Here he could cover at a glance the flat, gently sloping waste of snow which stretched unbroken backward from the house to the gray fringe of woods that marked the edge of the ravine. Beyond that belt of timbered horizon, with its shadows silvery soft in the brilliant morning sunlight, lay sunken in its hollow the ice-bound brook.

If Mose passed this stream there was before him the real forest—and safety.

The black figures of two running men moved upon this broad and dazzlingly white landscape. The farther of the two was now so far away that he seemed a mere dark speck, like the object seen from the gun-line of a turkey shoot. Perhaps this simile was suggested to Job by the fact that the other, pausing now for a moment in his race, straightened an arm and sent five more shots flashing after the fugitive.

Tenfold that number of echoes came rolling in upon one another's heels through the nipping air as the second man started again to run. He seemed not to be catching up with his prey—yes! now Mose was lost to sight in the woods, and his pursuer was not half-way there. Yes! and now the marshal had stopped, hesitated, and turned about.

The deputy marshal retraced his steps over the broken crust slowly, and with an air of dejection. He hung his head as he walked, and it took him a long time to reach the house. When he came into the yard he seemed not to look toward the house at all, but made his way straight past as if bound for the road, with his attention still steadfastly fixed on the snow in front of him.

But just as Job had jumped to the conclusion that he had not been observed, the deputy marshal called in a loud, peremptory aside over his shoulder:—

"Come along out here, boy!"

The lad had no course but to obey. He stole a quick, backward glance to where old Asa still sat motionless with bowed head near the stove. Then noiselessly shutting the shed door behind him, he followed out into the road.

"It'll be all right," the deputy marshal was saying to his companion as Job came up. "He can't take a step on this crust without leavin' a mark, 'specially now that it's goin' to melt a little. I'll land him in the stone jug before night, or you can call me a Dutchman!"

Norman Hazzard, the deputy marshal, was a thin, lithe, active man, somewhere in the thirties, with a long, sun-browned face and a square jaw. Although his keen eyes were of a light, bluish gray, one thought of him as a dark-complexioned person.

Ever since Job could remember, this man had been arresting people, first as a sheriff's officer, then as an army detective. Looking furtively at him now as he stood at the horse's head, with his sharp glance roving the distant landscape and his under lip nursing the ends of his sparse moustache in meditation, the boy felt that that was what nature intended that Norm Hazzard should be.

The whole country knew him by sight, and talked about the risky things he had done in the line of his duty, and the stern, cold-blooded pluck with which he had done them.

As the deputy marshal stood thus pondering the situation, he rattled together with his hand some heavy metallic objects in one of his overcoat pockets. The clanking sound they gave forth fascinated the boy.

"I s'pose them's handcuffs you've got there in your pocket?" he found himself suddenly impelled to remark. It was only after the words were out that he realized the boldness of speaking in this fierce presence without having been spoken to.

Hazzard turned his head obliquely downward, and regarded Job with a sort of ironical scowl.

"They ain't for you, anyway," he remarked. "I guess the horsewhip'll about suit your complaint."

"No, you don't!" replied Job. "You dassent lay a finger on me unless I've done something—I know that much."

The deputy marshal emitted a chuckle of amused contempt.

"Why, you blamed little runt, you!" he said. "You've done mischief enough this mornin' to git thrashed for it within an inch o' your life, and go to state's prison into the bargain. You mind your p's and q's now mighty sharp, or it'll be the end o' you!"

"I don't see, myself," put in Moak, a bearded, thickset, middle-aged man, who drawled his words lazily, but looked as if he might be a tough customer in a fight, "I don't jest make out how you're goin' to catch up with him, even if he does leave tracks. He's got a big start, and has pretty good reasons for humpin' himself, and if he can keep ahead till dark, he knows the woods in the night-time a plaguy sight better'n any of us do."

Hazzard curled his lips in a faint, momentary grin of superiority.

"Can't we get snow-shoes?" he asked.

The word had an evil sound to Job's ears. They would run Mose down, sure enough, with those terrible aids to the pursuit.

"The only question is," the deputy marshal ruminated aloud, "where'll be the nearest place to git the shoes. We'll hitch the horse here to the fence, and take a look at the house. Did you ever see such a tumble-down place in all your life? Here, you boy, mog along there in front o' me, and watch what you do! Or no, wait a minute!"

The deputy marshal had led the horse off the roadway toward the sprawling remains of a rail fence at the side. He paused now, communed with himself for an instant, then brought the horse and cutter back again, and tossed the blanket he had taken out upon the seat once more.

"No," he said briefly to Moak, "you jump in and drive to Juno Mills as fast as you can, and git two pairs of snow-shoes somewhere,—you're bound to find plenty of 'em; the hotel-keeper'll know who's got 'em,—and race back here again. Don't whisper a word to anybody—and we'll have him out in no time."

So it happened that as the cutter with its jingling bells receded from vision and hearing down the road, Job Parshall found himself marching back in embarrassed state toward the front door of the Whipple house, with the firm tread of the deputy marshal crunching on the snow close at his heels.

He could catch the sinister rattle of those handcuffs in Hazzard's pocket at every stride the man took. He tried not to dwell upon it in his mind, but it was a fact that Norm Hazzard had killed two men, one of them a member of a famous local gang of horse-thieves, whom he had shot where he was ambushed behind the grain bags in his barn, the other a wife-murderer, who had escaped from jail to the woods.

How was it, Job wondered, that he had missed all ten of his shots at Mose? Perhaps they were not all misses. Men did run sometimes, it was said, after they had been struck by a bullet. What if Mose, after all, was lying there, somewhere in the woods, wounded and helpless in the bitter cold!

The manacles behind him ground together with a cruel, rasping noise as this picture rose in his brain.

He pushed the door wide open and went in, closely followed by the other.

Old Asa sat where he had left him, his tall frame settled down supinely in the armchair, his head bent on his breast, motionless and apparently asleep.

"Here's somebody to see you, Asa," Job said, as he heard the door close behind him; but the old man did not stir.

The deputy marshal walked forward, brusquely pushing the lad aside, and laid a heavy hand on Asa Whipple's shoulder. He paused then, as if puzzled by what his grasp felt. Then he put his other hand, not so ungently, into the old man's beard and lifted his head up.

"Say! I wasn't figurin' on this!" was his bewildered exclamation. "Here, quick, you! run and bring some water. Maybe it's only a faint."

This indeed it turned out to be—a deep swoon, the result of long privation and weakness, accented by the sudden relief and the subsequent strain of excitement.

Hazzard could not rouse the old man from his comatose lethargy, with all his rubbing and slapping of hands, and liberal use of snow upon the temple and lips. But he did satisfy himself that there was no imminent danger, and he went to work to spread out the bed again behind the stove, loosen old Asa's clothes, and stretch him out to sleep at his ease, comfortably tucked in with Hazzard's own overcoat, which the marshal had stripped off for the purpose, quite as if his mission in life had been to nurse rather than arrest people.

He had taken out of the overcoat pocket, before spreading it across the bed, a big navy revolver, a parcel or two, presumably of ammunition, and a couple of curious steel wristlets, linked together with a chain; Job looked at these latter, as they lay on the table, with profound interest.

Job had never seen handcuffs so near, and he longed to ask the great man to show him how they worked. Finally, after he had obeyed his curt instruction to put more wood on the fire, and the deputy marshal had seated himself by the stove with his feet balanced on a stick just inside the oven door, and a pipe in his mouth, Job ventured to lift the manacles from the table and inspect them.

As this passed without protest he went to the length of opening one of the bands on its hinge, and then shutting it about his wrist. The two parts went together with a clicking snap, and the boy, after a few fruitless efforts to open them or to slip his hand through, began to guess that he would have to ask the help of the deputy marshal to release him.

He would not humble himself thus, however, before it was a matter of sheer necessity; and he tugged away at the lock in dogged silence, until his wrist was red and sore. The consciousness that the official was grinning at him only made the thing worse.

"If I'd had the sense to do that myself," remarked Hazzard after a time, "when I first laid eyes on you this morning, and then nailed the chain up to the barn door-post, I'd have saved myself a heap of trouble. Leave it alone, or you'll swell your wrist out o' shape. I'll unlock it bimeby—maybe."

He smoked silently for a minute, dividing his ruminative gaze between the steaming leather in the oven, and the rueful countenance of the boy in the handcuffs.

"You're Hank Parshall's boy, ain't you?" he asked at last.

Job nodded and held his imprisoned hand forth to hint, without saying, that he had had enough of the handcuff.

The other paid no heed to the gesture. "What's the matter with the old man, here?" he inquired with a downward nod.

"He ain't had enough to eat," said Job, bluntly. "That's what's the matter with him. He told me himself he laid down there last night to starve to death."

Mr. Hazzard pointed a thumb to the greasy frying-pan, and the remains of the chicken on the table beside Job.

"People don't go to work that way to starve," he commented dryly.

"Mose brought him that—I guess I know pretty well where he got it, too. The old man allowed that that was what saved his life. They hadn't been a soul near him before since the snowfall—and he laid up. Oh, that reminds me!" Job finished by taking the two slices of bread from his pocket, and putting them on the table.

"Bring that for the old man?" queried the deputy marshal.

Job shook his head.

"No, it's my own breakfast. I was goin' to give it to Mose," he replied stoutly. "Say, take this thing off, won't you?"

Norm Hazzard laughed outright. "No!" he said. "Guess after that I'll have to put the other one onto you, too." His tone lapsed to seriousness as he went on: "Maybe you know somethin' about it—didn't I hear that this Mose Whipple went to the war as substitute for your man—Teachout?"

"Yes, sir, he did—and Teachout didn't give him not a dollar, but jest let it go on to the mortgage, and he promised to look out for old Asa here, and he didn't—and he'd begrudge him this bread here, if he knew it."

The deputy marshal nodded comprehendingly, and blew the smoke through his pipe.

"Charged me and Moak thirty-five cents apiece for our breakfasts this mornin', and twenty cents for the horse," he said, in a musing tone. "Reckon he's about the tightest old skinflint on the whole turnpike—and that's sayin' a good deal. So he got drafted, did he? Should 'a' thought he was too old."

"He ain't as old as he looks," explained Job. "He's a good deal meaner, though. I'm glad o' one thing, anyway. I ain't goin' back there any more, except to git my clothes and my money. I'm goin' to live in here with the old man, and kind o' look after him. I promised——"

"Promised Mose, eh?" broke in the deputy marshal.

"Yes—if you want to know—I did promise Mose! You can't touch me for that!"

"Why, that's skinnin' alive, that is—jest for that alone," said Hazzard, with portentous gravity, "to say nothin' of scootin' over here to give warnin', and bringin' that bread there in your pocket, and so on. Why, it'll puzzle a Philadelphy lawyer to find punishments bad enough for you."

Job looked him searchingly in the eye for a full minute, then held up the fettered hand again.

"Say, unlock this, will you?" he said, unabashed. "I knew you was foolin' all the time," he added, as the other produced the key from his pocket and turned the lock. "I could tell it right from the start."

"Me? me foolin'?" asked Hazzard, with simulated surprise. "Why, you're crazy, boy!"

"No, I spotted it right off," Job replied, eager to put into words the idea that had suddenly come to him. "Why, anybody could tell that. A sure-enough dead shot like you wouldn't fire ten shots at a man and not hit him once, if he wasn't foolin'. It was as plain as the nose on your face—you didn't really want to catch poor Mose. That's what made me take a shine to you, right off."

Norman Hazzard blew more smoke through his pipe, and grinned to himself, and even gave an abrupt little laugh aloud, shifting on the instant to an air of grave imperturbability.

"You mustn't talk like that—that is, outside," he said. "It might give folks wrong notions. Besides, I tell you you're mistaken. I never fired more to kill in all my life. But of course—the old man here—p'r'aps that does make it a little different."

He looked down as he spoke to where old Asa lay, under the overcoat, and Job felt sure that there was a change on his face—a change toward kindliness.

"Well, anyway," the boy persisted, "you wouldn't fire to kill now, if you was to catch up to Mose, and what's more, I don't believe you're goin' to try to catch up to him, neither."

"I ain't, eh?" broke in the deputy marshal. "You wait till Moak gets back with the snow-shoes. We'll run him down in no time. He ain't got no more chance than a lame mud-turtle."

The words sounded savage enough, and Job, scanning the lean, tanned face of the speaker, found his mind conjuring up again visions of those two other wrong-doers whom this hunter of men had shot down.

And yet, somehow, there seemed to be a sort of relenting twinkle in those sharp, cold, gray eyes of his.

  CHAPTER VI.

A HOME IN THE WOODS.

The pursuit of Mose Whipple had to be postponed, as it turned out, whether the deputy marshal relented or not.

It was late, for one thing, before Moak returned from his quest after snow-shoes, and what was worse, he came back empty-handed. He had driven about, over and through the drifted roads, for miles, directed by local rumors and surmise, to one after another of the isolated farm-houses scattered over the district, but had found no snow-shoes.

He was too cold and stiff, and too much annoyed with the day's experiences, to listen to any further delay, but sat doggedly in the sleigh, out on the road in front of the Whipple house, until the deputy marshal, followed by Job, came out to him.

"No, I ain't goin' to get out again, Norm," he said querulously. "I've had enough of this fool's errand. I'm froze solid now in one position, and I'm gittin' used to it. I don't want to climb out and limber up, and then have to freeze stiff all over again in some new shape. Just you give it up for a bad job, and come along. We can get to Octavius by supper-time if we look sharp."

"I never got beat like this before!" growled Norman Hazzard, kicking into the crust. "I hate to give up a thing this way. But," he added after a pause, "I s'pose you're right. It is a fool's errand, and I guess we're the fools, sure enough."

With a reluctant sigh he knocked the snow off his boots against the runner, as he was about to step into the sleigh. He seated himself beside Moak, and drew the buffalo-robe up over his breast, and said, "All right, go ahead!"

Moak grinned, in spite of his ill-temper.

"I didn't think it'd be as bad as that, Norm," he chuckled, "drivin' you clean out of your senses. Why, man, you're goin' away without your overcoat!"

"No. You mind your own business, Moak!" rejoined the deputy marshal, getting one of his shoulders under the robe.

"Shall I run in and get it for you?" suggested Job, half-turning to hasten on the errand.

"You mind your business, too!" said Hazzard, with affected roughness, but with an undertone of humane meaning which both his hearers caught and comprehended. "And look here, boy, if you and the old man find yourselves in need of help, why, you know where I'm to be found. Meanwhile you'd better take this." He handed something to Job.

Mr. Moak cast a look of hostile suspicion at the urchin by the roadside.

"Guess he's more likely to know where Mose Whipple's to be found!" Moak said. Then he drew the reins tight with a jerk, gave a loud, emphatic cluck to the horse, and the sleigh went dashing southward amid a defiant jingling of bells.

The boy stood watching till the vehicle had become a mere dwindling point of blackness on the sunlit waste of snow.

Then he turned his attention to the greenback which the deputy marshal had given him, and looked meditatively at the big and significant "5" on its right-hand corner.

When he lifted his eyes again the sleigh had disappeared. The pursuit of poor Mose was at an end.

When the spring of 1864 came slowly up on the bleak tablelands skirting the Adirondacks, it found the Whipple homestead undoubtedly better off than it had been a year before. Neighbors from Juno Mills who drove by, after the road had settled into usable condition, noticed that the place had been "spruced up," and looked considerably more shipshape than it had ever done in Mose's time. There was even a report down at the Corners that old Asa was going to borrow Taft's two-horse cultivator and put in some crops!

People said "old Asa," but every one knew that this rumor, and all other comments upon the improved appearance and prospects of the Whipple place, really referred to young Job. Even in this hard-working and tireless region, accustomed as it has always been to energetic and capable boys, men talked this spring approvingly of what the "Parshall youngster" had done, and bragged about having predicted from the start that he had the right stuff in him.

When one comes to set down in words what it was that Job had done, it does not sound very great. He had worked three days a week at the cheese factory, and gone to school the other three days—that is all. But the outcome of this was that April found old Asa Whipple once more, to all outward appearances, a hale and strong man for his years, and revealed the young lad who had adopted him, so to speak, as an enterprising and efficient member of the sparsely settled community, who had plans for doing things, and worked like a beaver, and paid ready money at the Corner grocery store.

When the talk of the neighborhood drifted to the subject of Mose Whipple's desertion and his supposed flight to Canada, it ended usually in the conclusion that old Asa had made a good exchange in getting such an industrious and go-ahead chap as Job Parshall in Mose's place.

Asa Whipple and Job were at work in the field across the road from the Whipple house one afternoon in mid-May. Job had come back early from the factory to finish a job upon which he had expended all the spare labor of a week. There was a patch of land, some rods square, from which he had uprooted the black moss. He had ploughed and fertilized it, and sown it with oats.

He had resolved to put this reclaimed land to grass later on, and to this end was now dragging across it a heavy tree bough, old Asa following behind him with a bag of grass seed, which he scattered over the loosened earth as he walked.

Job glanced over his shoulder from time to time to note the uneven way in which the old man cast the flying handfuls to one side.

"Seems to me I ain't ever goin' to make a good farmer of you," he said at last, good-naturedly enough, but still with a suggestion of impatience in his tone. "You'll see that grass come up all in wads and patches. Open your hand more, and try and scatter it regular like. Let me show you again."

The old man stopped, and submissively lent himself afresh to the lesson which Job sought to teach; but at the end he sighed and shook his white head.

"No, I'm too old to learn, Job," he said. "I never was cut out for a farmer, anyway. Besides, what's the use? The black moss'll be all back agin by next spring."

"By that time, if we had good luck with this, we could be keepin' a cow, and p'r'aps a horse to do the work," remonstrated the boy. "If I had a horse, I'd knock that moss endwise, or know the reason why."

A noise from the road close behind them attracted their attention. They turned, screening their eyes against the declining sun to see who was seated in the buggy which had halted there across the tumble-down rail fence. Then old Asa pointed a lean forefinger toward the newcomer.

"That's the reason why!" he said, bitterly.

Job could make out now that it was Elisha Teachout who sat in the buggy. The boy had not seen him since the eventful day of Mose's return and escape, when he had gone over to the big farm-house toward dusk and got his clothes and the money due him. This had not been so easy or pleasant a task that he was rejoiced now to see Mr. Teachout again.

The rich farmer, thinner and yellower and more like a bird of prey than ever against the reddening flare of sunlight, looked over at the pair with an ugly caricature of a smile on his hard, hairless face.

"I happened to be drivin' past," he called out at last, snapping the shrill words forth with a kind of malevolent enjoyment, "and I jest thought I'd stop and mention that I'm going to foreclose on this place in four days' time. I've entered judgment for one hundred and six dollars and seventy-three cents, countin' interest and all. I jest thought that mebbe you'd like to know. The sheriff'll be on hand here bright and early Monday mornin'. It jest occurred to me to speak of it as I was passin'."

With these mocking words still on the air, Mr. Teachout turned and drove down the road a few yards. A thought occurred to him, and he halted long enough to call out, more shrilly than before:—

"That Parshall boy needn't come back and whine around my place to be taken back! I won't hev him!" Then he put whip to his horse and was off.

The two workers in the field looked each other in the face for one dumb moment of bewilderment. Then old Asa took the seed-bag off his arm and deliberately held it upside down, till the last grain had sifted out to the little pile at his feet.

"I don't sow for Elisha Teachout to reap—not if I know myself!" he remarked, grimly.

"Can he do it? Is it as bad as all that?" demanded Job.

Asa nodded his head.

"I s'pose it is," he said. "They ain't no use tryin' to buck against a man like him. He's got the money, and that means he's got the law and the sheriff on his side. No, the jig's up. They ain't nothin' for it but for us to git out Monday."

Job had tossed the heavy bough to one side, and walked to the fence, where he was putting on his coat.

"Oh, yes, there is," said he.

"What do you mean, Job?" queried the old man, advancing toward him, "what else kin we do?"

"Git out before Monday," answered the boy, laconically.

They walked in silence across the road, and through the front yard to the house, without exchanging further words. Once indoors, they began to empty drawers, clear cupboards and shelves, and gather the portable belongings of the household into a heap on the table in the living-room. It was not a long task, and they performed it in silence. It was only when they rested upon its completion that the old man said, with a little quaver in his voice:—

"Almost the last words he spoke before he went was, 'And in the spring you must come and be with me in the woods.' Them was his identical words. You remember 'em, don't you, Job?"

The boy nodded assent.

"We'll kill the chickens—all five of 'em, and roast 'em to-night. They'll keep that way, and they'll see us through the whole tramp. If you'll see to that, I'll sort this stuff over, and see how much of it we really need. We can burn the rest.

"His grandfather and my father," the old man went on, "started here together, both poor men. He's managed it so that he's got everything and I've got nothing. But he can't prevent my bein' an honest man, and I'll go away not beholden to him for a cent. That was one of his chickens that my boy brought me here, when I was sick and pretty nigh starved to death. Very well, I'll leave one chicken in the coop when we go. It sha'n't be on my mind that I owe Elisha Teachout so much as a pinfeather."

Almost nothing was said between them, either then or during the evening, about Mose. Though they were starting to join him in the morning,—turning their backs upon civilization and the haunts of men,—the reserve which through all these months since his disappearance they had observed about him and his offence still weighed upon their tongues.

But in the dead watches of the night—this last night to be spent under the Whipple roof—Job woke up, where he lay wrapped in his blanket, and heard old Asa's voice softly murmuring, whether in his sleep or not the boy never knew: "In the spring you must come and be with me in the woods!"

Away in the recesses of the forest primeval, in a mountain nook linked by a sparkling band of spring-fed streams and a chain of cascades to the silent thoroughfare of the Raquette water, Mose Whipple had chosen his hiding-place, and built for himself a log hut. Thither came to him now, after a toilsome three days' journey,—by creek-bed and steep, boulder-strewn ravine, by lonely, placid, still water, and broad, reed-grown beaver-meadow, where the deer fed unalarmed on the lily pads, and the great tracks of the moose lay on the black mud,—old Asa and Job.

There was an idyllic charm in the first few weeks of this reunited life to both father and son. Mose took an excited delight, after months of solitude, in this new companionship, and in the splendid renewal of youth and high spirits which the free life and air of the wilderness brought to his father.

Job showed his practical character in fixing up a well-built lean-to at the side of the shanty, putting a new roof of spruce bark on the whole structure, and constructing a fishing raft to float on the still water up the outlet.

One day in early July, a chance wanderer in the forest—a Canadian who was looking about with a divining rod for minerals on the mountain range, and who stopped at the shanty overnight—left behind him a month-old copy of a New York weekly newspaper. In this paper, after breakfast, old Asa, sitting out on a log in the sunlight with his pipe, read the horrible story of the three days' fighting—one might say butchery—at Cold Harbor.

Mose and Job had already started out on a fishing excursion to new waters across the divide. When they returned, along toward four o'clock, they found awaiting them one who seemed scarcely recognizable for Asa, so old and bowed had he once more become.

The change was apparent as they entered the clearing, and beheld him seated by the doorway a full hundred yards away.

"He's had a stroke or something!" Mose exclaimed, and they both started on a run toward him.

As they came up, the old man lifted his head and looked his son in the face, with a glance which the other dimly recalled as belonging to that bitter December day when he had first come home.

"Mose," cried Asa, holding the paper out as he spoke, "it's all wrong! There's no pretendin' it ain't! We've been enjoyin' ourselves here, foolin' ourselves into forgettin', but it's all wrong! There ain't been so much as a word dropped sence the boy and me come here, about this thing, and it seemed as if the whole affair had just slipped our mem'ries—but it won't do. I've been sittin' here ever sence you went away, thinkin' it over—thinkin' hard enough every minute for the whole five months—and it's all wrong. Here, you read this for yourself."

Mose took the paper, and spelt his way through the long, blood-drenched narrative, without a word. When he had finished he returned his father's glance, with a look of mingled comprehension and assent in his eyes.

"All right," he said simply. "I feel the same as you do about it. I'll go!"

Both seemed to feel intuitively that this great resolve, thus formed, could not wait an instant for fulfilment. Hardly another word was spoken until Mose, his pockets filled for the journey and his blanket strapped, stood ready in front of the cabin, to say good-by.

"It's no good waiting till to-morrow," he said then. "The sooner it's over the better. You can get along first-rate here by yourselves. Job can take in skins and so on, and a mess of trout now and then,—he knows the way,—and bring back ammunition and your tobacco and so on. You'll be all right."

He paused a moment, and then took from his finger the little rubber ring which Job had restored to him in Teachout's cow-barn months before, and handed it to Asa.

"Here," he said, "that's a kind of keepsake. Good-by, dad. Good-by, Job."

Half an hour or more had elapsed, and Asa still sat on the log by the doorway, his head buried in thought. He could hear the strokes of Job's axe, from where the boy was cutting firewood for the evening on the edge of the clearing. As they fell on the air with their sharp, metallic ring, one after another, the old man's fancy likened them to the deadly noises of the battle-field, whither his boy was making his way.

But he regretted nothing—no, nothing, save that the act of reparation, of atonement, had not been made long before.

There came with abrupt suddenness another sound—the unfamiliar sound of a stranger's voice addressing him. Asa looked up, rousing himself from his reverie with difficulty. He saw that two men with rods, and fishing baskets, and camping packs on their backs, were standing in front of him. Their faces were in the shadow, but he slowly made out the foremost one to be the deputy marshal, Norman Hazzard.

"So here's where you moved to, eh?" the deputy marshal was asking, by way of not unfriendly salutation.

Asa stared hard for a minute at this astonishing apparition. Then his bewildered tongue found words.

"If you're lookin' for my son," he said proudly, "he's gone back to jine his regiment—to do his duty!"

Hazzard stared in turn. "Gone!" he exclaimed, "when?"

"This very day," rejoined Asa, "not an hour ago. He saw it was right, and he went!"

The deputy marshal threw up his hands in a gesture of despairing amazement. "Why, man alive!" he cried, "they'll shoot him like a dog!"

  CHAPTER VII.

ANOTHER CHASE AFTER MOSE.

Asa Whipple and the deputy marshal gazed in a dumbfounded way at each other through a cruel minute of silence, broken only by the echoing strokes of Job's axe out in the undergrowth beyond. It was the third man who first found his tongue; and Asa, looking dumbly at him, saw that he was no other than Nelse Hornbeck.

"Downright cur'ous that we should 'a' happened to hit on you like this, ain't it?" Nelse began. "If we'd ben tryin' to find you, we'd never 'a' done it in this born world! Norm and me, you see, we've ben fishin' up Panther River three days, and then we followed up the South Branch outlet, and I'd ben figgerin' on makin' a camp by the lake there, an' workin' down the other branch; but the flies were pretty bad, and Norm here, he took a fancy to this 'ere outlet, and our oil of tar was about give out, and so I——"

"Oh, shut up!" broke in the deputy marshal, impatiently. "Look here, Asa Whipple, is that straight what you're telling me—that Mose has started off to give himself up?"

The old man rose from the log and stood erect. He had never seemed so tall before in his life, and he looked down upon the more lithe and sinewy figure of the deputy marshal almost haughtily.

"No, not to give himself up. 'To jine his regiment,' was what I said."

Norman Hazzard snorted out an angry laugh.

"Were there ever two such simpletons under one roof?" he cried. "'Jine his regiment!' Why, man, I tell you, they'll simply take him and shoot him! They can't do anything else, even if they wanted to. That's the regulations. He can't jine anything, except what the newspapers call the 'silent majority.' Do you mean to tell me—a man of your age—you didn't know that?"

"All I know is," said Asa, doggedly, "that Mose seen his duty, and he done it. He left his regiment because there was nothin' doin', and some mean Dutchman who had a spite agin him wouldn't let him git a furlough, and he was scairt to death about me,—and you know as well as I do that if he hadn't come just as he did I'd been a gone coon,—and then he come off up in here, and we follered him, and there was so much to do, fixin' up this new place, that we hadn't time to do much thinkin' about what was right and what was wrong till only this mornin' I happened to git hold o' that paper there, and it seems the war's about ten times worse than ever, and when Mose came in and I showed it to him, and he read it through, he jest give me a look, and says he, 'You're right. I ain't got no business here. I'm off.' And off he went. That's all; and I'm proud of him."

The deputy marshal groaned. "Don't I tell you they won't have him? The minute they lay eyes on him he's a dead man. I don't believe the President himself could save him."

"Why don't you save him yourself?" put in a new voice, abruptly.

Mr. Hazzard turned and beheld Job, who had come up with his axe and a huge armful of wood. He threw these down, brushed his sleeve, and nodded to the deputy marshal.

"How'd do, Norm," he said now. "Why don't you go and stop him yourself?"

Hazzard half-closed one of his eyes, and contemplated Job with a quizzical expression. "Hello, youngster!" he remarked. "You're lookin' after these loons, heh? Well, I wonder you didn't put a veto on this tomfoolery. You're the only party in this camp that seems to have any sense."

"They wouldn't have listened to me," rejoined Job. "They were both too red-hot about the thing to listen to anybody. I thought it was foolishness myself, but they didn't ask me, and so I went and chopped wood and minded my own business. But it'd be different with you. If you could manage to overtake Mose, he'd listen to you. You can catch him if you run."

The deputy marshal on the instant had tossed aside his rod, and was hurriedly getting off his basket and pack.

"I'll have a try for it, anyway," he said. "But it'd be jest like Mose to put his back up and refuse to come, even after I'd caught him."

"Tell him his father wants him to come back," suggested Job. "That'll fetch him. Here, Asa," the boy continued, "give us that ring there. Norm can take that and show it to him as a sign that you've changed your mind. That's the way they do it in the story-books. That's all rings are for, accordin' to them."

"But I don't know as I hev changed my mind," old Asa began hesitatingly, but with his fingers on the ring.

"Well, you'll have time to do that while Norm's gone," commented Job.

With grave insistence he took the old rubber ornament from Asa's hand and gave it to Hazzard. "Keep on this side of the outlet," he added. "There's a clear path most of the way. You can get down the big falls by the stones if you go out close to the stream. You'll catch him easy this side of the Raquette."

The deputy marshal wheeled and started down the clearing on a long-stride, loping run, like a greyhound. Almost as they looked he was lost to sight among the trees beyond.

It occurred to Nelse Hornbeck now to relieve himself of his pack and accoutrements, and to make himself otherwise at home. He lighted his pipe, and stretched himself out comfortably on the roots of a stump by the doorway.

"Well," he remarked after a little, "I allus said I'd ruther have a pack of nigger bloodhounds after me than Norm Hazzard if I'd done anything that I wanted to git away for. But of course this is different. I don't know how much good he'll be tryin' to catch a man that ain't done anything. I s'pose it would be different, wouldn't it? But then of course he could pretend to himself that Mose had done something—and for that matter, all he's got to do is to play that Mose is still a deserter; and of course if you come to that, why, he is a deserter."

"He ain't nothing of the kind!" roared old Asa, with vehemence.

"Well, of course, Asy, if you say so," Nelse hastened to get in, with a pacific wave of his pipe, "I don't pretend to be no jedge myself in military affairs; I dessay you're right. Of course Mose is in one place, and the army's in another, but that don't prove that it wasn't the army that deserted Mose, does it? I'm a man of peace myself, and I don't set up to be no authority on these p'ints."

"Well, then, what are you talkin' about?" interposed Job, severely. "Don't you see old Asa's upset and nervous about Mose? Tell us about things you know something about. How's old Teachout?"

"Well, now, cur'ous enough," said Nelse, thoughtfully, "that's jest one of the things I don't know about at all, and nobody else knows, either—that is, this side o' Jordan. 'Lishe Teachout's ben dead of inflammation o' the lungs now—le's see—up'ards of a month. Why, come to think of it, Asy, why, yes, he ketched his cold goin' out to attend the sheriff's sale at your old place, and that daughter of his that run away with the lightnin'-rod agent—you remember?—she's come in for the hull property, and they say she's goin' to sell it and live down in New York. I guess she'll scatter the money right and left. And 'Lishe worked hard for it, too!"

Old Asa cast a ruminant glance over the little shanty, and the clearing full of warm sunshine, and the broad belt of stately dark firs beyond rustling their boughs in soft harmony with the tinkle of the stream below, and swaying their tall tops gently against the light of bright blue overhead. Then he drew a long, restful breath.

"There's things a heap sight better than money in this world," he said.

Mose had started out on his impulsive errand buoyantly enough. He made his way down the side hill to the outlet with a light, swinging step, and pushed along on the descent of the creek-bed, leaping from boulder to boulder, and skirting the pools with the agility of a practised woodsman, almost as if his mission were a joyful one.

At the outset, indeed, his ruling sensation was one of relief. He had had four months and more of solitude here in the woods, from New Year's through till the weary winter broke at last, in which to think over his performance.

He could not bring himself to regret having come home; the thought that it had saved his father's life settled that. But side by side with this conclusion had grown up an intense humiliation and disgust for the necessities which had forced upon him this badge of "deserter." Granted that they were necessities, the badge was an itching and burning brand none the less.

The excitement and change involved in the coming of Asa and Job had drawn his attention away from this for a time, but the sore remained unhealed. With the chance occurrence of the newspaper, and the sight of its effect upon his father, the half-forgotten pain reasserted itself with such stinging force that the one great end in life seemed to be to escape from its intolerable burden.

In this mood of shame and self-reproach, Mose had jumped with hot eagerness at the notion of returning to the ranks, and rushed with unthinking haste to put it into effect.

As the thought came to him now that perhaps this haste had also been unfeeling, he unconsciously slackened the pace at which he was descending the ravine. His father was once more in good health and vigor, no doubt, and was as eager as he himself about having the odium of desertion washed from the family name, if not more eager than he; but Mose began to wish that they had talked it over a little more—that he had made his leave-taking longer and less abrupt.

The war seemed to have become a much bloodier and deadlier thing than he had known it. That paper had spoken of a full hundred thousand men having been lost between the Wilderness and Cold Harbor. It was quite likely that he now, as he swung along down the waterway, was going to his death. In his present mood this had no personal terrors for him, but it did cast a chill shadow over his thoughts of his father.

They two had chosen their own life together—with all the views and aims of other men's lives put quite at one side. Their happiness had not been in making money, in getting fine clothes, or houses, or lands, but just in being together, with the woods and the water and the sky about them.

Oddly enough, Mose remembered now, for the first time almost since his escape from the lines at Brandy Station, that if it had not been for that wretched Teachout mortgage, he need never have gone to the war at all. The draft would have exempted him, as the only support of an aged father. That seemed at first sight to justify him in leaving as he did, and he walked still more slowly now to think this over.

But no, nothing justified him. Perhaps his father's suffering condition excused him in some measure—gave him the right to say that under the circumstances he would do the same thing again; but that wasn't a justification.

So Mose worried his perplexed mind with the confusing moral problems until in sheer self-defence he had to shake them all off, root and branch, and say to himself, "At any rate I'm on my way back; I'm started, and I'll go."

He had halted, as he grasped this solution of the puzzle, to draw breath and look about him. He stood on a jutting spur of naked granite, overhanging the steep, shelving hillside, and commanding a vast panorama of sloping forest reaches, with broken gleams here and there of the Raquette waters way below, and with range upon range of fir-clad mountain cones rising in basins beyond.

It dawned upon him, as his glance wandered over this stupendous prospect, that he had heard at intervals a curious noise in the woods over at his left, as of some big body making its way through the underbrush in haste. If he had had a gun with him he reflected now that he might have investigated the matter.

The sounds seemed more like those made by a bear than by a deer—perhaps more like a moose than either. Mose had never had the fortune to see a moose. It would be just his luck, he thought, with a half-grin, to see one now, when he had no gun, and was quitting the woods forever.

Hark! there was the noise again, below and ahead of him now, but still to the left. He thought he almost saw a dark object push through the bushes, hardly a dozen yards away.

Mose leaped lightly down upon the moss at the base of his perch, and crept cautiously along under the ledge of rock, the cover of which would protect him quite to within a few feet of these bushes. Reaching this point, he lifted his head to look.

His astonished gaze rested upon no moose or bear, or other denizen of the wild wood, but took in at point-blank instead the lean and leathery countenance of Deputy Marshal Norman Hazzard. It in no wise lessened Mose's confusion to note that this unlooked-for countenance wore a somewhat sardonic grin.

"Well, Mose," Mr. Hazzard observed, "I learnt last winter that a stern chase was a long chase, and I thought this time I'd make a slicker job of it by headin' you off, and gittin' 'round in front. See?"

"Yes, I see," said Mose, mechanically; but in truth he felt himself quite unable to see at all. This sudden intrusion of the officer of the law between him and his patriotic resolve, this apparition of the man who had hunted him into the wintry woods with a revolver, seemed to change and confuse everything.

There rose in him the impulse to throw himself fiercely upon the deputy marshal; then, oddly enough, he was conscious of a chuckling sense of amusement instead.

"Guess I got the laugh on you this time, Norm," he said. "You've had your hull trip for nothin'. I'm on my way now, of my own motion, to jine my regiment, or enlist somewhere else, I don't care which."

Mr. Hazzard ostentatiously drew a revolver from his pocket.

"I ain't got any handcuffs with me," he remarked, "but you'll do well to bear in mind that I ain't at all shy about firin' this here, if there's any need for it."

"But I tell you I'm goin' of my own accord!" Mose expostulated. "If you had a hull battery of twelve-pounders with you, I couldn't do no more'n that, could I? You can come along down with me if you like—the hull way—only there's no use o' your bein' disagreeable and goin' round pullin' revolvers."

The deputy marshal did not put up the weapon, and the grin on his face grew deeper.

"Nobody, to look at you," said he, "would think you'd give an officer like me more trouble than any other man in the district. I had about the hottest run on record to chase you safely into the woods here. And now, by gum, here I've had to gallop myself all out of breath, barkin' my shins and skinnin' my elbows in a rough-and-tumble scoot through the underbrush, all to keep you from makin' a fool of yourself agin! It's enough to make a man resign office."

Mose stared at the speaker—puzzled by the smile even more than by this unintelligible talk.

"See here," Norman Hazzard went on, "I represent Uncle Sam, don't I? Well, then, Uncle Sam has to be pretty rough on fellows that shirk, and run away, and behave mean—but he's got a heart inside of him all the same. He knows about you, and he understands that while you did a very bad thing, you did it from first-rate motives. So he says to himself, 'Now if that fellow Mose comes around and pokes himself right under my nose, I'll be obliged to shoot him jest for the effect upon the others; but if he's only got sense enough to lay low, and keep on my blind side, why, I won't hurt a hair of his head.' Now do you see?"

"You mean that I'm to stay here?" asked Mose, in bewilderment.

"I mean that you're a dead man if you don't," replied Hazzard. "Of course my business is to arrest you, and take you back to be shot. But I ain't workin' at my trade this week—I'm fishin'. And so I tell you to come back with me, and cook us some trout for supper and shut up, that's all."

"But my father," stammered Mose, "he was as sot on my goin' back as I was—this 'deserter' business has been a-stickin' in his crop all winter."

"No, it's all right," said Hazzard. "I've explained it to him. Here's the ring you give him—to show that he understands it. The fact is, he and you ain't got any business to live outside the woods. You're both too green and too soft to wrastle 'round down amongst folks. They cheat you out of your eye-teeth, and tromple you underfoot, and drive you to the poorhouse or the jail. Jest you and Asa stay up here where you belong, and don't you go down any more, foolin' with that buzz-saw that they call 'civilization.'"

Then the two men turned and began together the ascent of the outlet.

That is the story. A good deal of it I heard from Mose Whipple's own lips, at different times, years after the war, when we sat around the huge fire in front of his shanty in the evening, with the big stars gleaming overhead, and the barking of the timber wolves coming to us from the distant mountain side, through the balmy night silence.

Generally Ex-Sheriff Norman Hazzard was one of our fishing party, and he never failed to joke with Mose about the time when he fired ten shots at a running target, and missed every one.

I picked up from their numerous conversations too,—for Mose, like all the old-time Adirondack guides, would rather talk any time than clean fish or chop fire-wood,—that Asa lived to be a very old Asa indeed, and that young Job Parshall, whom Hazzard took away with him, saw through school, and then set up in business, was already being talked of for supervisor in his native town.

A DAY IN THE WILDERNESS.