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The Deserter, and Other Stories: A Book of Two Wars

by Harold Frederic · English · Gutenberg #44304 · 355,876 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Deserter, and Other Stories: A Book of Two Wars

Author: Harold Frederic

Illustrator: George Foster Barnes
        Gilbert William Gaul
        Frank T. Merrill
        Henry Sandham


        
Release date: November 28, 2013 [eBook #44304]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DESERTER, AND OTHER STORIES: A BOOK OF TWO WARS ***

Transcriber's Note: Minor typographical errors have been corrected
without note. Irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have
been retained as printed. Words printed in italics are noted with
underscores: _italics_.


[Illustration: "I'LL UNLOCK IT BIMEBY--MAYBE." (_See page 91._)]




THE DESERTER

AND OTHER STORIES


_A Book of Two Wars_


BY

HAROLD FREDERIC


AUTHOR OF "IN THE VALLEY," "SETH'S BROTHER'S WIFE,"
"THE COPPERHEAD," ETC.


_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY_

MERRILL, SANDHAM, GILBERT GAUL AND GEORGE FOSTER BARNES


BOSTON
LOTHROP PUBLISHING COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1898,
BY
LOTHROP PUBLISHING COMPANY.


_All rights reserved._

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.




CONTENTS.


CHAPTER                                                          PAGE

THE DESERTER.

  I. DISCOVERIES IN THE BARN                                        3

 II. A SUDDEN DEPARTURE                                            20

III. FATHER AND SON                                                42

 IV. THE "MEANEST WORD"                                            60

  V. THE DEPUTY MARSHAL                                            80

 VI. A HOME IN THE WOODS                                           98

VII. ANOTHER CHASE AFTER MOSE                                     117


A DAY IN THE WILDERNESS.

  I. THE VALLEY OF DEATH                                          139

 II. LAFE RECONNOITRES THE VALLEY                                 157

III. THE BOUNTY-JUMPER                                            177

 IV. RED PETE IN CAPTIVITY                                        198

  V. LAFE RESCUES AN OFFICER, AND FINDS HIS COUSIN                216


HOW DICKON CAME BY HIS NAME.

  I. THE MAKING OF A SOLDIER                                      239

 II. A BURST FOR FREEDOM                                          260

III. A STRANGE CHRISTMAS EVE                                      279

 IV. UP IN THE WORLD                                              299


WHERE AVON INTO SEVERN FLOWS.

  I. HUGH THE WRITER                                              319

 II. SIR HEREWARD'S RING                                          350

III. HOW HUGH MET THE PRINCE                                      381




ILLUSTRATIONS.


"'I'LL UNLOCK IT BIMEBY--MAYBE'"                        _Frontispiece_

                                                                 PAGE

"'SH-H! TALK LOWER!'"                                              27

"'GIMME THAT GUN!'"                                                61

"'DROP IT--YOU!'"                                                 175

LAFE AND THE BOUNTY-JUMPER                                        195

"'I'M STEVE HORNBECK'S SON!'"                                     231

"SIR WATTY CAME STALKING DOWN"                                    249

"'WHOSE BLOOD IS THIS?'"                                          285

"HE ADVANCED AND KISSED THE LADY'S HAND"                          357

"TWO DOZEN PIKE-HEADS CLASHED DOWN AS BY A SINGLE TOUCH"          385




THE DESERTER.




CHAPTER I.

DISCOVERIES IN THE BARN.


It was the coldest morning of the winter, thus far, and winter is no
joke on those northern tablelands, where the streams still run black in
token of their forest origin, and old men remember how the deer used to
be driven to their clearings for food, when the snow had piled itself
breast high through the fastnesses of the Adirondacks. The wilderness
had been chopped and burned backward out of sight since their pioneer
days, but this change, if anything, served only to add greater
bitterness to the winter's cold.

Certainly it seemed to Job Parshall that this was the coldest morning
he had ever known. It would be bad enough when daylight came, but the
darkness of this early hour made it almost too much for flesh and blood
to bear. There had been a stray star or two visible overhead when he
first came out-of-doors at half-past four, but even these were missing
now.

The crusted snow in the barnyard did throw up a wee, faint light of its
own, for all the blackness of the sky, but Job carried, besides a
bucket, a lantern to help him in his impending struggle with the pump.
This ancient contrivance had been ice-bound every morning for a
fortnight past, and one needn't be the son of a prophet to foresee that
this morning it would be frozen as stiff as a rock.

It did not turn out to be so prolonged or so fierce a conflict as he
had apprehended. He had reasoned to himself the previous day that if
the pump-handle were propped upright with a stick overnight, there
would be less water remaining in the cylinder to freeze, and had made
the experiment just before bedtime.

It worked fairly well. There was only a good deal of ice to be knocked
off the spout with a sledge-stake, and then a disheartening amount of
dry pumping to be done before the welcome drag of suction made itself
felt in the well below, like the bite of a big fish in deep water.

Job filled his bucket and trudged back with it to the cow-barn,
stamping his feet for warmth as he went.

By comparison with the numbing air outside, this place was a dream of
coziness. Two long lines of cows, a score or more on a side, faced each
other in double rows of stanchions. Their mere presence had filled the
enclosure with a steaming warmth.

The ends of the barn and the loft above were packed close with hay,
moreover, and half a dozen lantern lights were gleaming for the hired
men to see by, in addition to a reflector lamp fastened against a post.

The men did not mind the cold. They had been briskly at work cleaning
up the stable and getting down hay and fodder, and the exercise kept
their blood running and spirits light. They talked as they plied shovel
and pitchfork, guessing how near the low-mercury mark of twenty below
zero the temperature outside had really fallen, and chaffing one of
their number who had started out to go through the winter without
wearing an overcoat.

Their cheery voices, resounding through the half-gloom above the soft,
crackling undertone of the kine munching their breakfast seemed to add
to the warmth of the barn.

The boy Job had begun setting about a task which had no element of
comfort in it. He got out a large sponge, took up the bucket he had
brought from the well, and started at the end of one of the rows to
wash clean the full udder of each of the forty-odd cows in turn. In a
few minutes the milkers would be ready to begin, and to keep ahead of
them he must have a clear start of a dozen cows.

When he had at last reached this point of vantage, the loud din of the
streams against the sides of the milkers' tin pails had commenced
behind him.

He rose, straightened his shoulders, and shook his red, dripping hands
with a groan of pain. The icy water had well nigh frozen them.

It was a common thing for all about the barn to warm cold hands by
thrusting them deep down into one of the barrels of brewers' grains
which stood in a row beyond the oat-bin. The damp, crushed malt
generates within its bulk so keen a heat that even when the top is
frozen there will be steam within. Job went over and plunged his cold
hands to the wrist in the smoking fodder. He held them there this
morning for a luxurious extra minute, wondering idly as he did so how
the cows sustained that merciless infliction of ice-water without any
such comforting after-resource.

Suddenly he became conscious that his fingers, into which the blood was
coming back with a stinging glow, had hit upon something of an unusual
character in the barrel. He felt of it vaguely for a moment, then drew
the object forth, rubbed off the coating of malt, and took it over to
the lamp.

It was a finger-ring carved out of a thick gutta-percha button, but
with more skill than the schoolboys of those days used to possess; and
in its outer rim had been set a little octagonal silver plate, bearing
some roughly cut initials.

Job seemed to remember having seen the ring before, and jumped to the
conclusion that some one of the hired men had unconsciously slipped it
off while warming his hands in the grains. He went back with it to the
milkers, and went from one to another, seeking an owner.

Each lifted his head from where it rested against the cows flank,
glanced at the trinket, and making a negative sign bent down again to
his work. The last one up the row volunteered the added comment:

"You better hustle ahead with your spongin' off; I'm just about through
here!"

The boy put the circlet in his pocket--it was much too large for any of
his fingers--and resumed his task. The water was as terribly cold as
ever, and the sudden change seemed to scald his skin; but somehow he
gave less thought to his physical discomfort than before.

It was very funny to have found a ring like that. It reminded him of a
story he had read somewhere, and could not now recall, save for the
detail that in that case the ring contained a priceless jewel, the
proceeds of which enriched the finder for life. Clearly no such result
was to be looked for here. It was doubtful if anybody would give even
twenty-five cents for this poor, home-made ornament. All the same it
was a ring, and Job had a feeling that the manner of its discovery was
romantic.

Working for a milkman does not open up so rich a field of romance that
any hints of the curious or remarkable can be suffered to pass
unnoticed. The boy pondered the mystery of how the ring got into the
barrel. For a moment he dallied with the notion that it might belong to
his employer, who owned the barn and almost all the land within sight,
and a prosperous milk-route down in Octavius.

But no! Elisha Teachout was not a man given to rings; and even if he
were, he assuredly would not have them of rubber. Besides, the grains
had only been carted in from town two days before, and Mr. Teachout had
been nursing his rheumatism indoors for fully a week.

It was more probable that some one down in the brewery at Octavius had
lost the ring. When Job had been there for grains, he had noticed that
the workers were cheerful and hearty fellows. No doubt they might be
trusted to behave handsomely upon getting back a valued keepsake which
had been given up as forever gone.

Perhaps--who could tell?--this humble, whittled-out piece of
gutta-percha might be prized beyond rubies on account of its family
associations. Such things had happened before, according to the
story-books; and forthwith the lad lost himself in a maze of brilliant
day-dreams, rose-tinted by this possibility.

He could almost behold himself adopted by the owner of the brewery--the
fat, red-faced Englishman with the big watch-chain, whom he had seen
once walking majestically among his vats. Perhaps, in truth, Job was a
trifle drowsy.

All at once he roused himself with a start, and began to listen with
all his ears. The milkers behind him were talking about the ring. They
had to shout to one another to overcome the fact of separation and the
noise in their pails, and Job could hear every word.

"I tell you who had a ring like that--Mose Whipple," one of them called
out. "Don't you remember? He made it with his jack-knife, that time he
was laid up with the horse kickin' him in the knee."

"Seems's if I do," said another. "He was always whittlin' out somethin'
or other--a peach-stone basket, or an ox-gad, or somethin'."

"Some one was tellin' me yesterday," put in a third, "that old man
Whippf sick abed. Nobody ain't seen him around for up'ards of a
fortnight. I guess this cold snap'll about see the last o' him. He's
been poorly all the fall."

"He ain't never ben the same man since Mose 'listed," remarked the
first speaker; "that is if you call it 'listin' when a man takes his
three hundred dollars to go out as a substitute."

"Yes, and don't even git the money at that, but jest has it applied to
the interest he owes on his mortgage. _That's_ payin' for a dead horse,
if anything is in this world!"

"Well, Mose is the sort o' chap that _would_ be workin' to pay for
some kind o' dead horse all his life, anyway. If it wasn't one it'd
be another. Never knew a fellow in all my born days with so little
git-up-and-git about him. He might as well be shoulderin' a musket as
anything else, for all the profit he'd git out of it.

"A chip of the old block, if there ever was one. The old man always
wanted to do a little berryin', an' a little fishin', an' a little
huntin', an' keep a dozen traps or so in the woods, an' he'd throw up
the best-payin' job in the deestrict to have a loafin' spell when the
fit took him--an' Mose was like him as two peas in a pod.

"I remember one year, Mose an' me hired out in the middle o' March, an'
we hadn't fairly begun early ploughin' before he said he wasn't feelin'
right that spring, an' give up half his month's wages to go home, an'
then what do we see next day but him an' his father down by the bridge
with their fishpoles, before the snow-water'd begun to git out o' the
creek. What _kin_ you do with men like that?"

"Make substitutes of 'em!" one of the milkers exclaimed, and at this
there was a general laugh.

Every one on the farm, and for that matter on all the other farms for
miles round, knew that Elisha Teachout had been drafted the previous
summer, and had sent Moses Whipple to the front in his place. This
relation between the rich man and the poor man was too common a thing
in those war times to excite particular comment. But, as Mr. Teachout
was not beloved by his hired men, they enjoyed a laugh whenever the
subject came up.

Job had gone over to the lamp, during the progress of this talk, and
scrutinized the ring. Surely enough, the clumsily scratched initials on
the little silver plate, obviously cut down from an old three-cent
piece, were an M and a W.

This made it all the more difficult to puzzle out how the ring came in
the barrel. The lad turned the problem over in his mind with increasing
bewilderment.

He had known Mose Whipple all his life. His own father, who died some
years ago, had accounted Mose among his intimate friends, and Job's
earliest recollections were of seeing the two start off together of a
spring morning with shot-guns on their shoulders and powder-flasks hung
round their bodies.

They had both been poor men, and if they had not cared so much for
hunting--at least if one of them had not--Job reflected that probably
this very morning he himself would be sleeping in a warm bed, instead
of freezing his hands in the hard employ of Elisha Teachout.

It was impossible not to associate Mose with these recriminatory
thoughts; yet it was equally impossible to be angry with him long. The
boy, indeed, found himself dwelling upon the amiable side of Mose's
shiftless nature. He remembered how Mose used to come round to their
poor little place, after Job's father's death, to see if he could help
the widow and her brood in their struggle.

After Mrs. Parshall had married again, and gone West, leaving Job to
earn his own living on the Teachout farm, Mose had always kept a kindly
if intermittent eye on the boy. Only the previous Christmas he had
managed, somehow, to obtain an old pair of skates as a present for Job,
and when he had gone to the war in the following August, only the fact
that he had to sell his shot-gun to pay a pressing debt prevented his
giving that to the boy for his own.

The news that old Asa Whipple was ill forced its way to the top of
Job's thoughts. He resolved that that very day, if he could squeeze in
the time for it, he would cut across lots on the crust to the Whipple
house, and see how the lonely old man was.

As the milkers said, old Asa had been "poorly" since his Mose went
away. It was only too probable that he had been extremely poor as well.

Even when Mose was at home, theirs was the most poverty-stricken
household in the township. Left to his own resources, and failing
swiftly all at once in health, the father had tried to earn something
by knitting mittens and stockings.

It had looked funny enough to see this big-framed, powerfully built old
man fumbling at his needles like some grandmother in her rocking-chair
by the stove.

It occurred to Job now that there was something besides humor in the
picture. He had been told that people were making woollen mittens and
stockings now, like everything else, by machinery. Very likely old Asa
couldn't sell his things after he had knit them; and that might mean
starvation.

Yes, that very day, in spite of everything, he would go over and see.

He had finished his task now. The milkers had nearly finished theirs.
Two of the hired men were taking the cloth strainers off the tops of
all the cans but one, and fastening on the covers instead. He could
hear the bells on the harness of the horses outside, waiting with the
big sleigh to rush off to town with the milk. It was still very dark
out-of-doors.

Job put away his water-bucket, warmed his hands once more in the
grains-barrel, and set about getting down a fresh supply of hay for the
cows. Six weeks of winter had pretty well worn away the nearest haymow,
and the boy had to go further back toward the end of the barn, into a
darkness which was only dimly penetrated by the rays of the lantern.

Working thus, guided rather by sense of touch than of sight, the boy
suddenly felt himself stepping on something big and rounded, which had
no business in a haymow. It rolled from under his feet, and threw him
off his balance to his hands and knees. A muttered exclamation rose
from just beside him, and then suddenly he was gripped bodily in the
clutch of a strong man.

Frightened and vainly struggling, Job did not cry out, but twisted his
head about in the effort to see who it was that he had thus strangely
encountered. There was just light enough from the distant lantern to
reveal in the face so menacingly close to his--of all unlooked-for
faces in the world--that of Mose Whipple!

"Why, Mose!" he began, in bewilderment.

"Sh-h! Keep still!" came in a fierce whisper, "unless you want to see
me hung higher than Haman!"




CHAPTER II.

A SUDDEN DEPARTURE.


The man upon whose sleeping form Job had stepped in the haymow sat up
and looked about him in a half-puzzled fashion, mechanically brushing
the loose particles from his hair and neck.

"I s'pose it's mornin'," he whispered, after a minute's silence. "How
long'll it be before daylight?"

Job, released from the other's clutch, had scrambled to his feet, and
stood staring down in astonishment at his old friend, Mose Whipple. He
had regained his fork, and held it up as if to repel a possible second
attack.

"What did you want to pitch on to me that way for?" he asked at last in
displeased tones.

"Sh-h! Talk lower!" urged Mose under his breath. "I didn't mean to hurt
you, sonny. I didn't know who you was. You come tromplin' on me here
when I was fast asleep, and I took hold of you when I wasn't hardly
woke up, you see, that's all. I didn't hurt you, did I?"

[Illustration: "SH-H! TALK LOWER!"]

"No," Job admitted grudgingly. "But there wasn't no need to throw me
down and choke me all the same."

"I thought it was somebody comin' to catch me," explained the other,
still in a whisper. "But who else is here in the barn? What time is it
gettin' to be?"

"They're just through milkin'," replied the boy. "They're gettin' the
cans out into the sleigh. They'll all be gone in a minute or two. Time?
Oh, it ain't six yet."

"That's all right," said Mose, with a weary sigh of relief. He added,
upon reflection: "Say, sonny, can you manage to get me something to
eat? I've gone the best part of two days now without a mouthful."

"Mebbe I can," responded Job, doubtingly. Then a sudden thought struck
him. "Say, Mose," he went on, "I bet I can tell what you did the first
thing when you came into the barn here. You went and stuck your hands
into the grains there--that's how it was."

The man displayed no curiosity as to the boy's meaning. "Yes, by
jiminy!" he mused aloud. "I'd 'a' liked to have got in head first. I
tell you, sonny, I was about as near freezin' to death as they make
'em. I couldn't have gone another hundred rods to save my life. They'd
have found me froze stiff on the road, that's all."

"But what are you doing here, anyway?" asked Job. "You ain't gone and
deserted, have you?"

"Well," said the other, doggedly, "you can call it what you like. One
thing's certain--I ain't down South, _be_ I?"

"Something else is pretty certain, too," the boy put in. "They'll hang
you, sure!"

Mose did not seem to have much doubt on this point. "Anyway, I'll see
the old man first," he said. "It's pitch dark outdoors, ain't it?"

The boy nodded. "I must git along with my work," he commented, after
another little silence. "What are you figgerin' on doin', anyway,
Mose?" he asked gravely.

"Well, I'm goin' to sneak out while it's still dark," said the man,
"and git across lots to our place, and just wake up the old man,
and--and--well, see how he is, that's all. Mebbe I can manage it so
that I can skip out again, and nobody be the wiser. But whether or no,
that's what I'm bound to do. Prob'ly you've heard--is he--is his health
pretty middlin' good?"

"Seems to me some one was saying something about his being kind o'
under the weather lately," replied Job, with evasion. "I was thinkin'
of goin' over this afternoon myself, if I could git the time, to see
him. The fact is, Mose, I guess he _is_ failing some. It's been a
pretty tough winter for old folks, you know. Elisha Teachout's been
laid up himself with rheumatics now for more'n a fortnight, and he
ain't old exactly."

"He ain't had 'em half bad enough!" cried Mose, springing to his feet
with suddenly revived energy. "If he's let the old man suffer--if he
ain't kept his word by him--I'll--I'll take it out of his old hide if I
have to go to jail for it!"

"You've got enough other things to go to jail for, and get hung for
into the bargain, I should think," said Job. "You'd better not talk so
loud, either."

Surely enough, one of the hired men seemed to have remained in the
barn, and to have caught the sound of voices--for the noise of his
advancing footsteps could be heard on the floor between the stanchions.
Mose threw himself flat, and rolled under the hay as best he could. Job
began to sing in a low-voiced, incoherent way for a moment, and then
loudly. Prying up a forkful of hay, he staggered under the burden back
to the cows, singing as he came toward the intruder.

It was only Nelse Hornbeck, an elderly and extra hand who worked at
starvation wages during the winter, chopping firewood and doing odd
chores about the house and barns. When he saw Job he stopped. He was in
a sociable mood, and though he leaned up against one of the stanchions
and offered no sign of going farther, displayed a depressing desire for
conversation.

The boy came and went, bringing in the hay and distributing it along
under the double row of broad pink noses on either side. He made the
task as long as he could in the hope of tiring Nelse out, but without
avail.

"I dunno but I'm almost sorry I didn't enlist myself last fall,"
drawled Hornbeck, settling himself in an easy posture. "So far's I can
make out, Mose Whipple and the rest of the boys are having a great
sight better time of it down South, with nothin' to do and plenty o'
help to do it, than we are here to hum. Why, Steve Trimble's
brother-in-law writes him that they're havin' more fun down there than
you can shake a stick at; livin' snug and warm in sort o' little houses
built into the ground, and havin' horse-races and cock-fights and so on
every day. They ain't been no fightin' since Thanksgivin', he says, and
they're all gittin' fat as seals."

"Well, why _don't_ you enlist then?" demanded Job, curtly, going on
with his work.

"I dunno," said the hired man in a meditative way. "I guess I'm afeard
o' gittin' homesick. I'd always be hankerin' to git back and see my
folks, and they won't let you do that, nohow. A lot of 'em tries to
sneak off, they say, but Steve's brother-in-law says they've got
cavalry-men on horseback all around outside the camps, and they just
nail everybody that tries to git out, and then they take 'em back to
camp and shoot 'em. That's what they do--lead 'em out before breakfast
and shoot 'em down."

"I thought they hung deserters," said Job, pausing with his fork in
air.

"Some they hang and some they shoot," replied Nelse. "I don't see as it
makes much difference. I'd about as lieve be one as the other. I guess
they make it a rule to hang them that gits off into the North and has
to be brought way back again. That's only reasonable, because they've
give 'em so much extry trouble."

Job was interested. "But suppose a man does get up North--I guess they
ain't much chance of their ever findin' him after that."

"Ain't they?" exclaimed the hired man, incredulously. "Why, it's a
thousand to one they catch him! They've got their detectives in every
county just doin' nothin' but watchin' for deserters. They git paid for
every one they catch, so much a head, and that makes 'em keep their
eyes peeled."

"But how can you tell a deserter from any other man," pursued Job, "so
long as he's got ordinary clothes on and minds his own business and
keeps away from where he's known?"

"Oh, they always point for home--that's the thing of it. What do they
desert for? Because they're homesick. So all the detectives have got to
do is to watch their place, and nab 'em when they try to sneak in. It's
as easy as rollin' off a log. They always git caught, every mother's
son of 'em."

Tiresome Nelse Hornbeck was still talking when Job came to the end of
all possible pretexts of employment in the cow-barn, and was only too
obviously waiting to accompany the boy over to the house to breakfast.
At last Job had to accept the situation and go.

The boy dared no more than steal for a moment back into the hay, feel
about with his foot for where Mose lay hidden in the dark, and drop the
furtive whisper, "Going to breakfast. If I can I'll bring you some."

Then, in company with Nelse, he left the barn, shutting and hooking the
door behind him. It occurred to him that Mose must have effected an
entrance by the door at the other end, which was fastened merely by a
latch. Otherwise the displacement of the outer hook would have been
noticed.

It was lucky, he thought in passing, that Elisha Teachout did not have
padlocks on the doors of his cow-barn, as he had on those which
protected his horses and wagons and grain. If he had, there would have
been the lifeless and icy body of Mose, lying on the frozen roadside,
to be discovered by the daylight.

Poor Mose! he had saved his life from the bitterly cold night, but was
it not only to lose it again at the hands of the hangman or the firing
party?

Job remembered having seen, just a few weeks before, a picture in one
of the illustrated weeklies of a deserter sitting on his own coffin,
while files of soldiers were being drawn up to witness his impending
punishment. Although the artist had given the doomed man a very bad
face indeed, Job had been conscious at the time of feeling a certain
human sympathy with him.

As his memory dwelt now on the picture, this face of the prisoner
seemed to change into the freckled and happy-go-lucky lineaments of
Mose Whipple.

The boy took with him into the house a heart as heavy as lead.

Breakfast was already well under way in the big, old-fashioned,
low-ceiled kitchen of the Teachout homestead. Three or four hired men
were seated at one end of the long table, making stacks of hot
buckwheat cakes saturated with pork fat on their plates, and then
devouring them in huge mouthfuls.

They had only the light of two candles on the table. So long as there
was anything before them to eat, they spoke never a word. The red-faced
women over at the stove did not talk either, but worked in anxious
silence at their arduous task of frying cakes fast enough to keep the
plates before the hungry men supplied.

For once in his life Job was not hungry. He suffered Nelse Hornbeck to
appropriate the entire contents of the first plate of cakes which the
girl brought to the table, without a sign of protest. This was not what
usually happened, and as soon as Nelse could spare the time he looked
at his companion in surprise.

"What ails you this mornin'?" he asked, with his spoon in the grease.
"Ain't you feelin' well?"

Job shook his head. "I guess I'll eat some bread 'n' butter instead,"
he made reply. He added after a pause, "Somehow, I kind o' spleen
against cakes this mornin'."

"They ain't much good to-day, for a fact," assented Nelse, when he had
eaten half-way through his pile. "I guess they want more sody. It beats
me why them women can't make their cakes alike no two days in the week.
First the batter's sour, and then they put in more sody; and then it's
too flat, and they dump in a lot o' salt; and then they need more
graham flour, and then the batter's too thick, and has to be thinned
down with milk, and by that time the whole thing's wrong, and they've
got to begin all over again."

Nelse chuckled, and looked up at Job, who paid no attention.

"If we men fooled around with the cows' fodder, every day different,"
Nelse went on, "the way the girls here do with ours, why, the whole
barnful of 'em would 'a' dried up before snow blew. But that's the way
with women!" Mr. Hornbeck concluded with a sigh, and began on the
second heap of cakes.

The boy had not listened. A project had been gradually shaping itself
in his mind, until now it seemed as if he had left the cow-barn with it
definitely planned out. As soon as the other men, who for the moment
were idling with their knives and forks, had been supplied with a fresh
batch of cakes, he would put it into execution.

"Why, you was feelin' first rate a few minutes ago," remonstrated
Nelse, between mouthfuls, "singin' away for dear life."

"Remember how Mose Whipple used to sing?" put in one of the others.
"The' was one song o' his, 'The Faded Coat o' Blue'--seems's if I could
set and listen to him singin' that all day long. He sung it over at
Steve Trimble's huskin', I remember, and Lib Truax let him see her
home, just on account of it. She wouldn't so much as looked at him any
other time. She told my sister afterward that if he'd 'a' popped the
question then, with that singin' o' his in her ears, as like as not
she'd 'a' said yes."

"Lucky for her he didn't, then," remarked another. "I give Mose credit
for one thing, though. He had sense enough not to git married--and
that's more'n most shiftless coots like him have. He always said that
as long's the old man was alive, he'd keep a roof over his head, and
let everything else slide. Whatever else you may say, there's no
denyin' Mose was a good son to the old man."

"If I was old," said a third, "and was dependent on my son, I'd think a
good deal more of him if he shinned around, and worked stiddy, and put
somethin' by for a rainy day, even if he did marry into the bargain,
instid o' bein' bone-lazy like Mose, and never knowin' one day where
the next day's breakfast was comin' from."

"Not if you was old Asa Whipple," rejoined the first speaker. "Mose was
jest after the old man's heart. I never see father and son so wrapped
up in one another as them two was. Seems's if they didn't need no other
company--they was company enough for themselves. That's what made it so
rough on the old man when Mose 'listed."

"He couldn't help himself," said Nelse Hornbeck; "there was the
interest comin' due on the mortgage, and how else----"

"Sh-h! can't ye!" muttered one of the others, kicking Nelse under the
table, and giving a backward nod of the head toward the women by the
stove. "Want them to tell 'Lishe Teachout you're blabbin' about his
affairs, you sawney?"

Nelse bent hastily over his cakes, and the others busied themselves at
making way with the steaming fresh supply which had accumulated while
they talked.

Job's opportunity had come. He rose with as fine an assumption of
carelessness as he could manage, and walked up to the other end of the
table, where the big loaf of home-made bread and the butter-dish were.

He cut off two thick slices; the butter which he tried to spread upon
them had become hard with the night's intense cold, and had not been
near enough to the fire to be softened. So Job could only distribute it
in lumps over the soft surface of one slice, and then put the other on
top of it.

Then, watching his chance in the dim light, he conveyed the bread to
his jacket pocket. Nobody at the table had observed him, he was sure.

He turned to discover that the sitting-room door close at his back had
been opened wide, and that Elisha Teachout was standing in the doorway,
looking at him with all his eyes.

It was Elisha Teachout's habit to look very closely at everything and
everybody--and his was at the best of times a somewhat uncomfortable
gaze to sustain. Job felt that this was not one of the best of times.

His employer was in all seasons an austere and exacting man, coldly
suspicious of those about him, and as pitiless in his treatment of his
hired help's shortcomings as he was vigilant in looking out for them.
But in the winter, when rheumatism put its dread touch upon the marrow
of his bones, he was irascible as well, and led his household what they
used to describe outside as "a life of it."

His lean, small figure did not seem as much bent as usual this
morning--probably he was better, Job thought--but his little
steel-colored eyes had an abnormally piercing effect. His pallid face,
hairless and wrinkled, with its sunken lips and sharply hooked nose,
was of a yellower and sourer aspect than usual, too. The boy felt
himself turning very red.

It turned out to be a needless alarm. Mr. Teachout diverted his gaze
from Job to look at his old silver watch, which he took from his fob,
and then ostentatiously held it in his hand.

"Milk late again this morning?" he demanded, raising his querulous
voice with a snap.

"No, it got off in good season," replied the head hired man,
nonchalantly.

He had answered the same question now every day for several years, and
was at home with it. As a matter of fact the milk from the Teachout
farm was never late, but this had not prevented the masters query
becoming a formula.

"Then breakfast ought to 'a' been out of the way half an hour ago!" he
exclaimed, in the same high, snarling tone. "If I didn't get up and
come out, sick as I am, I suppose you'd be settin' here gorging
yourselves till noon! And you women, you jest aid and abet 'em in their
laziness and gormandizing!"

Job stayed to hear no more. Relieved from his fear of detection, he had
taken advantage of the attack upon the others to get his cap and sidle
unobtrusively from the room.

Once outside he scampered headlong across the frozen ruts and hummocks
of the yard to the cow-barn. There was a perilous show of pink and
lemon lights in the eastern sky. Very soon it would be daylight.

He groped his way past between the stanchions to the hay, and began
feeling about with his feet.

"Here you are, Mose!" he called out. "It's almost daylight! Here's
something to eat."

No answer came. The boy trampled foot by foot over the whole mow in
vain. Mose Whipple was gone.




CHAPTER III.

FATHER AND SON.


It is not likely that anything whatever remains standing now of the
Whipple house. It must be a dozen years ago that I shot a black
squirrel as it whisked its way along over the ridge-beam which had once
been Asa Whipple's roof-tree; and the place then was in ruins. The
rafters had fallen in; what was left of the sides were dry-rotten under
a mask of microscopic silver-gray moss. Tangled masses of wild-brier
and lichens surrounded its base, and pushed their way in through the
open, dismantled doorway.

Even at that time, the road which once led past the house had fallen
into disuse. I suppose that to-day it would be as hard to find the
house under the briers as to trace the ancient highway beneath the
carpet of grass and sorrel.

Even during the war, when human beings thought of it as a home, the
Whipple place was a pretty poor sort of habitation. The lowliest of
Elisha Teachout's live-stock were considerably better housed and better
sheltered from the weather than old Asa and his son Mose.

The house, as I remember it, used to interest me because it was so
obviously a remainder from the days when the district round about was
still a veritable part of the Adirondacks. Whether Asa built it or
inherited it from his father, a Revolutionary soldier who took up his
land-patent in these primitive parts, I never knew. It looked old
enough, though, to have been erected by Hendrik Hudson himself.

There must have been a sawmill on the creek at the time, however, for
it was not a log house but a frame building, with broad planks nailed
roughly to its sides, and the joinings of these covered over with
weather-strips.

The frames of the door and the two front windows also came from this
mill, wherever it was; the window on the north side was of rude
construction, and was evidently the work of some person not greatly
skilled in the use of carpenters' tools; perhaps it was made by old Asa
himself.

There was a legend that the roof had once been shingled; in my time it
was made of flattened breadths of spruce bark, which must have leaked
sadly in rainy seasons. There was no cellar under the house, but a
rough lean-to woodshed at the back served to shelter any overflow of
possessions which might trouble the Whipples. This lean-to was given
over chiefly to traps, fishpoles, netting gear, and the like.

There was a barn, but it was roofless and long since disused.

I dare say the original Revolutionary Whipple aimed at being a farmer,
like the rest of his neighbors. Like the others, he cleared his land,
got in his crops, built a barn for his cattle and produce, and ran up
rail fences. Perhaps he even prospered thus, as prosperity was measured
in those lean, toilsome times.

But either in his day, or when his son Asa was a comparatively young
man, the hand of fate was laid on the Whipple place. The black moss
came!

Strong and intelligent farmers, with capital behind them, can
successfully fight and chase off nowadays, they say, this sinister
scourge of the thin-soiled northern farm lands on the forests edges.
But forty years ago, and even much later, it was a common saying that
when the moss came, the man must go.

Asa Whipple did not go. He let farming go instead. When the moss had
seized upon pasture and meadow alike, nothing was simpler than to sell
the cows, and allow the barn to fall to pieces. Much better than taking
anxious thought about the farm, it suited Asa to turn to the woods--the
kindly, lazy, mysteriously tempting woods.

Here were no back-aching ploughs and scythes, no laborious hoeing of
corn and grubbing for roots, and painful wrestling with rain and
drought and frost--and worst of all, the moss--for pitiful coppers.
Here instead were luscious trout for the hook, and otter, mink, and
even an occasional beaver for the trap; here in the greenwood, to the
trained hunter, was spread a never-ending banquet of rare and toothsome
meats, from the game birds, the raccoon, and the squirrel, up to the
fleet-heeled deer and the black bear, lounging his clumsy way through
the undergrowth.

Like father, like son. Time came, indeed, when the woods were no longer
what they had been, and when the influence of advancing civilization
compelled Mose to eke out a scanty living for his father and himself by
hiring out a week or two now and then during busy seasons on the farms
roundabout.

He did this as seldom as he could, however, and he never pretended that
he liked to do it at all.

Of their own land, the Whipples for years had cultivated only a
garden-patch close about the house, and this in so luke-warm a fashion
that the net results--some potatoes, a little sweet corn, a few
pumpkins, and so on--never by any chance saw them through the winter.

Why they did not sell this unproductive land to Elisha Teachout, who
evidently wanted it, instead of borrowing money from him on it to pay
taxes for it, I could never understand. Very likely they did not try to
explain it to themselves.

But it was the fact, nevertheless, that in July of 1863 they owed Mr.
Teachout something over three hundred dollars in accrued interest upon
the mortgages he held, and that to prevent his foreclosing and evicting
them from the house, Mose Whipple went to the war as Teachout's
substitute.

This year of 1863 had still a week of life before it on the morning in
question--when Mose returned from the war.

He had made across the stiff-crusted level wastes of snow from
Teachout's straight as the bee's flight, even before the dawn began to
break. He had heard the talk in the barn about the certainty of his
capture, but it made little impression on his mind. It did not even
occur to him that the matter concerned him. What had stirred him was
Job Parshall's roundabout and reluctant admission that all was not
right with the old man.

He had waited only a few minutes in the haymow after Job had gone to
the farm-house before the temptation to be off again toward home
mastered him. It was silly to linger here for food when the goal was so
close at hand.

He took a couple of English turnips from one of the fodder bins to eat
on the way, and let himself cautiously out by the rear door of the
cow-barn.

It was still quite dark and bitterly cold, but he started briskly off.
After he had left the barnyard an idea occurred to him. His father
might be perishing of hunger! He turned and bent his steps back across
the yard to the hen-house, opened the door, and crept in. A cackling
murmur fell upon the darkened silence, rising all at once into a harsh
and strident squawking, then ceasing abruptly.

Mose emerged upon the instant, shut and hooked the door, and started to
run, stuffing a big, limp and shapeless object into his coat pocket.

When he had rapped upon and rattled vigorously for a third time the
window on the north side of the house he had journeyed so far and
risked so much to return to, Mose was conscious of a heavy, sudden
sinking of the heart. That was the bedroom window; how was it his
father had not heard him?

He knocked once more, more loudly than before, and bent his head to
listen. No answer came.

After a minute's waiting he walked around to the front of the house. In
the broad daylight which had spread itself now over the white
landscape, he noticed something he had missed before. There had been no
path cut through from the house to the road. The frozen drifts lay
packed as they had fallen upon the doorsill. There was no mark of
footsteps save his own. The window-panes were opaque with frost.

Mose tried the latch. It yielded readily, and he entered. The light
inside was so dim, after the morning glow on the snow without, that it
was hard at first to make out the room, familiar as it was to him.
Apparently there was no one there.

A curious change of some sort there had been, though. Mose shut the
door and walked across to the stove, instinctively holding his hands
over it. So dull a semblance of warmth radiated up from the griddles
that he put a finger on the metal. It was only blood-warm.

Some one had left a fire here an hour ago. Where was his father? What
had happened?

Then Mose saw what it was that had at the outset vaguely puzzled him.
The straw tick had been brought from the bed in the other room and
spread there on the floor behind the stove. It was covered with bedding
and old clothes, and under these--

In a flash Mose was on his knees beside the improvised bed, and had
pushed away the coverings at the top. There was disclosed before him
the head of a man asleep--a head which he scarcely recognized at first
sight, so profuse and dishevelled were its masses of white hair and
beard, so pinched to ghastliness the waxen features.

"He is dead!" Mose heard himself say aloud, in a voice that sounded not
at all his own.

But no; there was warmth, and a feeble flicker of pulse at the shrunken
wrist which he instinctively fumbled for under the bedclothes.

"Father! Father!" Mose called, bending till his lips touched the white
hair. "Wake up! I've come back! it's me--Mose!"

The faintest stir of life passed over the corpse-like face, and old Asa
opened his eyes. It did not seem as though he saw his son, or anything
else. His whitened lips moved, emitting some husky, unintelligible
sounds. Mose, stooping still lower, strained his ears to piece together
these terrible words:--

"Starved--many days--don't tell Mose!"

With a cry of rage and horror Mose sprang to his feet. The things to be
done mapped themselves, in the stress of this awful situation, with
lightning swiftness before his brain. He strode to the woodshed door
and opened it. Two sides of the old lean-to were gone, and the snow was
drifted thick across the floor.

Mose realized that the shed had gone for fuel, and in another minute he
had torn down half the roof, and was crushing the boards to splinters
under his heels.

With the same fierce haste he started the fire blazing again; got out
an old frying-pan from under the snow, and put it, filled with ice to
be melted into water, on one of the open griddle holes; hacked the
remaining turnip into slices, and then began at the fowl, stripping the
feathers off in handfuls, and dismembering it as fast as he cleared the
skin from joint to joint, filling the rusty old pan to the brim.

Even as he worked thus, and after the water was steaming, and the rude
stew under way, he kept an eager and apprehensive eye upon the bed
behind the stove. No token of life was forthcoming.

He could not hear his father breathe, even when he bent over him; but
no doubt that was on account of the prodigious spluttering and
crackling which the fire kept up. Through the other griddle hole he
continually thrust in fresh, dry kindlings to swell the blaze.

He had learned some new things about cooking in the army--among others
the value of a pot-lid in hurrying forward the stew. He looked about
for a cover for the frying-pan. There was no such thing in the house,
but he found in the shed an old sheet-iron snow-shovel, and made the
blade of this serve, with a nail-hole punched through it to let out the
steam.

In his researches he was glad to run upon some salt, because it would
help toward making the mess on the stove palatable. But it would not be
easy to tell with what emotions he discovered that there was absolutely
not another eatable thing in the house.

The room had grown decently warm again, under the influence of the
roaring fire, and now it began to be filled with what Mose believed to
be a most delicious odor.

The conviction, though to any one else it might well have seemed
unwarranted, was pardonable in Mose perhaps, for he himself had tasted
his last warm meal nearly sixty hours before.

He munched the turnip peelings almost contentedly as he recalled this
fact. Perhaps there would be some of the stew left, after the old man
had eaten his fill. If not, there were parts of the fowl which could
still be utilized.

An absurd sort of fantasy--a kind of foolish day-dream--began all at
once to rise before him. He seemed to see himself eating the whole of
that glorious stew, lingering with all his soul over the luxury of each
piping-hot mouthful, and giving his father none at all.

This visionary thing grew so upon him, so gripped and enthralled his
mind, that it made him dizzy and faint to put it away from him. When, a
few minutes later, the smell of burning warned him that the cooking was
done, and he lifted the pan from the stove, this brutal temptation
rushed savagely at him again. He set the pan on the table, and walked
away, not daring to lift the cover.

There were two or three old plates on the shelf, and a tea-cup. Mose
got them all down, and arrayed them on the table, with such cutlery and
spoons as he could find. He made a motion then to take off the
improvised lid from the frying-pan, but once more drew back. It was as
if he could not trust himself.

He knelt by the bedside again, now, and putting his arm under his
father's neck sought to raise him to a more upright posture. Old Asa
opened his eyes as before, and made an effort to whisper something, but
he lay an almost inert weight in his son's arms.

Mose swung the tick round, propped the end of it up against the wall
and raised his father into a half-sitting posture.

In this position the old man's face took on a sudden expression of
interest and reviving intelligence. He had begun to smell the savor of
the food.

Looking upon that pallid, vacant, starved face, and wasted, helpless
form, Mose, starving himself, felt strong enough to defy the most
appetizing stew in the world. He took off the cover with decision, and
dipped the tea-cup up half full of the smoking contents. It was too
hot, evidently, to be given to the old man at once, and it was also
very thick.

Mose took it out to the dismantled woodshed, and spooned in snow until
it seemed of the right temperature and consistency. He dipped a little
finger into it to further satisfy himself, but he would not even lick
that finger afterward. It was too dangerous to think about.

Mose fed his father as a mother might a baby--watching solicitously to
see that he did not eat too fast or choke himself. After the first
cupful, he brought a chair to sit in, and held the tick against his
knee while old Asa, leaning more lightly upon it, helped himself.

There was a little left at last for Mose, and he swallowed it gravely,
with a portentous rush of sensations within, but keeping up as best he
could an indifferent exterior. It left him still hungry, but he had
much more important things to dwell upon than that.

The meal worked wonders upon the old man. The combined influences of
food and warmth seemed for a few minutes to send him off to sleep
again.

Mose sat looking down upon him in silence, and noting that something
like color was stealing back into his face.

All at once, however, Asa Whipple sat upright, lifted his hands to
brush back the hair from his forehead, and, turning his face up to look
at his son, smiled. There was no lack of comprehension in his gaze. He
had regained his tongue as well. He patted Mose's knee as he spoke.

"Mose," he said, in a voice strangely altered and aged, but clear
enough, "I'm kind o' 'shamed to tell it, but I'd laid down here just to
go to sleep for good. I thought for quite a spell there, after you come
in, that I was dreaming--sort o' out o' my head, you know."

"How did you come to let yourself down like this, dad?" was the only
reply Mose had at hand.

"Rheumatiz," Asa explained. "It laid me up--I couldn't git around, an'
nobody come near me. I ain't seen a soul since the big snowfall--up'ards
of a fortnight. But--but it's all right now, ain't it, Mose? An' to
think o' your comin' home here like this, right in the nick o' time.
How did you come to git off, Mose?"

For answer there fell the crunching sound of footsteps on the crusted
snow outside, then of a loud, peremptory knock on the door.




CHAPTER IV.

THE "MEANEST WORD."


Mose Whipple had lifted his head in apprehensive inquiry at the sound
of the footsteps outside the door of the cabin. He sprang to his feet
when the sharp knock on the door followed. Holding a hand downward with
outspread fingers as a warning to silence, he tiptoed out to the middle
of the room, then paused and listened.

The knock came again, bolder and more peremptory still.

Vague notions of resistance were shaping themselves in Mose's mind. He
glanced up at the shot-gun hanging on the chimney behind the stovepipe,
and in another instant had it down, with his thumb on the hammer.

"Loaded?" he asked in a whisper, testing the percussion-cap with his
nail.

The old man nodded. Then he, too, laboriously rose to his feet. Bent as
his form was, he stood a taller man than his son. He rested one hand on
the table for support, and stretched out the other with a masterful
gesture.

[Illustration: "GIMME THAT GUN!"]

"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.




CHAPTER I.

THE VALLEY OF DEATH.


The rising sun lifted its first curved rim of dazzling light above the
dark line of distant treetops just as the brigade band began a new
tune--"The Faded Coat of Blue." The musicians themselves, huddled
together under the shelter of a mound of rocks where the road descended
into the ravine, did not get their share of this early morning
radiance, but remained in the shadows.

Only a yard or two away from the outermost drummer-boy these shadows
ended, and a picture began that was full of action and color, and
flooded with golden sunshine.

The bandsmen, as they played, observed this picture, and thanked their
stars they were no part of it. Better a whole life spent in the shade,
than sunlight at such a price as was being paid for it out there in the
road!

This road had never before been anything but a narrow, grass-grown,
out-of-the-way track for mule-carts. Now it had become the bed of a
broad, endless, moving human flood--filling it compactly from side to
side, with ever a fresh wave of blue-coated men entering at the rear,
where the scrub-oak opening began, and ever a front wave gliding off
downward from view with that sinister slipperiness which arches the
brow of a cataract.

The sense of motion conveyed by these thousands of passing men was at
its perfection of rhythm just opposite the band. They were marching in
eights, so close together that they trod continually on any lagging
heel.

The ranks, when they first came in view, seemed pressing forward
without much order. Then, as they drew close to the musicians, they
fell into step instinctively, swung along in swaying unison for a few
rods, and again lapsed into jagged irregularity as they swept downward
behind the rock.

It was indeed only this shifting section of the dozen nearest ranks
that could catch the strains of the band. The others, whether in van or
rear, moved on with their hearing numbed by a ceaseless and terrible
uproar which came from the ravine in front, and, mounting upward,
seemed to shake the earth on which they trod.

The musicians might blow themselves red in the face, the drummers beat
the strained sheepskins to bursting, and make no headway against this
din of cannon.

The men of Boyce's brigade, as they came into the little space where
they could hear the music above the artillery, and caught the step it
was setting, hardly looked that way, but pushed forward with eyes
straight ahead, and grave, drawn faces on which the cheerful sunlight
seemed a mockery.

When the band had finished "The Faded Coat of Blue" the sky was still
clear overhead, but from the gully below a dense cloud of smoke had
spread upward to choke the morning light. While the bandsmen paused,
blowing their instruments clear and breathing hard, this smoke began to
thicken the air about the rock which sheltered them.

In a minute more the front figures of the endless moving chain before
them seemed to be walking off into a fog, and the atmosphere was all at
once heavy with the smell of gunpowder.

Curiously enough, the men's faces brightened at this. There came a
block now somewhere on the road ahead, and the column halted. The
regimental flags, with the color-guard, were just abreast of the band.
The sergeant took out his knife to cut one of the furling strings that
was in a hard knot, and untied the rest, shaking out the silken folds
of the banners.

"I always untie 'em when we get into the smoke," he said, speaking at
large.

The drummer-boy nearest the road moved over to study the flags. He held
his head to one side and scrutinized them critically.

"No bullet holes in 'em yet, to speak of, I notice," he remarked to the
sergeant, raising a clear, sharp young voice above the universal
racket. "Guess you'll get enough to-day to make up!" he added.

The old sergeant nodded his head. "Something besides flags will get
holes in 'em, too," he returned, lifting his voice also, like a man
talking in the teeth of a roaring gale.

"What are you? Michiganders?" shouted the boy.

"No--Ohio!" the sergeant bawled back. "When they changed the corps,
they brigaded us all up fresh, so that we don't know our own mothers.
We've got in with some New Yorkers that ain't got no more sense than to
chew fine-cut tobacco. You can't raise a plug in a whole regiment of
'em. Regular pumpkin-heads!"

"They'll show you fellows the way, down below there, though!" retorted
the boy, his injured state pride adding shrillness to his tone. "Ohio's
no good, anyhow!"

He instinctively moved beyond reach of the sergeant's boot, as he
passed this last remark. Some of the men in the crowded ranks close by
laughed at his impudence, and he himself was grinning with a sense of
successful repartee, when he felt a hand laid on his shoulder. He
looked up, and found himself confronting a young, fair-faced officer,
who was regarding him with gravely gentle eyes.

"Don't say that about any men who are going out to die," this officer
said; and though he did not seem to be speaking loudly, the words fell
very distinctly. "I've got a brother at home about your size. So have
lots of the rest of us here. We want to carry down there with us a
pleasant notion of the last boy we saw."

"I was only fooling!" the drummer-boy rejoined.

There was no time for further words, as the preparatory rattle on the
drum-edge behind warned him. In another minute he was back in his
place, and the band was hurling forth into the general uproar the
strains of "The Red, White, and Blue."

The column had begun to move again. The flags, the color-guard, the
young officer with the sad, gentle eyes, had passed downward out of
sight, and company after company of their regiment came pressing onward
now.

The boy, as he kept up with his part of the familiar work, watched
these Ohio men swing past. They seemed young fellows, for the most
part, and their uniforms were significantly new and clean. Everything
about them showed that they were going under fire for the first time,
though they pushed forward as stoutly as veterans. The boy found
himself hoping that a good many of these Ohio men would come back all
right--and most of all that young officer who had a brother about his
size.

All this while a group of field officers had been standing on the ridge
up above the rocky mound which sheltered the band. Their figures, with
broad hats and big-cuffed gauntlets, had grown indistinct against the
sky as the smoke thickened. Now they gave up trying to follow through
their glasses the movements in the vale below, and turned to descend.

Their horses, which men had been holding near the musicians, were
hastily brought forward, and the general and his staff sprang into the
saddle and trotted over toward the road.

The end of the column was in view, with its disorder of servants,
baggage-carriers, soldiers who had lost their places, and behind, the
looming canvas covers of ambulance-wagons and the train. Into the thick
of this straggling mass General Boyce, sitting splendidly erect and
with a bold smile on his rosy-cheeked face, spurred his way, and the
staff in turn clattered after him down out of sight. The brigade had
passed, and the band stopped playing.

Files of mules, heavily laden with stacks of cartridge-boxes, were
still pouring along the road and being whacked down the ravine path;
but the big wagons, as they came, halted, and were drawn off into the
field to the left. Tall poles were taken out and set up. Coils of rope
were unwound, stakes driven, and huge cylinders of canvas unrolled on
the grass.

Soon there arose the gray outlines of tents--one dominating structure
fully thirty yards long, and around it, like little mushrooms about the
parent stool, a number of smaller tents, some square, some conical. The
drummer-boy, his task ended, sauntered over with his companions toward
the tents.

He paused to watch the heavy folds of canvas being hauled up to the
ridge-pole of the big one. In one way it recalled those preparations on
the old circus-ground at home which he used to watch with such zest.
But in another way it was strangely different.

While some men tugged at the ropes or drove in stakes for the
guy-lines, others were busy bringing from the wagons rolls of blankets
and huge trusses of straw. Even before the roof was secure scores of
rude beds were being spread on the trampled grass underneath.

Bearded and spectacled men, dressed after the fashion of officers, yet
clearly not soldiers at all, were directing everything now. Among them,
here and there, flitted young women, clad also in a sort of uniform,
who seemed busiest of all.

No, this was decidedly different from a circus tent. The thunder of the
batteries on the other side of the ridge was alone enough to throw a
solemn meaning over this long, barn-like house of ropes and cloths. It
was the brigade hospital-tent, and the hundreds of active hands at work
could hardly hope to have it ready before it was needed.

It was the morning of the second day of the Battle of the Wilderness.
The men of Boyce's brigade knew only vaguely, by hearsay, of what had
happened on that terrible yesterday. They themselves, forming the
rear-guard of the great army, had been nearly the last to cross the
Rapidan on the swinging pontoon bridge of Germania ford. They had had a
night's forced march; a two hours' nap in the open starlight; a hasty
bite of rations at half-past three in the morning, and now this plunge
in the chilly twilight of sunrise down into the unknown.

There had been, just before the general advance across the Rapidan, a
wholesale shaking-up of army organization. Two whole corps had been
abolished, and their strength distributed among the three remaining
corps. Regiments found themselves suddenly torn from their old
associates, and brigaded with strangers. Their pet officers
disappeared, and others took their places whom the men did not know and
were disposed to dislike.

To add to this discontent, there was an understanding that their
leaders had been entrapped into this Wilderness fighting. Certainly it
was no place which an invading army would have chosen for battle.

It was a vast, sprawling forest district, densely covered with low
timber, scrub-oak, dwarf junipers, and tangled cedars and pines, all
knit together breast-high and upward with interlacing wild vines, and
foul underfoot with swamp or thicket.

In this gloomy and sinister wilderness men did not know where they
were, nor whom they were fighting. Whole commands were lost in the
impenetrable woods. Mounted orderlies could not get about through the
underbrush, and orders sent out were never delivered.

Though gulches and steep ravines abounded, cutting sharp gashes through
the forest, there were no hills upon which a general and his keen-eyed
staff might perch themselves and get an idea of how the land about them
lay. The Confederates had plenty of this local knowledge, and used it
to terrible purpose. The invaders could only put their heads down, and
strive to crush their way blindly through.

After a little, the drummer-boy put his snare-drum in the wagon where
the other instruments were, and started off up the ridge, to see what
the general and his staff had been observing earlier in the morning.

As he neared the summit, he noticed that the roar of the cannon
directly in front seemed to have died down a good deal. There were
still angry outbursts, but one had to wait for them now; and a new kind
of noise, made up of peal after peal of crackling musketry fire, was
rising from the gully farther to the left.

The boy had come now to the top of the ridge, only to find it crowned
with a thick fringe of alders which completely shut out his view. From
the roots of the farther bushes the hillside dropped precipitously. He
worked his way along until, by a cleft in the rocks, an opening offered
itself.

Here, stooping low and bending aside the alders, he could creep out
upon a big, flat, moss-grown boulder, which overhung the ravine like a
balcony. He had not thought he was so high up. The other side of the
gulf spread out before him could not be seen for the smoke--but the
tops of tall pines growing on its bottom were far below him.

The steepness of the descent made him dizzy. The rock on which he stood
seemed to be suspended in mid-air. He drew back a little. Then
curiosity got the upper hand. He laid himself face down on the boulder,
and edged cautiously forward till he could peer over its front.

The fog-like smoke was so dense that at first he could see nothing.
Even when the bearings of the land below, masked as it all was under
forest, began to be apparent to him, his ears were still the best guide
to what was going on. The confused sound of men's shouts and yells
mingled now with the intermittent volleys of musketry to the left. The
cannon-firing had stopped altogether.

He discovered all at once that a good many of the tree-tops in front of
him seemed to have been broken off very recently. Some were hanging to
the trunks by their bark; everywhere the splinters were white and
fresh. Now that he listened more intently, there were weird whistling
noises among these shattered boughs and an incessant dropping of leaves
and twigs.

Suddenly a big branch not far away shook violently, then toppled
downward. At the same moment a swift ringing buzz sounded just over his
head, and a bunch of alder-blossoms fell upon one of his hands. He
pulled himself back abruptly.

Crawling backward out through the alders, he did not venture to lift
his head until there was a comfortable wall of rocks between him and
that murderous ravine. Then, getting to his feet, he looked amazed down
upon the brigade camp, which he had left an hour before. The big tent,
and the little ones about it, only a while ago the scene of such
bustling activity, were all deserted.

Some of the wagons could be seen rolling and bumping off toward the
road to the left under drivers who stood up to lash their teams. The
white, canvas-hooped tops were the centres of wild confusion.

Other drivers were scurrying off on horseback, leading with them in a
frantic gallop groups of the team horses, pulled along by their bunched
reins. The people on foot--doctors, nurses, camp-guards and the
rest--were all racing pell-mell toward the road for dear life.

Thunderstruck at the spectacle, the boy turned to the right. A long,
double line of men had come out through the woods in which the ridge
lost itself, and were advancing upon the camp at a sharp run. They
seemed dressed in a sort of mud-colored uniform, and they raised a
sharp whoop of triumph as they came. At the farther end of the line,
some of these men lifted their guns as they ran, and fired into the
receding mass of fugitives.

Down in front, meantime, the foremost of the advancing line had reached
the camp and entered upon possession. They had begun overhauling the
captured wagons, and were tossing out loaves of bread and hardtack
boxes, which their comrades fell upon eagerly. The boy reflected now
that he himself was hungry, and he scratched his head with perplexity.

The sound of panting breath close beside him made him turn swiftly. A
man had clambered up the side of the ridge, away from the camp, and had
rushed up to him, his eyes starting from his head with excitement. He
waved something like a short stick, with wild gestures, and tried to
shout, but could only pant instead.

He stopped as he came up, stared at the boy, then shook his head
dolefully as he gasped for breath.

"Is dot you, Lafe?" he managed to groan. "Oh, my jiminy priest!"

"Look out!" cried the boy. "Lie down!"

Some of the men below had caught sight of them, and two or three sparks
and jets of smoke told that they were being fired at. Though they were
probably beyond range, it was safer behind the alders, so the two
crawled out on the overhanging ledge.

"I say, Foldeen, have they scooped the old band wagon? I couldn't see
from here," was the boys first remark.

"Dey von't get 'em my flute, anyhow," the other responded, holding
proudly forth the ebony stock with its silver keys, which he had been
waving so vehemently. "I don't catch me putting him in de bant vagon."

Even as he spoke he clutched the boy fiercely by the arm, with a
smothered exclamation of horror. The rock on which they crouched had
stirred from its foundations, and as the two instinctively strove to
turn themselves, it lurched outward, and went crashing down the steep
declivity.




CHAPTER II.

LAFE RECONNOITRES THE VALLEY.


On the river road below the tannery, away back in New York State, there
stood for many years a small house, always surrounded in summer by
sunflowers and hollyhocks and peonies that enwrapped it as in a
beautiful garment. It seemed that flowers grew nowhere else as they did
for the Widow Hornbeck.

There was no other such show of lilacs in Juno Mills as that which
early May brought for her front yard. The climbing roses which covered
the whole front and side of the poor little house were only of the
simple, old sorts,--the Baltimore Belle, the yellow Scotch and the
ordinary pink brier,--but they bore thick clusters of delightful
blossoms. And in the fall, when the frosts had nipped and blackened
other people's flowers, the asters and nasturtiums and gladiolus in
this wee patch appeared unhurt by the weather.

When there was to be a wedding in the village, or some celebration at
the church or the school-house, the children always went to the Widow
Hornbeck to beg for flowers. Often they found her sitting out in her
yard among the plants she loved--a mild-faced, patient little woman,
with thin, bent shoulders and hair whitened before its time; and she
would be poring through her spectacles over the same big Book spread
open on her knees.

The spectacle of Mrs. Hornbeck and her family Bible, framed like a
picture in vines and flowering shrubs, grew pleasantly familiar to
everybody in the district. Strangers driving past used to stop their
buggies and admire the place; and they, too, seeing the white-haired
owner sitting there, would feel that her presence added to the charm of
the scene.

The widow died suddenly one day in the autumn of 1863. She was found
quite lifeless, seated as of old in the garden, with the old patient,
wistful half-smile on her face, and the old Book spread open in her
lap.

The village was sad for a day or two, and gently touched for a
fortnight. Then the widow had been forgotten, and the family Bible had
vanished. The cottage was taken for the mortgage upon it, and its
meagre contents went the way of humble, ownerless things. Mrs. Hornbeck
had been very poor, and nothing was left for her son.

In that family Bible had been written the names of some score of
Hornbecks. Against all these names but two a date of death had also
been inscribed. One of these two names, the last in the list, was that
of the boy, now made an orphan, the Benjamin of the widow's flock. He
was described on the yellowed page, in his mother's scrawling hand, as
"Washington Lafayette Hornbeck, born April 30, 1850." In real life he
had always been known as "Lafe."

He grew up a brown-skinned, hardy sort of ordinary boy, whose face
might suggest some acuteness and more resolution, but whom nobody
thought of calling good-looking.

He turned out to be the best wrestler among the village lads of his
age, and he was also the strongest swimmer of all the lot who used to
go down, of a summer evening, to dive off the spring-board into the
deep pool below the mill-dam. This raised him a good deal in the esteem
of the boys, but somehow their elders were not so much impressed by
"Lafe's" qualities.

He had to work, and he did work, but always at some new job--now
berry-picking, now stripping willows for the basket factory, now
packing "heave-powders" for the local horse-doctor. He had been
employed in the mills and in the tannery, and he had once travelled for
a month as the assistant of a tin-peddler, not to mention various
experiments in general farm-work.

People hardly blamed Lafe for this lack of steadiness in employment.
They said it was in his blood. All the Hornbecks since any one could
remember had been musicians--playing the fiddle or whatever else you
liked at country dances, and some of them even journeying to distant
parts as members of circus or minstrel bands.

It was felt that a boy from such a roving stock could scarcely be
expected to tie himself down to regular work.

Doubtless Lafe felt this, too, for as soon as he began thinking what he
should do, after the shock of his mother's death, he found himself
wishing to be a drummer-boy. The notion struck all the neighbors as
quite appropriate. Lafe was a capital drummer. Kind old Doctor Peabody
went with him to Tecumseh, saw the head recruiting officer at the big
barracks there, and arranged matters for him.

Lafe was sent forward to New York, and thence to headquarters at the
front. Men liked him, and his lifelong familiarity with instruments
made him a handy boy to have about. Before long he was taken out of the
little company drum-corps, and promoted to the big brigade band.

This very morning, when he went up from the hospital camp to the ridge
where he hoped to see the fighting beyond, he had been thinking whether
this promotion had been what he wanted.

All his dreams had been of action--of brave drummer-boys who went into
battle with the fifes, and stood through it all by the side of the
file-leader, valiantly pounding their sheep-skins as the shot and shell
screamed past, and men pitched headlong, and officers were hurled from
their horses, and the fight was lost or won.

Alas! a brigade band never got so much as a whiff of actual warfare,
but tamely stayed about in camp, playing selections outside the
general's headquarters while he ate his dinner, or contributing its
quota to the ceremonial of a Sunday dress-parade.

Perhaps nothing more was to be looked for during the long winter in
peaceful quarters at Brandy Station; but now that spring had come, and
the grand advance was begun, and battles were in the air all about
them--even now the bandsmen merely gave the warriors a tune or two to
start them off, and then ingloriously loafed around the camp till they
returned, or did not return, as the case might be. One might almost as
well have stayed at home in Juno Mills!

The great rock on which Lafe and the German flute-player Foldeen had
taken their station gave way beneath them, as was stated in the last
chapter, and smashed its way down the steep hillside, crushing the
brush and rooting up vines as it went, snapping saplings like
pipestems, and bowling over even trees of a larger growth. It brought
up almost at the bottom of the hill, in the heart of a clump of sturdy
cedars.

A long gash of earth laid bare and of foliage ripped and strewn aside
stretched up the incline to mark the track of the fallen boulder.
Half-way up this pathway of devastation a boy presently appeared.

Lafe had crawled up out of the débris of saplings, boughs, and tangled
creepers into which he had been hurled, and clambered over now to the
open space. Then he stood looking up and down in a puzzled way, rubbing
his head. His clothes were torn a good deal, he had lost his cap, and
he was conscious of numerous bruises under these damaged clothes of
his.

There was blood on the palm of his hand, which had come from his head.
So far as feeling could guide him, this, however, was nothing but a
scalp scratch. He cared more about the tremendous bark one of his shins
had got, close up under his knee. When he took his first aimless steps,
this had already stiffened, and was hurting him.

Suddenly he remembered that he had not been alone on the rock. Foldeen
Schell had been with him, and had grabbed his arm just as everything
gave way under them. His wits were still woolgathering under the
combined scare and tumble, and he began mechanically poking about among
the underbrush at his feet, as if the missing flute-player might be
hidden there. Or was he hunting for his cap? For a dazed minute or two
he hardly knew.

Then the sense of bewilderment lifted itself, and was gone. Lafe
straightened himself, and looked comprehensively about him.

"Foldeen!" he shouted shrilly, and then bent all his powers of hearing
for a reply. There came no answering call.

The air was full of other sounds--the rattling echoes of
musketry-firing and the boom of bigger guns, some far off, others
seemingly near, all mingling here among the thicket recesses in a
subdued, continuous clamor. Perhaps shouting was of no use.

Lafe climbed up the hill a dozen yards or so, to a point where he could
go no farther, and scrutinized his surroundings carefully. The
impenetrable wall of foliage shut out the valley from him even more
completely than when he was on the ridge. He called again and again,
and explored the bushes on either side, to no purpose.

Limping slowly down the track cleared by the passing rock, he continued
his search to the right and left. He knew so little of how he himself
had escaped death that there was nothing to help him guess how it had
fared with his companion.

He had not known much about this missing bandsman heretofore, save that
he seemed to be the best fellow among the three or four German
musicians which the band contained. The boy, like the rest, spoke and
thought of all these alien comrades as "Dutchmen," and he was far from
comprehending that that outlandish name "Foldeen" was only a corruption
of "Valentine." But a common misfortune binds swift ties, and Lafe, as
he kept up his quest, began to think of Schell quite affectionately.

He recalled how good-tempered he had always been; how he alone had made
jokes on the long march, when the cold and driving rain had soured
every one else, and empty stomachs grumbled to keep company with aching
bones.

Reflecting upon this, Lafe realized that he was very fond of the
"Dutchman," and would be in despair if he had come to grief.

"Foldeen!" he yelled out again.

"Sh! sh! geeb guiet!" came a guttural reply, from somewhere near by.

The boy's heart lightened on the instant. He looked hastily about him
with a cheerful eye, trying to trace the direction of the voice. "Where
are you?" he demanded, in a lower tone.

For answer, the blue-coated German rose from a cover of brush, away
down the hill, and beckoned him, enforcing at the same time by emphatic
gestures the importance of coming noiselessly.

Lafe stole down furtively, and in a minute was bending close beside
Foldeen in shrubby shelter.

"Get hurt any?" Lafe asked, subduing his voice almost to a whisper in
deference to the other's visible anxiety.

Foldeen shook his head. "It is much worse," he murmured back. "I have
my flute lost."

The boy could not but smile. "We can thank our stars we weren't both
smashed to atoms," he observed.

"Sh-h! don't talk!" Foldeen adjured him, and indicated with a sidewise
nod of the head that special reasons for silence lay in that direction.

Lafe edged himself forward, and looked out through the bushes. They
were on the crest of a little mound which jutted out slightly from the
descending face of the hillside. The bottom of the ravine lay only
thirty feet or so below them.

Save for scattered clumps of dwarf firs, hardly higher than the mullein
stalks about them, the ground was clear, and the short grass told
Lafe's practised eye that it was pasture land. Beyond, there was the
gravelled bed of a stream, along which a small rivulet wandered from
side to side.

At the first glance his eye had taken in various splashes of color
dotting the grass, which suggested bluebells. He saw now that these
were made by the uniforms of men, who lay sprawled in various unnatural
postures, flat on the green earth. Most of them were on their faces,
and not one of them stirred. Lafe moved his head about among the
screening bushes, and was able to count twenty-six of these motionless
figures.

The boy had seen such sights before, and had even helped bring in the
wounded from the field of Payne's Farm during the most of a long, cold
night in the previous November. This experience guided him now to
remark a curious thing. No muskets, knapsacks, or canteens were
scattered about beside these fallen men. And another odd detail--they
were all barefooted.

"Some one's been along, after the fighting was over, and skinned
everything clean," he muttered to his companion.

Foldeen nodded again, and once more held up a warning hand. He himself
was intently watching something beneath, from his side of the leafy
cover. The boy shifted his position, and craning his neck over the
other's shoulder, saw that just below them, where the ascent began,
there stretched a rough, newly made ridge of sods, fence rails and
tree-tops, which had evidently been used as a breastwork.

Behind this there were other human forms, also lying prone, but clad in
gray or butternut instead of blue. Here, too, there was no sign of
life, but only that fixed absence of motion to which the remote thunder
of gun-fire gave such a bitter meaning.

"Anybody there?" whispered the boy.

"I dink so," returned Foldeen, under his breath. "Dere is some, what
you call it, hanky-banky, goes on here. Look yourself!"

He moved aside, and Lafe crowded into his place, and put his head out
cautiously through the bushes. In one corner of the breastwork there
was to be seen a big pile of accoutrements--knapsacks, muskets, swords,
water-bottles, and the like, as well as a heap of old boots and
miscellaneous foot-gear.

"Vell, how you make it out?" asked Foldeen.

Lafe drew in his head. "The way I figure it," he whispered, "is first,
that they held this place against our men, and drove 'em off. Then they
went out, and gathered up these traps, and brought 'em in there. Then
some more of our men came along, and chased them out. That's what it
looks like."

"Well, den, vare is gone dem second men of ours?" the German demanded.

"They've gone after 'em, up the valley, there."

Foldeen shook his head. "Dey don't do such foolishness," he objected.
"Ven dey take some place like dis, den dey shtick to him. I know so
much, if I do blay mid the band."

"There'd be rations in the knapsacks," mused Lafe, after a pause. He
had never been so hungry before in his life.

"What do you say to sneaking down there, and trying to find something
to eat?" he suggested. "Come on!" he added persuasively. "There's
nobody down there that--nobody that we need be afraid of."

"Vell, I am afraid, dot's all," responded Foldeen.

"They can't do more than make us prisoners," urged the boy, "and that's
better than starving to death. Come on! I'm going to make a try."

The German took his companion by the arm. "See here," he explained;
"ven dey catch you, dot's all right. You are prisoner; dot's all. Ven
dey catch me, den it goes one, two, dree--bang, und den Foldeen Schell
addends his own funeral. Dot's the difference by you und me."

"Nonsense!" said Lafe. "They don't shoot anybody in the band."

"Anyhow, dey shoot me out of de band," persisted Foldeen, gloomily. "I
was in dot oder army myself, sometimes."

The boy drew a long breath of enlightened surprise, which was almost a
whistle.

"Well, then, you stay here," he said, after a little, "and I'll take a
look at the thing by myself."

Suiting the action to the word, Lafe laid hold of the stoutest
saplings, and lowered himself down by his arms to the ledge below. The
footing was not quite easy; but by hanging to the vines he managed to
work his way obliquely across the face of the declivity, and yet keep
pretty well under cover of the bushes.

Suddenly, emerging from the thicket, he found himself quite inside the
breastwork, which he had entered from the open rear. The more terrible
signs of the conflict which had been waged here a few hours before
forced themselves upon his attention, first of all.

He braced himself to walk past them, and to go straight to the heap of
knapsacks piled up among the branches in the corner.

Lifting one of the haversacks, he opened it. There was a tin cup on
top, and some woollen things which might be socks. Pushing his hand
under these, he came upon some bread, and paused to express his content
by a smile.

"Drop it--you!"

[Illustration: "DROP IT--YOU!"]

A loud, peremptory voice close at his shoulder caused the boy to turn
with alarmed abruptness. A burly man, with a rough, sandy stubble of
beard about his face, had come into the breastwork--or perhaps had been
hidden there all the while.

Lafe's first impulse was one of satisfaction at noting that the
stranger wore the blue Union uniform.

Then he looked into the man's face, and the instinct of pleasure died
suddenly away.




CHAPTER III.

THE BOUNTY-JUMPER.


When Lafe Hornbeck looked into the countenance of the strange man who
appeared thus unexpectedly before him in the deserted breastwork, it
needed no second glance to tell him that he had to deal with a
scoundrel. A threatening and formidable scoundrel he seemed, too, with
his heavy, slouching shoulders, his long arms ending in huge, hairy
hands, and the surly scowl on his low-browed, frowzy face.

He wore the dark-blue jacket and light-blue trousers of the Federal
infantry, and their relative newness showed that he was a fresh
recruit. His badge was the Maltese cross of the Fifth Corps, and its
color, red, indicated the First Division. This was the corps and
division of Boyce's brigade.

Even in the first minute of surprised scrutiny of the fellow Lafe found
himself thinking that he probably belonged to that Ohio regiment which
he had seen bringing up the rear of the line forming for battle.

"Drop it, I say!" the man repeated, harshly.

Lafe drew his hand from the haversack slowly and reluctantly.

"There's enough more of 'em here," he protested, nodding at the pile in
the corner of the earthwork. "I haven't had a mouthful since before
sunrise, and I'm hungry."

"Where'd you come from, anyway, and what business have you got here?"
the other demanded, with an oath and a forward step.

"I'm Fifth Corps, same as you are," replied Lafe, making an effort to
keep his voice bold and firm, "and I came here by tumbling head over
heels down that hill there, right spang from top to bottom." He took
courage from the indecision apparent in the man's eyes to add, "And
that's why I'm going to have something to eat."

The stranger gave a grunt, which, bad-tempered though it was, did not
seem to forbid the action, and Lafe drew forth the bread again. It was
dry and tasteless enough, but he almost forgot to look at his unwelcome
companion in the satisfaction which he had in gulping down the food.

The man lounged over to the pile of haversacks, muskets, and clothing,
and seemed to be trying to make out whether anything was missing. He
grunted again, and turned to Lafe just as the last crust was
disappearing.

"You're a drummer, ain't you?" he said roughly. "Where do you belong?"

Lafe held up his hand to signify that his mouth was too full to talk.
"Boyce's brigade," he explained, after a little.

"That ain't what I asked. What's your regiment?"

"Haven't got any regiment," replied Lafe. "I'm in the brigade band."

"Oh!" growled the man, and turned on his heel. The information seemed
to relieve his mind, for when he had taken a few loitering steps about
the enclosure, and confronted Lafe again, his tone was less
quarrelsome. "Left the hospital camp up there, eh?" he asked, with a
sidelong nod of his head toward the top of the hill.

"Well, yes--and no," responded the boy. "It was there when I left it,
but it ain't there now. Or rather, it _is_ there, but _we_ ain't
there."

"What are you driving at?" the man demanded, once more in a rougher
voice.

"The rebs have gobbled it," said Lafe. "Our folks were skedaddling and
the rebs were coming in the last I saw."

The man gave a low whistle of surprise and interest. He began walking
about again, bending his ugly brows in thought meanwhile. From time to
time he paused to ask other questions, as to which way the people of
the brigade camp had fled, how large was the force which had captured
the camp, and the like.

The news evidently impressed him a good deal. Lafe got the idea that
somehow it changed his plans. What were these plans? the boy wondered.
The whole thing was very hard to make out. More than once he had had it
in mind to say that he had left another member of the band, a very nice
fellow indeed, up on the side-hill above them, who must also be hungry,
and to suggest that he should call him down.

But every time, when this rose to his tongue, a glance at the evil face
of the man restrained him. He could not but remember what Foldeen had
hinted, that there was some "deviltry" going on down below here. What
was it?

"There must have been some pretty tough fighting right here," he
ventured to remark, after a while.

"You bet there was!" the other assented. He seemed not averse to a
little talk, though his mind was still on other things.

"I don't quite figure it out," the boy went on, cautiously. "Of course,
wrastling round in the woods like this, you can't make head nor tail of
how things go, or who's on top, or where--but how does it stand--right
here, I mean? We're in our own lines here, ain't we?"

The stranger fixed a long, inquiring glance upon the boy's face. Lafe
returned the gaze with all the calmness he could muster. He could not
help feeling that there was a good deal of stupidity in the stare under
which he bore up. The man was not quick-minded; that was clear enough.
But it was also plain that he was both a stubborn and a brutal
creature.

"Yes," he growled, after he had stared Lafe out of countenance, "yes,
these are our own lines."

The phrase seemed to tickle his fancy, for something like the beginning
of a grin stirred on the stubbly surface about his mouth. "Yes--our own
lines," he repeated. How strange it was! All at once, like a flash,
Lafe remembered having seen this man before. That slow, sulky wavering
of a grimace on his lips betrayed him. Swiftly pursuing the clue, the
boy reconstructed in his mind a scene in which this man had played the
chief part.

It must have been in the early part of the previous December--just
after the army went into winter quarters behind the line of the Orange
railroad, cooped up in its earth-huts all the way from Culpeper Court
House to Brandy Station. Lafe had gone over on leave one afternoon to
the corps headquarters--it must have been of a Thursday, because there
was to be a military execution the next day, and these were always
fixed for Friday.

The army was then receiving almost weekly large batches of raw
recruits, sent from the big cities, some the product of the draft,
others forwarded by the enlistment bureaus. Among these new-comers were
many good citizens and patriots; but there were also a great many
cowards and a considerable number of scoundrels who made a business of
enlisting to get the bounty, deserting as soon as they could, and
enlisting again from some other point.

To prevent wholesale desertions, both of the cowards and the
"bounty-jumpers," the utmost vigilance was needed. Their best chance to
run away was offered by picket duty, when they found themselves posted
out in comparative solitude, in the dark, on the very outskirts of the
army line.

To checkmate this, a cordon of cavalry had to be drawn still farther
out than the pickets--cavalry-men who slept all day, and at night
patrolled the uttermost confines of the great camp, watching with all
their eyes and ears, ready on the instant to clap spurs and ride down
any skulking wretch who could be discovered attempting his escape.

Even in the teeth of this precaution, the attempts were continually
made, and it was the rarest event for a Friday to pass without the
spectacle of summary punishment being meted out to some captured
deserter on the corps' shooting-ground. Often there were more than one
of these victims to martial law.

Lafe now remembered how, with a boy's curiosity, he had prowled about
the provost marshal's guard quarters, fascinated by the idea that
inside the log shanty, where the two sentinels with fixed bayonets
walked constantly up and down, there were men condemned to be shot at
six the following morning.

Standing around, and gossiping amiably with these sentinels, who shared
the common feeling of the army in making pets of the drummer-boys, he
had managed at last to get a glimpse at one of these fated prisoners.

A face had appeared at the little window, square-cut in the logs. It
was a bad, unkempt face, with a reddish stubble of beard on jaws and
cheek. There may have been some rough jest passed by the other
prisoners inside the hut, for as the boy watched this face, a grim,
mean sort of smile flickered momentarily over it.

Then the face itself disappeared, and left the boy marvelling that a
man could grin in presence of the fact that he was to be shot on the
morrow.

The smile, and the countenance it played upon for that instant of time,
burned themselves into his memory. Lafe racked his brain now for some
recollection of having heard that these particular prisoners were
reprieved, or had succeeded in escaping from their log jail. His memory
was a blank on the subject. Yet he felt sure that the face he had seen
at that window was the identical face he now saw before him.

For the life of him, he could not resist the temptation to venture upon
this dangerous topic.

"You're one of the new regiments brought over to us from the old First
Corps, ain't you?" he asked, with an effort at an ingratiating tone.

The man nodded his head in indifferent assent. He seemed to be
listening intently to the sounds of battle in the air. These were
reduced now to faint, far-away cracklings of rifle-firing, as if only
distant sharpshooters were engaged.

"Suppose this is about the first time you've been under fire, then,"
Lafe remarked. He added, with a bragging air: "I was all through the
Payne's Farm and Mine Run racket last November! That was hot enough, I
tell you!"

The man made that inarticulate grunt of contempt which we try to convey
by the word humph! "So was I," he growled, "and plenty more fights
worse than them."

"Oh, got your discharge and 'listed again?" commented the boy.

Again the stranger turned upon him that steady, dull stare of
inquiry--like the gaze of a vicious ox. He seemed satisfied at length
with the artlessness of Lafe's countenance, but did not trouble himself
to answer his suggestion.

"What do you figure on doin' with yourself?" he abruptly asked the boy,
after a pause.

"How do I know?" retorted Lafe. "I'd try and join brigade headquarters,
if I knew where they were, but I don't. The next best thing is to try
and find some other brigade's headquarters. It's all clear enough
outside here now. I guess I'll take some bread with me, and make a
break through the woods down the run there. I'll fetch up somewhere,
all right."

He bent over the pile of knapsacks, as if to pick one of them up.

"No," the man called out. "Leave 'em alone! You can't take no more of
them rations, and you can't go down the run. You can't go anywhere."

Lafe straightened himself. "Why not?" he asked, with an assumption of
boldness.

"Because you can't," the other retorted curtly.

"What can I do, then?" Lafe inquired defiantly.

The man looked him over. "You can turn up your toes to the daisies in
about another minute, if you don't mind your own business. That's what
you can do," he remarked, with an ugly frown.

"What's the use of talking that way?" said Lafe. "I haven't done you
any harm, have I?"

"No--and you ain't going to, either," was the reply.

The stranger, as he spoke, took a two-barrelled pistol from his inside
jacket-pocket. It was a beautiful weapon, ornamented with a good deal
of chased silver. Lafe had seen pistols like this before, in the
possession of officers, and knew that they were called Derringers.
Private soldiers were not likely to carry weapons of that sort.

He was sure that this man must have stolen the pistol, and the
conviction did not assist Lafe to calmness, as he observed the man push
one of the hammers back with his thumb to full-cock. It is as bad to be
shot by stolen firearms as by those which have been bought and paid
for.

The stranger drew from another pocket a gold watch, with a long loop of
broad black silk braid hanging from its ring. He held it in the palm of
his free hand, and glanced at its open face.

"It must be getting along toward noon," Lafe had the temerity to
remark. There were cold shivers through his veins, but he managed to
keep his tongue steady. If "cheek" could not help him, nothing could.

"About as nigh noon as you're ever likely to git," said the other,
making a pretence of again consulting the watch.

Instinct told the lad with a flashlight swiftness that this looking at
the watch was buncombe. Men who really meant to kill did not parade
timepieces like that.

"I haven't got anything on me that would be of any use to you," he
said, with an immense effort at unconcern. "Even if I had, you wouldn't
need a gun to take it away from me."

"You've got a mouth on you," said the man, eying him, "and it'll be of
use to me to shut it up."

He lifted the pistol as he spoke, and Lafe instinctively closed his
eyes, with a confused rush of thoughts in which he seemed to see his
old mother sitting in the garden with the Book on her knees, and also
the young Ohio officer, who somehow came in among the tall flowers
beside her, and these flowers themselves were the regimental flags
which the color-sergeant was unfurling.

Then, as nothing happened, the boy opened his eyes again, and found
himself able to look into the two black disks of the Derringer's muzzle
without flinching.

He could even look beyond the muzzle, as the barrels sloped downward
toward him, and he now saw distinctly that the two little upright steel
nipples bore no caps. The discovery made him annoyed at his own
cowardice. It was easier now to be bold.

"What's your idea, anyway?" he asked the man, with an added effrontery
in his tone. "If you'd been going to shoot, you'd have done it long
ago. This thing doesn't scare me at all, and I don't see how it does
you any good. What are you getting at, anyhow?"

"I'd as soon shoot you as look at you!" the other declared with angry
emphasis, but lowering the weapon.

"Yes, but seeing you ain't going to shoot, what are you going to do?"
Lafe put in.

The ruffian eyed him again. "If I agree not to hurt you, will you do
what I tell you?" he demanded.

"Well, maybe I will," replied the boy. His spirits rose as his contempt
for this slow and shilly-shallying sort of scoundrel increased. "What
is it you want me to do?"

"I want you to help me carry some things I've got together over there,
on the other side of the creek. Well go over now, and bring 'em back
here."

"I'll take another bite of bread, first," it occurred to the boy to
say. He lifted a haversack, and shoved in one hand to burrow among its
contents, while with his foot, as if by accident, he pushed one of the
muskets lengthwise so that he might grab it the more readily if
occasion required.

Biting in leisurely fashion on the new crust he had found, Lafe felt
emboldened to make the conversation personal.

"That's a mighty fine watch you've got there," he remarked, affably. "I
suppose it went with the pistol--sort o' thrown in, like."

The man put the watch back into his trousers pocket. He seemed for a
moment disposed to annoyance. Then the furtive, mean grin curled over
the lower part of his face. "Yes--it was thrown in," he replied, almost
with a chuckle. "Come on," he added. "You can chew that bread as you go
along."

"But what am I to get?" the boy queried, slowly turning the crust over
to select a place for the next bite. "Do I come in for any watches and
silver-mounted Derringers, too?"

"You jest help me for all you're worth," replied the man, after a
moment's pause, "and I'll see to it you git something worth your
while."

"It's got to be something pretty good," said Lafe, meditatively chewing
on the hard bread. "A fellow can't be expected to risk the chance of
being shot for nothing."

"There ain't no danger of gittin' shot," the other replied.

"Well, hung, then," Lafe said impudently.

"What's that you say?" the man growled, with reawakened suspicion. "Who
said anything about hangin'? What kind o' nonsense are you talkin',
anyway?"

It might be a desperately foolish thing to do, but Lafe could not hold
himself from doing it--and for that matter didn't try.

[Illustration: LAFE AND THE BOUNTY-JUMPER.]

"Why, they hang men caught robbing the dead on battle-fields, don't
they--specially when they're bounty-jumpers to begin with?"

He had called this out as swiftly as he could, holding himself in
readiness as he spoke, and now he pounced downward, and clutching the
musket, lifted it for defence.

The man sprang forward with a quicker motion than the boy had counted
upon, and before Lafe had got erect he felt the stifling grasp of big,
hard fingers around his throat.




CHAPTER IV.

RED PETE IN CAPTIVITY.


Things grew black before Lafe's eyes as the iron clutch about his
throat tightened. He strove desperately to twist himself loose, using
in a frantic way the wrestling tricks he knew; but the grip of the
bounty-jumper was too powerful. Lafe's head seemed swelling in the
effort to burst, and feeling in all his body below that fatal circlet
became numb. There was room for but a single thought--this was what
being choked to death meant!

Afterward it never seemed to the boy that he entirely lost
consciousness. He could remember that there was a violent sidewise jerk
at his neck, and then the sense of intolerable squeezing there ceased.
But there was still an awful buzzing inside his head, and midnight
blackness, shot with interlacing lines of crazy light, spread itself
indefinitely about him.

Gradually he perceived that he was breathing again, and that he could
feel his arms and legs once more to be parts of him. He knew that he
was exceedingly tired and sleepy, and felt only that the one desirable
thing was to lie still, just as he was. He mentally resolved that he
would not stir nor open his eyes for anybody.

"_How vas it mit you, Lafe?_"

The words were undoubtedly in the air. He realized that, and lay very
still, lazily confident that he would hear them again.

Things began to assort themselves in his brain. Foldeen and he had been
on a big, overhanging rock, which had tumbled with them, and by some
chance they hadn't both been killed, and now Foldeen was looking for
him. But he would lie still and rest.

"Vake up! Lafe! Vake up!"

The boy heard these words, too. The heavy drowsiness upon him seemed to
be lifting, and he felt some one fumbling at his breast, inside his
shirt. On the instant he was awake and sitting up, wonderingly staring.

A tall figure had risen away from him as he opened his eyes. The sun
had come out, and was falling warm and full upon the mass of young
green which covered the hillside. This erect standing figure was for a
moment or two very indistinct against the dazzling light. Then Lafe
made out that this was Foldeen.

Almost in the same glance he saw that he was sitting among the heap of
knapsacks and battle-field débris in the corner of the breastwork.
Close beside him--so near that he felt he must have been lying upon him
when he recovered consciousness--sprawled the burly figure of the
bounty-jumper, face downward, and quite still.

Lafe was so contented with the spectacle on which his eyes rested that
it did not occur to him to ask what had happened.

It was pleasanter to look at Foldeen's honest face, beaming
satisfaction back into the boy's slow and inquiring regard. The German
said nothing, but just smiled at Lafe.

As the boy's memory cleared itself, the fact that Foldeen had had no
breakfast, and that he had left him in his covert on the hillside with
very little compunction, rose above everything else.

Lafe pointed to the knapsacks, and attempted to speak. His throat and
windpipe, the roots of his tongue and everything else involved in vocal
sounds, seemed at the effort to shrivel up in pain. At first he thought
he could not manage to utter a syllable. Then, at the cost of some
suffering, he forced out the words, "Bread--there." They sounded quite
strange in his ears.

Foldeen nodded his head, still with the jubilant grin on his round,
kindly face. "Ya vole," he said, in a matter-of-fact way. "But first I
fix me up dis fellow dight."

He sorted out of the pile of stolen property two officers' sashes of
knitted crimson silk, and kneeling down beside the outstretched form of
the bounty-jumper, proceeded calmly to bind his legs together at the
ankles with one of them.

Then, with some roughness, he dragged the prostrate man's arms together
till their wrists met on the small of his back, and there tied them
securely.

"He ain't dead, then?" commented Lafe, his throat feeling easier.

"Vell, maybe he is," said Foldeen. "I hit him shtraight by the top of
his head mit dot gun-barrel, und he vent down like if he vas a tousand
bricks. But it makes nodding. Ven he is dead, den he is good tied up.
Ven he is alife, den he is much better tied up. Now ve eat us our
breakfast in kviet. Bread, you say? Show me dot bread."

Foldeen needed no showing, but was on the instant wolfing huge
mouthfuls from the half-loaf which the nearest haversack furnished.
Lafe leaned back and watched him, his mind filled with formless
emotions of thanksgiving.

In such intervals as he could spare from the bread, Foldeen lightly
told what had happened. From his perch up on the hillside he had seen
everything, and though beyond earshot, had been able to follow pretty
well what was going on.

When the rascal drew the pistol, Foldeen slipped out from his
hiding-place, and began letting himself noiselessly down the hill. He
had entered the breastwork just at the critical moment, and had dealt
Lafe's assailant a crushing blow on the skull with a gun he picked up.
That was all. It was very simple.

"And mighty lucky for me, too!" was the boy's heartfelt comment.
"Foldeen, do you know what this fellow here's been doing?"

"I haf some brains on my head. I haf seen his business. He is a dief."

"He got these things together here," said Lafe, "and he told me there
was a lot more over on the other side of the creek. He was going to
make me help him bring them here. That was what he had the pistol out
for. But what beats me is, what did he expect to do with them? A man
can't get out of the lines with a load of traps like this, even if he
could carry 'em."

For answer Foldeen rose, and turned the sprawling, inert form of his
captive over on its back. The pallor of the thief's face, contrasted
with the coarse, sandy hair and stubble of beard, made it seem more
repellent than ever.

The German bent over to examine this countenance more carefully.

"By jiminy priest! I bet me anydings I know dot man!" he exclaimed,
staring downward intently. "Vake up dere, you!" he called out, pushing
the recumbent figure with his foot. "I know you, Red Pete! Dot's no
use, your making out you vas asleep! Vake up, kvick now!" and he
stirred him with his boot again.

"I bet he's dead," said Lafe.

No! The man half opened his eyes and moved his head restlessly. The
color came back into his face, the muscles of which were drawn now into
an angry scowl by pain. He fell back helpless after an instinctive
effort to lift himself to a sitting posture. Then, shifting his head,
he discovered the two friends, and fixed upon them a stolid,
half-stupefied stare.

"How you like him, dot Red Pete, eh?" Foldeen burst forth, with
exultation, never taking his jubilant glance from the face of the
wretch on the ground. "Dots a beauty, ain'd it? Dot's a first-glass
Ghristmas bresent, eh, to find in your shtocking! Or no, he is too big.
Ve hang him on a dree, eh? A nize Ghristmas-dree, all by ourselves, eh?
O Red Pete, you vas git the best place by dot dree, right in front, on
the biggest branch!"

The man on the ground had been staring upward at the speaker in a
puzzled fashion. He had slowly taken in the situation that he was
disabled, bound hand and foot, and at the German's mercy. At last he
seemed to recall who it was who was talking to him.

"I never done you no harm!" he growled.

"So-o!" ejaculated Foldeen, with loud sarcasm. "Dot vas no harm, eh,
dot vas only some little fun, eh, to make me on fire und burn me up mit
the rest in dot shteam-boat? Just some funny joke, eh? Veil, den, now I
will haf me _my_ funny liddle jokes mit you."

Speaking with such swift volubility that Lafe followed with difficulty
the thread of his narrative, Foldeen unfolded a curious tale. Before
the war he had drifted about in the South a good deal, playing in
orchestras in New Orleans some of the time, and then for whole seasons
travelling up and down the Mississippi in the bands of the old
passenger steamers.

This man, Red Pete, was a well-known character on the river, too well
known all the way from Cairo to the last levee. Sometimes he was in
charge of a squad of slaves, sometimes travelling on his own account as
a gambler, slave-buyer, or even for a trip as minor boat officer--but
always an evil-minded scoundrel.

One night, when they were lying at the wharf under the bluff at
Natchez, the cabins of the steamer had been robbed, and fire set to the
boat in several places. Those on board barely escaped with their lives,
and when they found that Red Pete was missing, every one knew well
enough that he was the thief and would-be murderer.

Foldeen believed there had been some search for him, but those were
rough times, and he was never tracked down. Then the war came, and
Foldeen perforce went into the band of an Arkansas regiment--until the
opportunity of making his escape to the Union lines occurred.

During that period of reluctant service with the band which played
"Dixie" and "The Bonnie Blue Flag," he had more than once heard of Red
Pete as a sort of unattached guerrilla, who, like many other river
ruffians, played for his own hand between the lines.

"Und now it looks like dot game of his vas pretty near blayed out, eh?"
Foldeen concluded with a chuckle.

Lafe gazed down with loathing upon this burly and powerful desperado,
lying in such utter helplessness. He told Foldeen in turn how he had
seen this very man in the Fifth Corps "quod" only last winter,
condemned to death.

"So-o!" exclaimed the German. "I remember dot. All five deserters und
bounty-chumpers dug deir vay out, und gilled a sentinel, und skipped in
the night. So-o! Ve don't have us dot private Ghristmas-dree, after
all. Ve make Red Pete a bresent to Cheneral Boyce, instead."

"Yes, but where shall we find General Boyce?" Lafe put in.

Moved by a common impulse, the two turned their backs on their
prisoner, and went outside the earthwork.

The sky was overcast with shifting clouds again, and gave no hint as to
the points of compass. The little valley, strewn with motionless,
blue-clad figures, lay wrapped in such silence that they could hear the
murmur of the rivulet beyond. On both sides the hills rose steeply,
covered with thick, tangled verdure.

Behind and before them the valley lost itself a hundred yards away in
dense thickets. A sharp wind had risen, under which the tree-tops
moaned. Above the noises of the gathering gale, faint sounds of distant
firing could be heard.

"We'd better stay where we are," the boy suggested. "There's been
rough-and-tumble fighting all around here, and there's no way of
figuring out where our people are. I guess they don't know themselves.
If we go hunting round, we're as likely as not to walk into a hornets'
nest. I tell you what we'll do. If we can find a piece of white cloth,
we'll put it up on a pole out here, and we'll bury these men of ours.
Nobody'll touch us, if they come along and find us doing that. Besides,
it's the right thing to do."

They turned back into the breastwork, and Lafe, rummaging among the
knapsacks, speedily found a roll of bandage-linen which would serve his
purpose. He got out more bread as well, and found a scrap of fried
bacon. The two ate standing; now that they had a plan, they were all
eagerness to put it into operation.

Red Pete had closed his eyes again, and was lying perfectly still. The
excitement of his capture having died away, they now scarcely gave him
a glance.

"I wonder what time it's got to be," Lafe remarked, as they were
finishing the last mouthful. "Oh, I forgot--he's got a gold watch in
his pocket, and I think it's going."

Foldeen knelt, and feeling about for it, drew the watch from Red Pete's
trousers pocket. "By jiminy priest! it's near four o'clock!" he
exclaimed. Then rising, he looked more attentively at the watch,
turning it over in his hand admiringly, and prying open the back of the
case with his nail.

There seemed to be an inscription on the inside of the cover, and
Foldeen held the watch sidewise to decipher this more readily, while
Lafe peered over his shoulder to look.

"It's in writing," he said; "let me take it. I can make it out easier,
perhaps."

The legend inside the gold case was delicately engraved in small
running script. Lafe, reading with increasing surprise, discovered it
to be this:--

          _Presented to
       Lieut. Lyman Hornbeck,
         January 22, 1864,
    by his friends and admirers
       Of St. Mark's Church,
            Cleveland._

"Say, Foldeen," Lafe burst forth, "I bet that's a relation of mine.
I've got an uncle----"

"So everybody has got some ungles," put in the musician.

"No, but look here," the boy insisted. "That says 'Lyman Hornbeck.'
Well, my father's brother was Lyman Hornbeck. I've heard talk about my
Uncle Lyme ever since I could remember. He left home years ago, before
I was born. They always said he was out West, somewhere. I bet it's the
same man. At any rate, I'm going to take a look around. You fix up the
pole and the white flag outside here, and bring out the shovels. I'll
be back again and help."

Lafe's eyes sparkled with a new excitement as he made his way across
the pasture to the bank of the creek, noting as he strode along that
all the lifeless forms on the grass wore the uniforms of privates.

He walked along the shelving edge of this bank from one end of the
clearing to the other, to make sure that the winding bed of the stream
below did not hold what he sought for. There was no sign, anywhere in
the open, of an officer.

He remembered now that Red Pete had spoken of the other side of the
creek, which lay so much lower than the bank on which he stood that it
could not have been raked by the fire from the breastwork. It was
swampy ground, covered heavily with high, bushing willows and rank
growths of tall marsh grass. No path leading into it was discernible,
perhaps because the wind blew the reeds and flags so stiffly sidewise.

With a running jump Lafe cleared the bed of the stream, and pushed his
way into the morass. It was not so wet underfoot as he had expected,
but the tangle of vines and undergrowth made his progress slow and
troublesome. It was easy enough to see that no portion of the brigade
had passed this way; there were no indications that wild nature here
had ever been disturbed. The boy pressed on until, finding the
swamp-jungle getting worse with every yard, and the shadows deepening
about him, it was clearly useless to go farther.

Turning, he fancied he knew from which direction he had advanced into
this maze. There was no use in merely retracing his steps. He settled
his bearings as well as might be, and struck off to the left, to work
his way diagonally out to the clearing.

When he had floundered on over what seemed twice the distance of his
first direct line, and halted, hot, tired, and out of breath, he could
detect no open space ahead. The wind was blowing hard from up above,
and the noise of its impact upon the wilderness was in itself enough to
confuse the senses. It was undoubtedly growing dark.

"Hello--Hornbeck!" Lafe shouted.

The wind seized the shrill cry and scattered it into fragmentary
echoes. It was worse than useless to call out. He must push doggedly
on. Lafe turned a little to the right, and crushed his way forward
through the brush and bracken, with a step to which dawning fears of
being lost lent added vigor.

He was traversing slightly higher ground now. The willows and marsh
grass had given place to a more orderly second growth of firs, with dry
moss underfoot, and open spaces overhead. In one of these
breathing-places of the thicket, he came suddenly upon the blue-clad
figure of a man sitting propped up against a stump, his head hanging on
his breast.

He was young and fair-haired, and Lafe's glance took in the glint of
gilt straps on his shoulders as he hurried toward him. Almost in the
same instant the boy, kneeling at his side, saw that this was the young
Ohio officer he had spoken with at sunrise, and that he was alive.

As he sought to waken the wounded man, and make out how badly he had
been hurt, it grew suddenly, strangely dark. Looking upward, Lafe saw
above the treetops nearest him, piling skyward on the wind, a great
writhing wall of black smoke.

It mounted in huge, waving coils as he looked, and came nearer, bending
forward in a sinister arch across the heavens. His startled ears dimly
heard a sullen, roaring sound, newly engrafted upon the whistling of
the wind.

The woods were on fire!




CHAPTER V.

LAFE RESCUES AN OFFICER, AND FINDS HIS COUSIN.


Lafe had seen forest fires near Juno Mills, and there was nothing in
his recollection of them to suggest great danger in this one. He was
more interested for the moment in the young Ohio officer propped
against the stump. This lieutenant was barefooted. A thief had
evidently taken also his sash, sword, and belt.

He was probably one of Red Pete's victims. The others could not be far
away, among them Lafe's problematical kinsman with the presentation
watch.

But finding a possible uncle was just now of less importance than
finding a safe way out of the thicket. The smoke grew visibly thicker,
and Lafe could detect, off to the left, the distinct crackling noise of
flames. He dropped on one knee again, and patted the officer's shoulder
with decision.

The young man moved his head restlessly, then opened his eyes and
stared dully at Lafe.

"Which way is the creek?" the drummer-boy shouted.

The lieutenant, as if dazed, looked half wonderingly into the boy's
face. Then he blinked, shook himself, and made a move to sit upright.
He sank back with his mouth drawn awry by the severity of his pain, and
forced the semblance of a laugh upon these pale lips.

"I thought at first I was home, and you were my brother," he said.

"How bad are you hurt? Can you walk?" Lafe demanded. "We've got to get
out of this. The woods are on fire, and the wind is blowing it dead
this way. Where are you hit?"

"Minie ball here--between the shoulder and the lung, I hope," replied
the other, indicating his left side. "It's stiffened and I can't lift
myself. Help me on my feet, and I guess I can walk away."

Lafe put an arm under him and gave him his hand. The lieutenant, with a
groan, set his teeth and scrambled up on his feet. He looked about him
for an instant, and then hastily seated himself on the stump.

"I'm dizzy for the minute," he murmured. "I must have lost so much
blood. It's afternoon, isn't it?"

"Past five. You'd better brace up now, and try to come on. Which way is
it?"

The officer looked vaguely around. "I hardly know," he confessed. "I
can just remember dragging myself off into the swamp. I thought I
should find some water, and I guess my strength gave out about here.
Somebody came along and pulled off my boots and stockings, and went
through my pockets, but I was too near dead to resist, and I kept my
eyes shut."

"Well, you want to keep 'em open now. This must be the way out,
according to the wind. That's it; get your arm over my shoulder, and
we'll make a break."

They walked thus for a dozen steps or so, the officer leaning a little
on Lafe's right shoulder. Then the wounded man stopped.

"I'd rather you went ahead," he called into the boy's ear. "The
branches knock against my game side, this way. I'll keep behind you;"
and so they went on again, Lafe pushing the saplings and boughs aside
for the other.

The smoke had become almost blinding now, as it sifted through the
motionless air of the thicket. The noises had risen now into a
pandemonium of uproar--on the left the furious bellowing of the tempest
and the flames, to the right a series of outbursts that shook the earth
like mine explosions. It sometimes seemed to Lafe as if he
distinguished the cheers and vague cries of men, off on the other
side--and then back would come the chaotic din.

Awed and deafened, the two pushed doggedly on, Lafe stealing glances
over his shoulder, to see if the officer was following. He came,
holding to the branches with his right hand for support, and striving
to pick soft places for his bare feet among the stones and prickly
ground vines.

It had suddenly grown very hot. The heat began to sting Lafe's forehead
and eyes. They were advancing into the temperature of a veritable
furnace. The crackling noises to the left had swollen all at once to an
angry tumult close at hand.

Looking up with smarting eyes through the pungent smoke, the boy beheld
scattered flashes of flame dotting the murky shadows of the forest
beyond, and even as he looked these tongues of fire ran forward under
the wind with darting swiftness. An imperative outcry behind Lafe
called a halt. He turned as his companion reeled, clutched wildly at an
ash sapling, and fell against it, his head hanging helplessly forward
on his breast.

"It's no use," he gasped, as the boy strode back. "I'm choking, and I'm
played out. I can't go another step."

He falteringly lifted one of his torn and bleeding feet, and put it
down again. His arm slipped from around the sapling, and he would have
fallen if Lafe had not caught him.

"Why don't you be a man!" the boy screamed shrilly through the tumult.

A sort of angry desperation seized upon Lafe. He would drag this Ohio
tenderfoot out of the fire in spite of himself. With rough energy he
fitted his shoulder under the officer's armpit, and drew his right arm
forward in the determined clutch of both his hands.

"Come on now, the best way you can. Never mind your feet or your
shoulder either!" he yelled, and then, stiffening his back under the
burden, he staggered forward.

He could never afterward recall anything definitely of how he did it,
or how long it took. But through the shrivelling heat, through the
murderous swoop of fire and smoke, somehow he came. All at once there
was the play of cooler air upon his face. Instead of the choking smoke
and darkness he was wrapped about by a clean wind. It had grown
suddenly daylight again.

Bent almost double under his burden, he strove in vain to fill his
lungs with this fresh air. It was dimly in his mind to straighten
himself, and breathe in all he could hold. But the load on his back
seemed to be pressing him further down, and whirling him round as well.

Then he was lying face downward, on dry, soft earth with the sharp
edges of stiff marsh grass in his hair. Something heavy lay across him.
He rolled himself free from the encumbrance, and stretched himself out
luxuriously on his back. The wind soughed pleasantly through the reeds
about his head.

He went to sleep, dreaming placidly as he dropped off that ordered
swarms of men were passing through the tall grass close beside him,
firing volleys and cheering as they fired.

Four red points of light, at regular distances apart, and shining
faintly against a broad canopy of blackness, was what Lafe, still lying
on his back, beheld when he woke. He looked at them lazily for what
seemed a long time, and did not care in the least what they signified.
Then, quite without any effort, he knew that they were lanterns hung on
a rope.

There were sinuous lines of motion in the darkness above the lanterns,
and these revealed themselves to him as the sides of canvas-strips
stirring in the wind. This, too, did not seem important, and he
indolently closed his eyes again.

A sharp cry, ringing abruptly out close at hand, awoke him more
thoroughly. He even lifted his head a little, and saw many more
lights--lanterns, kerosene lamps, and tallow-dips stuck in bottles.
They stretched out irregularly in all directions, illumining little
patches of space, which seemed all the smaller by comparison with the
vast blocks of deep shadows surrounding them.

The radiance of many of these lights centred upon a broad table, about
which several men were standing in their shirtsleeves, and with aprons
like butchers. There seemed to be another man lying on this table, and
one of his legs was bared to the thigh. Some of these shadowy figures
moved, and another cry arose. Lafe shut his eyes, and turned away from
the spectacle.

There was now a rustle of straw under him, and he noted that his head
was resting on a canvas pillow filled with straw. A strong smell, as of
arnica, attracted his attention. Now he understood that he was in a
hospital tent.

He wondered where he himself had been hurt. Except for a general, dull
aching of the muscles, he was conscious of no special pain. He tried
opening and closing his fingers, and moving his toes.

Each member seemed in working order. He passed his hands along his
sides, and still found nothing amiss. But his head certainly did ache.

Vague recollection of the events of the day began to stir in his
memory, but not at all in their right order. It seemed as if it was
Foldeen Schell whom he had carried out of the burning woods, and nearer
still in point of time seemed to be Red Pete's stifling grip upon his
neck. Then, somehow, his thoughts drifted to the watch and its
inscription.

He drowsily tried to think what this Lyman Hornbeck must be like--a
gray-bearded old man and a church-member, and yet only a lieutenant. So
his vagrant fancy drifted about on the border-land of sleep.

Suddenly there were voices close about him. Half opening his eyes, Lafe
blinked at three or four torches which some soldiers were holding up at
the foot of his bed. A half-dozen officers were there as well, and the
foremost one was General Boyce.

The light hurt Lafe's eyes, and he closed them. The general's cheery
voice remained in his ears, though, and conveyed so true a notion of
the man that Lafe seemed to continue to behold him, the red torchlight
heightening the glow of health on his round cheeks and shining in his
brave, kindly eyes.

"Oh, you'll be up and about in a day or two," the general was saying,
in a hearty, encouraging way. "Won't he, surgeon-major?"

"Well, inside a week," answered another voice. "The wound in itself
wasn't much. It's the loss of blood that's worst."

"Lieutenant," the general went on, "if I don't call you captain when
you get back from your furlough, it won't be my fault. You've been
mentioned in the despatches. Your company's tussle with the breastwork
under the hill was as plucky a thing as has been done to-day. Well,
good luck to you!"

There was a rattle of spurs and swords, as if the group were moving,
and then Lafe was conscious that the young Ohio officer spoke, as if
from the very next bed.

"O general," he called out, "I'll save my own thanks for some other
time! But I want you to take notice of this boy here. _He's_ one
who ought to be mentioned in despatches. I'd have been roasted alive if
it hadn't been for him. He came into the woods and found me, and routed
me up, and made me walk, and when I gave out he actually carried me
right through the blaze. Talk about charging the breast-work! What he
did was worth fifty of it."

Lafe felt through his closed eyelids that the torches were being held
so as to cover him with their light. Oddly enough, he seemed without
desire to look.

"I won't forget," said the general. "How badly off is he?"

"He was brought in with the lieutenant here," returned the
surgeon-major. "I didn't see him myself. You were here, nurse?"

A woman's voice took up the thread: "Poor little fellow, he doesn't
seem to have been shot, but his head was laid open to the bone somehow.
Doctor Alvord thought it must have been a horse's hoof."

"We were both on the ground in the way when the big charge down the run
was made," explained the lieutenant. "He must have got trampled on. I
think he's a drummer in the brigade band. I noticed him when we went
into line this morning."

"I wonder if it can be our Juno Mills boy," broke in the general. Lafe
felt that the great man was bending over close to him. "Some Dutchman
in the band was telling a tremendous yarn about a youngster who went
down alone into the breast-work after it was deserted, and had a fight,
single-handed, with a baggage-thief, and played the deuce generally.
Does anybody know whether he's the same one?"

Lafe could never understand afterward what ailed him to behave so, but
at this he kept his breathing down to its gentlest possible form. The
general and his attendants moved off down the aisles, halting with the
torches at other bedsides to give cheer. Their going gave Lafe leisure
for the thought which interested him most.

The news that his head had been laid open to the bone had fascinated
him. He put up a hand now and felt of his skull. It was covered all
over with interlaced strips of stiff plaster encased in a soft linen
bandage drawn tight.

"Are you feeling all right?"

It was the voice of the lieutenant. Lafe, proud of his plasters, opened
his eyes and made out the young officer, propped up with a couple of
straw pillows on the bed next his.

"My head aches a little, that's all," said Lafe. "Say, we had a squeak
for it, didn't we?"

"I shan't forget it--nor you," responded the other.

"Cleveland's in Ohio, ain't it?" the boy asked, all at once pursuing a
subject which had kept dodging in and out of his mind. "Perhaps you
know an old man in one of the Ohio regiments--he must be getting along
toward sixty--he's a lieutenant, and his name's Lyman Hornbeck. I was
looking for him this afternoon when--when I lighted on you."

The young officer, quite heedless of his bandages, sat bolt upright and
stared at Lafe as if too much amazed for words.

"I don't know what you're driving at," he said at last. "_My_ name
is Lyman Hornbeck, and I'm a Cleveland man and a lieutenant--but I'm a
long way off from sixty. You can't mean my father? He's been dead two
years. His name was Lyman. Why, hold on! General Boyce said something
about Juno Mills--my father came from near there--you don't mean to say
you're a Hornbeck?"

An irresistible impulse moved Lafe to crawl out of his bed and totter
across to the other's pallet. He sat down on the edge of it, and leaned
his head back on the officer's two pillows.

"Say, I'm Steve Hornbeck's son," he said, "and your father was my Uncle
Lyme. Do you know, I kind of felt like takin' a shine to you when you
spoke to me early this morning."

[Illustration: "I'M STEVE HORNBECK'S SON!"]

The officer had put his arm affectionately round the boy's neck. "Why,
don't you remember," he cried, with pleased interest, "how I said I had
a brother like you at home?"

And so the two lay close together in a delighted gossip until the
surgeon came, and laughingly but peremptorily drove them apart. They
told him something of the strange story, and an attendant went out and
found Foldeen, and brought him in, and he added many striking
variations to the legend which now, by midnight, had become the talk of
the brigade.

General Boyce came back to the hospital tent purposely to see the boy
from his own Dearborn County whom men were talking about. He nodded his
head approvingly as he stood by the bedside and listened to Foldeen's
excited narrative of the lad's fight with Red Pete.

"I remember hearing of that fellow before," he said. "We'll hang him in
the morning, if we have to go without breakfast to do it."

Foldeen shook his head. "He is no good for hanging, dot Red Pete,"
he explained. "When the fire is gone out by dot breastwork where he
vas, maybe you find some chargoals from him--und maybe two, dree
buttons--dot's all."

The beautiful city by the lake wore its most velvety, green robes of
June when Lieutenant Hornbeck, who had been home invalided for some
weeks, was able at last to accept the reception which the good people
of St. Mark's Church wished to hold in his honor.

It seemed as if all Cleveland sought for admission to this festival of
welcome to the brave young officer. Yet when he came in, leaning on his
wife's arm, and with the flush of honest pride mantling upon the pallor
of his face, it turned out that the real hero of the evening was the
wiry, brown-faced boy he brought with him.

Lafe's story had been told in many other places. They knew it by heart
here in his new home, where henceforth he was to live with his cousin.
He blushed many times that evening at the things admiring people said
to his face about him, and he still says if folks _will_ insist on
discussing it, that the only interesting thing of the whole day was his
taking a shine to his cousin before he knew who he was.




HOW DICKON CAME BY HIS NAME.

A Tale of Christmas in the Olden Time.




CHAPTER I.

THE MAKING OF A SOLDIER.


Though more crests are blazoned nowadays than there are minutes in
which the heralds may count them, yet old families still live, with
roots deep down in rural England's soil, and nourish in quiet legends
which, when they come to notice, are the fairest flowers in the garden
of English folk-lore.

Such a tale the Tambows of Shropshire can tell. Once, it is dimly
understood, the narrative was written out, and even printed from types
in Caxton's own press. If this be true, the book has long been lost.
But the story is worth keeping.

Dickon looked at this time to be well on in his teens. He was so tall
and stout a lad that grown men spoke to him, now and again, as to one
of themselves. Just what his age might be, however, it lay beyond
mortal power to discover. His mother was long since dead. His native
hamlet had been wiped by fire and sword from the face of the earth.

His father could remember nothing more of Dickon's birth than that it
was either just before the Battle of Bloreheath in Stafford, or soon
after the fierce fight at Mortimer's Cros

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