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!"