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.