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[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