CHAPTER I.
DISCOVERIES IN THE BARN.
It was the coldest morning of the winter, thus far, and winter is nojoke on those northern tablelands, where the streams still run black intoken of their forest origin, and old men remember how the deer used tobe driven to their clearings for food, when the snow had piled itselfbreast high through the fastnesses of the Adirondacks. The wildernesshad been chopped and burned backward out of sight since their pioneerdays, but this change, if anything, served only to add greaterbitterness to the winter's cold.
Certainly it seemed to Job Parshall that this was the coldest morninghe had ever known. It would be bad enough when daylight came, but thedarkness of this early hour made it almost too much for flesh and bloodto bear. There had been a stray star or two visible overhead when hefirst came out-of-doors at half-past four, but even these were missingnow.
The crusted snow in the barnyard did throw up a wee, faint light of itsown, for all the blackness of the sky, but Job carried, besides abucket, a lantern to help him in his impending struggle with the pump.This ancient contrivance had been ice-bound every morning for afortnight past, and one needn't be the son of a prophet to foresee thatthis 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 hehad apprehended. He had reasoned to himself the previous day that ifthe pump-handle were propped upright with a stick overnight, therewould be less water remaining in the cylinder to freeze, and had madethe experiment just before bedtime.
It worked fairly well. There was only a good deal of ice to be knockedoff the spout with a sledge-stake, and then a disheartening amount ofdry pumping to be done before the welcome drag of suction made itselffelt 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 ofcoziness. Two long lines of cows, a score or more on a side, faced eachother in double rows of stanchions. Their mere presence had filled theenclosure 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 hiredmen 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 cleaningup the stable and getting down hay and fodder, and the exercise kepttheir blood running and spirits light. They talked as they plied shoveland pitchfork, guessing how near the low-mercury mark of twenty belowzero the temperature outside had really fallen, and chaffing one oftheir number who had started out to go through the winter withoutwearing an overcoat.
Their cheery voices, resounding through the half-gloom above the soft,crackling undertone of the kine munching their breakfast seemed to addto the warmth of the barn.
The boy Job had begun setting about a task which had no element ofcomfort in it. He got out a large sponge, took up the bucket he hadbrought from the well, and started at the end of one of the rows towash clean the full udder of each of the forty-odd cows in turn. In afew minutes the milkers would be ready to begin, and to keep ahead ofthem he must have a clear start of a dozen cows.
When he had at last reached this point of vantage, the loud din of thestreams against the sides of the milkers' tin pails had commencedbehind him.
He rose, straightened his shoulders, and shook his red, dripping handswith 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 bythrusting them deep down into one of the barrels of brewers' grainswhich stood in a row beyond the oat-bin. The damp, crushed maltgenerates within its bulk so keen a heat that even when the top isfrozen there will be steam within. Job went over and plunged his coldhands to the wrist in the smoking fodder. He held them there thismorning for a luxurious extra minute, wondering idly as he did so howthe cows sustained that merciless infliction of ice-water without anysuch comforting after-resource.
Suddenly he became conscious that his fingers, into which the blood wascoming back with a stinging glow, had hit upon something of an unusualcharacter in the barrel. He felt of it vaguely for a moment, then drewthe object forth, rubbed off the coating of malt, and took it over tothe lamp.
It was a finger-ring carved out of a thick gutta-percha button, butwith more skill than the schoolboys of those days used to possess; andin its outer rim had been set a little octagonal silver plate, bearingsome roughly cut initials.
Job seemed to remember having seen the ring before, and jumped to theconclusion that some one of the hired men had unconsciously slipped itoff while warming his hands in the grains. He went back with it to themilkers, 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 tohis work. The last one up the row volunteered the added comment:
"You better hustle ahead with your spongin' off; I'm just about throughhere!"
The boy put the circlet in his pocket--it was much too large for any ofhis fingers--and resumed his task. The water was as terribly cold asever, and the sudden change seemed to scald his skin; but somehow hegave less thought to his physical discomfort than before.
It was very funny to have found a ring like that. It reminded him of astory he had read somewhere, and could not now recall, save for thedetail that in that case the ring contained a priceless jewel, theproceeds of which enriched the finder for life. Clearly no such resultwas to be looked for here. It was doubtful if anybody would give eventwenty-five cents for this poor, home-made ornament. All the same itwas a ring, and Job had a feeling that the manner of its discovery wasromantic.
Working for a milkman does not open up so rich a field of romance thatany hints of the curious or remarkable can be suffered to passunnoticed. The boy pondered the mystery of how the ring got into thebarrel. For a moment he dallied with the notion that it might belong tohis 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 hewere, he assuredly would not have them of rubber. Besides, the grainshad only been carted in from town two days before, and Mr. Teachout hadbeen nursing his rheumatism indoors for fully a week.
It was more probable that some one down in the brewery at Octavius hadlost the ring. When Job had been there for grains, he had noticed thatthe workers were cheerful and hearty fellows. No doubt they might betrusted to behave handsomely upon getting back a valued keepsake whichhad been given up as forever gone.
Perhaps--who could tell?--this humble, whittled-out piece ofgutta-percha might be prized beyond rubies on account of its familyassociations. Such things had happened before, according to thestory-books; and forthwith the lad lost himself in a maze of brilliantday-dreams, rose-tinted by this possibility.
He could almost behold himself adopted by the owner of the brewery--thefat, red-faced Englishman with the big watch-chain, whom he had seenonce walking majestically among his vats. Perhaps, in truth, Job was atrifle drowsy.
All at once he roused himself with a start, and began to listen withall his ears. The milkers behind him were talking about the ring. Theyhad to shout to one another to overcome the fact of separation and thenoise in their pails, and Job could hear every word.
"I tell you who had a ring like that--Mose Whipple," one of them calledout. "Don't you remember? He made it with his jack-knife, that time hewas 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 manWhippf sick abed. Nobody ain't seen him around for up'ards of afortnight. I guess this cold snap'll about see the last o' him. He'sbeen poorly all the fall."
"Yes, and don't even git the money at that, but jest has it applied tothe 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 forsome kind o' dead horse all his life, anyway. If it wasn't one it'dbe another. Never knew a fellow in all my born days with so littlegit-up-and-git about him. He might as well be shoulderin' a musket asanything 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 alwayswanted to do a little berryin', an' a little fishin', an' a littlehuntin', an' keep a dozen traps or so in the woods, an' he'd throw upthe best-payin' job in the deestrict to have a loafin' spell when thefit 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 bridgewith their fishpoles, before the snow-water'd begun to git out o' thecreek. What _kin_ you do with men like that?"
"Make substitutes of 'em!" one of the milkers exclaimed, and at thisthere was a general laugh.
Every one on the farm, and for that matter on all the other farms formiles round, knew that Elisha Teachout had been drafted the previoussummer, and had sent Moses Whipple to the front in his place. Thisrelation between the rich man and the poor man was too common a thingin those war times to excite particular comment. But, as Mr. Teachoutwas not beloved by his hired men, they enjoyed a laugh whenever thesubject came up.
Job had gone over to the lamp, during the progress of this talk, andscrutinized the ring. Surely enough, the clumsily scratched initials onthe little silver plate, obviously cut down from an old three-centpiece, were an M and a W.
This made it all the more difficult to puzzle out how the ring came inthe barrel. The lad turned the problem over in his mind with increasingbewilderment.
He had known Mose Whipple all his life. His own father, who died someyears ago, had accounted Mose among his intimate friends, and Job'searliest recollections were of seeing the two start off together of aspring morning with shot-guns on their shoulders and powder-flasks hunground their bodies.
They had both been poor men, and if they had not cared so much forhunting--at least if one of them had not--Job reflected that probablythis very morning he himself would be sleeping in a warm bed, insteadof freezing his hands in the hard employ of Elisha Teachout.
It was impossible not to associate Mose with these recriminatorythoughts; yet it was equally impossible to be angry with him long. Theboy, indeed, found himself dwelling upon the amiable side of Mose'sshiftless nature. He remembered how Mose used to come round to theirpoor little place, after Job's father's death, to see if he could helpthe widow and her brood in their struggle.
After Mrs. Parshall had married again, and gone West, leaving Job toearn his own living on the Teachout farm, Mose had always kept a kindlyif intermittent eye on the boy. Only the previous Christmas he hadmanaged, 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 factthat he had to sell his shot-gun to pay a pressing debt prevented hisgiving that to the boy for his own.
The news that old Asa Whipple was ill forced its way to the top ofJob's thoughts. He resolved that that very day, if he could squeeze inthe time for it, he would cut across lots on the crust to the Whipplehouse, and see how the lonely old man was.
As the milkers said, old Asa had been "poorly" since his Mose wentaway. It was only too probable that he had been extremely poor as well.
Even when Mose was at home, theirs was the most poverty-strickenhousehold in the township. Left to his own resources, and failingswiftly all at once in health, the father had tried to earn somethingby knitting mittens and stockings.
It had looked funny enough to see this big-framed, powerfully built oldman fumbling at his needles like some grandmother in her rocking-chairby the stove.
It occurred to Job now that there was something besides humor in thepicture. He had been told that people were making woollen mittens andstockings now, like everything else, by machinery. Very likely old Asacouldn't sell his things after he had knit them; and that might meanstarvation.
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 ofall the cans but one, and fastening on the covers instead. He couldhear the bells on the harness of the horses outside, waiting with thebig sleigh to rush off to town with the milk. It was still very darkout-of-doors.
Job put away his water-bucket, warmed his hands once more in thegrains-barrel, and set about getting down a fresh supply of hay for thecows. 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 adarkness which was only dimly penetrated by the rays of the lantern.
Working thus, guided rather by sense of touch than of sight, the boysuddenly felt himself stepping on something big and rounded, which hadno business in a haymow. It rolled from under his feet, and threw himoff his balance to his hands and knees. A muttered exclamation rosefrom just beside him, and then suddenly he was gripped bodily in theclutch of a strong man.
Frightened and vainly struggling, Job did not cry out, but twisted hishead about in the effort to see who it was that he had thus strangelyencountered. There was just light enough from the distant lantern toreveal in the face so menacingly close to his--of all unlooked-forfaces 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 seeme hung higher than Haman!"
The Deserter, and Other Stories: A Book of Two Wars Page 2