"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.