He stood there for a long time, reading the notice thrice over, making sure of its import. The captain’s dark, angry glance had borne fruit and he, Alva Jukes, was to lose the tabard of authority he had won by his own reckless effort. To lose it for speaking nothing but truth; and, what was more unfair, to lose it to a man who had not the courage of his beliefs. The wild, Scotch-Irish rage gave power to his hand. The burning stick smashed against the notice and sputtered, lighting and consuming the paper. “Let ’em fight their own war, then!” he cried, ducking into the hut. “I’ve done my share!” He went to his corner of the gloomy place, rolled together his bundle of belongings and took his rifle. Going out, he stopped to add fresh fuel to the fire. “Better come an’ take care o’ this now,” he called back. Ploughing through the snow, he was swallowed by the night. But he hadn’t gone twenty yards before he stopped, put down his rifle and bundle and went back to the fallen tree. He collected another armful of wood and packed it to the fire, grumbling-- “Ain’t a blessed one o’ them boys able to lift a stick.” A moment later he had vanished again, turning his course to pass the pickets, bound homeward, a deserter from Valley Forge. The farther he traveled the more powerfully did the bitter resentment affect him. At last he cried out to the black winter sky. “May the Lord strike me dead if ever I see the army again. ---- the Congress! Let ’em fight fer their own freedom if they’re so sot on it. A pack o’ shilly-shally lawyers an’ argufyers!” * * * * * He was a tough, canny fellow, Alva Jukes, and capable of sustaining himself through hard affairs. That night, a great deal later, he turned off the road and slept in a barn. At the first crack of day he was away, bearing in his pouch two ears of dried corn, which was his only food for the next ten hours. His course led him northwesterly along a pike, aiming straight for the backwoods part of the State, toward that land he had left better than two years before. As he traveled he kept good watch behind for patrols that swept the environs of Valley Forge. He was not of a mind to be taken and marched back before a summary court. And so it was that, when his eyes spied horsemen coming along the road, he dropped into a stand of trees and let them pass. They were a few officers on a reconnoitering party and after they vanished around a bend he came from concealment. At the joining of highways some distance farther along, he chose the lesser used route and soon was slogging through drifts of snow. The sky was lowering and beyond noon the flakes began to drift slantwise through the air. It was about this time, too, that he considered himself removed sufficiently from the army to abandon his precaution and to give all his attention to the road ahead.