Looking upon that pallid, vacant, starved face, and wasted, helpless form, Mose, starving himself, felt strong enough to defy the most appetizing stew in the world. He took off the cover with decision, and dipped the tea-cup up half full of the smoking contents. It was too hot, evidently, to be given to the old man at once, and it was also very thick. Mose took it out to the dismantled woodshed, and spooned in snow until it seemed of the right temperature and consistency. He dipped a little finger into it to further satisfy himself, but he would not even lick that finger afterward. It was too dangerous to think about. Mose fed his father as a mother might a baby--watching solicitously to see that he did not eat too fast or choke himself. After the first cupful, he brought a chair to sit in, and held the tick against his knee while old Asa, leaning more lightly upon it, helped himself. There was a little left at last for Mose, and he swallowed it gravely, with a portentous rush of sensations within, but keeping up as best he could an indifferent exterior. It left him still hungry, but he had much more important things to dwell upon than that. The meal worked wonders upon the old man. The combined influences of food and warmth seemed for a few minutes to send him off to sleep again. Mose sat looking down upon him in silence, and noting that something like color was stealing back into his face. All at once, however, Asa Whipple sat upright, lifted his hands to brush back the hair from his forehead, and, turning his face up to look at his son, smiled. There was no lack of comprehension in his gaze. He had regained his tongue as well. He patted Mose's knee as he spoke. "Mose," he said, in a voice strangely altered and aged, but clear enough, "I'm kind o' 'shamed to tell it, but I'd laid down here just to go to sleep for good. I thought for quite a spell there, after you come in, that I was dreaming--sort o' out o' my head, you know." "How did you come to let yourself down like this, dad?" was the only reply Mose had at hand. "Rheumatiz," Asa explained. "It laid me up--I couldn't git around, an' nobody come near me. I ain't seen a soul since the big snowfall--up'ards of a fortnight. But--but it's all right now, ain't it, Mose? An' to think o' your comin' home here like this, right in the nick o' time. How did you come to git off, Mose?" For answer there fell the crunching sound of footsteps on the crusted snow outside, then of a loud, peremptory knock on the door. CHAPTER IV. THE "MEANEST WORD." Mose Whipple had lifted his head in apprehensive inquiry at the sound of the footsteps outside the door of the cabin. He sprang to his feet when the sharp knock on the door followed. Holding a hand downward with outspread fingers as a warning to silence, he tiptoed out to the middle of the room, then paused and listened. The knock came again, bolder and more peremptory still.