Job showed his practical character in fixing up a well-built lean-to at the side of the shanty, putting a new roof of spruce bark on the whole structure, and constructing a fishing raft to float on the still water up the outlet. One day in early July, a chance wanderer in the forest--a Canadian who was looking about with a divining rod for minerals on the mountain range, and who stopped at the shanty overnight--left behind him a month-old copy of a New York weekly newspaper. In this paper, after breakfast, old Asa, sitting out on a log in the sunlight with his pipe, read the horrible story of the three days' fighting--one might say butchery--at Cold Harbor. Mose and Job had already started out on a fishing excursion to new waters across the divide. When they returned, along toward four o'clock, they found awaiting them one who seemed scarcely recognizable for Asa, so old and bowed had he once more become. The change was apparent as they entered the clearing, and beheld him seated by the doorway a full hundred yards away. "He's had a stroke or something!" Mose exclaimed, and they both started on a run toward him. As they came up, the old man lifted his head and looked his son in the face, with a glance which the other dimly recalled as belonging to that bitter December day when he had first come home. "Mose," cried Asa, holding the paper out as he spoke, "it's all wrong! There's no pretendin' it ain't! We've been enjoyin' ourselves here, foolin' ourselves into forgettin', but it's all wrong! There ain't been so much as a word dropped sence the boy and me come here, about this thing, and it seemed as if the whole affair had just slipped our mem'ries--but it won't do. I've been sittin' here ever sence you went away, thinkin' it over--thinkin' hard enough every minute for the whole five months--and it's all wrong. Here, you read this for yourself." Mose took the paper, and spelt his way through the long, blood-drenched narrative, without a word. When he had finished he returned his father's glance, with a look of mingled comprehension and assent in his eyes. "All right," he said simply. "I feel the same as you do about it. I'll go!" Both seemed to feel intuitively that this great resolve, thus formed, could not wait an instant for fulfilment. Hardly another word was spoken until Mose, his pockets filled for the journey and his blanket strapped, stood ready in front of the cabin, to say good-by. "It's no good waiting till to-morrow," he said then. "The sooner it's over the better. You can get along first-rate here by yourselves. Job can take in skins and so on, and a mess of trout now and then,--he knows the way,--and bring back ammunition and your tobacco and so on. You'll be all right." He paused a moment, and then took from his finger the little rubber ring which Job had restored to him in Teachout's cow-barn months before, and handed it to Asa. "Here," he said, "that's a kind of keepsake. Good-by, dad. Good-by, Job."