Half an hour or more had elapsed, and Asa still sat on the log by the doorway, his head buried in thought. He could hear the strokes of Job's axe, from where the boy was cutting firewood for the evening on the edge of the clearing. As they fell on the air with their sharp, metallic ring, one after another, the old man's fancy likened them to the deadly noises of the battle-field, whither his boy was making his way. But he regretted nothing--no, nothing, save that the act of reparation, of atonement, had not been made long before. There came with abrupt suddenness another sound--the unfamiliar sound of a stranger's voice addressing him. Asa looked up, rousing himself from his reverie with difficulty. He saw that two men with rods, and fishing baskets, and camping packs on their backs, were standing in front of him. Their faces were in the shadow, but he slowly made out the foremost one to be the deputy marshal, Norman Hazzard. "So here's where you moved to, eh?" the deputy marshal was asking, by way of not unfriendly salutation. Asa stared hard for a minute at this astonishing apparition. Then his bewildered tongue found words. "If you're lookin' for my son," he said proudly, "he's gone back to jine his regiment--to do his duty!" Hazzard stared in turn. "Gone!" he exclaimed, "when?" "This very day," rejoined Asa, "not an hour ago. He saw it was right, and he went!" The deputy marshal threw up his hands in a gesture of despairing amazement. "Why, man alive!" he cried, "they'll shoot him like a dog!" CHAPTER VII. ANOTHER CHASE AFTER MOSE. Asa Whipple and the deputy marshal gazed in a dumbfounded way at each other through a cruel minute of silence, broken only by the echoing strokes of Job's axe out in the undergrowth beyond. It was the third man who first found his tongue; and Asa, looking dumbly at him, saw that he was no other than Nelse Hornbeck. "Downright cur'ous that we should 'a' happened to hit on you like this, ain't it?" Nelse began. "If we'd ben tryin' to find you, we'd never 'a' done it in this born world! Norm and me, you see, we've ben fishin' up Panther River three days, and then we followed up the South Branch outlet, and I'd ben figgerin' on makin' a camp by the lake there, an' workin' down the other branch; but the flies were pretty bad, and Norm here, he took a fancy to this 'ere outlet, and our oil of tar was about give out, and so I----" "Oh, shut up!" broke in the deputy marshal, impatiently. "Look here, Asa Whipple, is that straight what you're telling me--that Mose has started off to give himself up?" The old man rose from the log and stood erect. He had never seemed so tall before in his life, and he looked down upon the more lithe and sinewy figure of the deputy marshal almost haughtily. "No, not to give himself up. 'To jine his regiment,' was what I said." Norman Hazzard snorted out an angry laugh.