while. I had the feeling that he
wished I had not told him.

At last he looked up. "I suppose, now that we have found this out,
Jotham will have to be told. They are his oxen, of course, and we should
not feel right if we were to keep this from him. It wouldn't be quite
the neighborly thing to do--to conceal it. So you had better go over and
tell him."

Almost every one likes to carry news, whether good or bad; and within
fifteen minutes I had reached the Edwards farmhouse. Jotham, who was
taking a late supper, came to the door.

"What will you give to know where your lost oxen are?" I cried.

"Where are they? Do you know?" he exclaimed. Then I told him where
Willis and I had seen them. "Wal, I vum!" said Jotham. "Left me and took
to the woods! And I've lost two years' work from 'em!"

For a moment I was sorry I had told him.

The next day he journeyed up to Willis's camp with several neighbors;
and from there they all snowshoed to the yard to see the oxen and the
moose. The strangely assorted little herd was still there, and, so far
as could be judged, no one else had discovered them.

Jotham had intended to drive the oxen home; but the party found the snow
so deep that they thought it best to leave them where they were for a
while. Since it was now the first week of March, the snow could be
expected to settle considerably within a fortnight.

I think it was the eighteenth of the month when Jotham and four other
men finally went to get the oxen. They took a gun, with the intention of
shooting one or more of the deer. A disagreeable surprise awaited them
at the yard.

At that time--it was before the days of game wardens--what were known as
"meat-and-hide hunters" often came down over the boundary from Canada
and slaughtered moose and deer while the animals were snow-bound. The
lawless poachers frequently came in parties and sometimes searched the
woods for twenty or thirty miles below the Line in quest of yards.

Apparently such a raiding party had found Willis's yard and had shot not
only the six deer and moose but Jotham's oxen as well. Blood on the snow
and refuse where the animals had been hung up for skinning and dressing,
made what had happened only too plain.

Poor Jotham came home much cast down. "That's just my luck!" he
lamented. "Everything always goes just that way with me!"

CHAPTER X

BETHESDA

If anything was missing at the old farmhouse--clothes-brush, soap, comb
or other articl