The deserter and other stories - 1898 Author:Harold Frederic Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. FATHER AND SON. IT is not likely that anything whatever remains standing now of the Whipple house. It must be a dozen years ago that I shot a... more » black squirrel as it whisked its way along over the ridge-beam which had once been Asa Whipple's roof-tree; and the place then was in ruins. The rafters had fallen in; what was left of the sides were dry-rotten under a mask of microscopic silver-gray moss. Tangled masses of wild- brier and lichens surrounded its base, and pushed their way in through the open, dismantled doorway. Even at that time, the road which once led past the house had fallen into disuse. I suppose that to-day it would be as hard to find the house under the briers as totrace the ancient highway beneath the carpet of grass and sorrel. Even during the war, when human beings thought of it as a home, the Whipple place was a pretty poor sort of habitation. The lowliest of Elisha Teachout's live-stock were considerably better housed and better sheltered from the weather than old Asa and his son Mose. The house, as I remember it, used to interest me because it was so obviously a remainder from the days when the district round about was still a veritable part of the Adirondacks. Whether Asa built it or inherited it from his father, a Revolutionary soldier who took up his land-patent in these primitive parts, I never knew. It looked old enough, though, to have been erected by Hendrik Hudson himself. There must have been a sawmill on the creek at the time, however, for it was not a log house but a frame building, with broad planks nailed roughly to its sides,and the joinings of these covered over with weather-strips. The frames of the door and the two front windows also came from this mill, wherever it was; the window on the north side was of rud...« less