We dressed the deer and then I had the great joy of carrying him on my back two miles across the country to the wagon.  The Senator wished to send a guide for the deer, but I insisted that the carrying was my privilege.

“Well, I guess your big thighs and broad shoulders can stand it,” said he.

“My uncle has always said that no man could be called a hunter until he can go into the woods without a guide and kill a deer and bring it out on his back.  I want to be able to testify that I am at least partly qualified.”

“Your uncle didn’t say anything about fetching the deer across a deep river without a boat, did he?” Mr. Wright asked me with a smile.

Leaves of the beeches, maples and basswoods—­yellowed by frost—­hung like tiny lanterns, glowing with noonday light, above the dim forest-aisle which we traveled.

The sun was down when we got to the clearing.

“What a day it has been!” said Mr. Wright when we were seated in the wagon at last with the hound and the deer’s head between his feet and mine.

“One of the best in my life,” I answered with a joy in my heart the like of which I have rarely known in these many years that have come to me.

We rode on in silence with the calls of the swamp robin and the hermit thrush ringing in our ears as the night fell.

“It’s a good time to think, and there we take different roads,” said my friend.  “You will turn into the future and I into the past.”

“I’ve been thinking about your uncle,” he said by and by.  “He is one of the greatest men I have ever known.  You knew of that foolish gossip about him—­didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“Well, now, he’s gone about his business the same as ever and showed by his life that it couldn’t be true.  Not a word out of him!  But Dave Ramsey fell sick—­down on the flat last winter.  By and by his children were crying for bread and the poor-master was going to take charge of them.  Well, who should turn up there, just in the nick of time, but Delia and Peabody Baynes.  They fed those children all winter and kept them in clothes so that they could go to school.  The strange thing about it is this:  it was Dave Ramsey who really started that story.  He got up in church the other night and confessed his crime.  His conscience wouldn’t let him keep it.  He said that he had not seen Peabody Baynes on that road the day the money was lost but had only heard that he was there.  He knew now that he couldn’t have been there.  Gosh t’almighty! as your uncle used to say when there was nothing else to be said.”

It touched me to the soul—­this long-delayed vindication of my beloved Uncle Peabody.

The Senator ate supper with us and sent his hired man out for his horse and buggy.  When he had put on his overcoat and was about to go he turned to my uncle and said: 

“Peabody Baynes, if I have had any success in the world it is because I have had the exalted honor and consciousness that I represented men like you.”