He reached deep down in a pocket of his enormous faded overcoat, brought out two red apples, and leaned down out of his saddle, that creaked under the strain of his weight.

“Try one of ’em yourself, an’ take one of ’em home to your ma.  Git up, Mag!”

He jogged on down the road, and the boy, sobered walked on.  One thing was certain, though, Mr Kirby hadn’t known whose dog this was.  What difference did it make anyhow?  He hadn’t stolen anything.  He couldn’t let a dog choke to death before his eyes.  What did Old Man Thornycroft care about a dog, anyhow, the hard-hearted old skin-flint!

He remembered the trouble his mother had had when his father died and Old Man Thornycroft pushed her for a note he had given.  He had heard people talk about it at the time, and he remembered how white his mother’s face had been.  Old Man Thornycroft had refused to wait, and his mother had had to sell five acres of the best land on the little farm to pay the note.  It was after the sale that Mr. Kirby, who lived five miles away, had ridden over.

“Why didn’t you let me know, Mrs. Allen!” he had demanded.  “I would have loaned you the money—­gladly, gladly!” He had risen from the fire and pulled on the same overcoat he wore now.  It was faded then, and that was two years ago.

It was sunset when Davy reached home to find his mother out in the clean-swept yard picking up chips in her apron.  From the bedroom window of the little one-storied unpainted house came a bright red glow, and from the kitchen the smell of cooking meat.  His mother straightened up from her task with a smile when with his new-found partner he entered the yard.

“Why, Davy,” she asked, “where did you get him?”

“He—­he just followed me, Ma.”

“But whose dog is he?”

“He’s mine, Ma—­he just took up with me.”

“Where, Davy?”

“Oh, way back down the road—­in a pasture.”

“He must belong to somebody.”

“He’s just a ol’ hound dog, Ma, that’s all he is.  Lots of hounds don’t belong to nobody—­everybody knows that, Ma.  Look at him, Ma.  Mighty nigh starved to death.  Lemme keep him.  We can feed him on scraps.  He can sleep under the house.  Me an’ him will keep you in rabbits.  You won’t have to kill no more chickens.  Nobody don’t want him but me!”

From her gaunt height she looked down into the boy’s eager eyes, then at the dog beside him.  “All right, son,” she said.  “If he don’t belong to anybody.”

That night Davy alternately whistled and talked to the dog beside him as he husked the corn he had raised with his own hands, and chopped the wood he had cut and hauled—­for since his father’s death he had kept things going.  He ate supper in a sort of haze; he hurried out with a tin plate of scraps; he fed the grateful, hungry dog on the kitchen steps.  He begged some vaseline from his mother and rubbed it on the sore neck.  Then he got two or three empty gunnysacks out of the corncrib, crawled under the house to a warm place beside the chimney and spread them out for a bed.  He went into the house whistling; he didn’t hear a word of the chapter his mother read out of the Bible.  Before he went to bed in the shed-room, he raised the window.