Wonder, Dog, what she’s switched fur?” he would say to him.  He noticed, too, that the girl’s cheeks were not so white and pinched.  She seemed taller and not so weary; and when he walked up the cut, tired out with the day’s work, she always met him at the door, the dog springing half way down the slope, wagging his tail and bounding ahead to welcome him.  And she would sing little snatches of songs that her mother had taught her years ago, before the great flood swept away the cabin and left only her father and herself clinging to a bridge, she with a broken back.

After a while Sanders coaxed him down to the track, teaching him to bring back his empty dinner-pail, the dog spending the hour with him, sitting by his side demurely, or asleep in the sentry-box.

All this time the dog never rose to the dignity of any particular name.  The girl spoke of him as “Doggie,” and Sanders always as “the Dog.”  The trainmen called him “Rags,” in deference, no doubt, to his torn ear and threadbare tail.  They threw coal at him as he passed, until it leaked out that he belonged to “Sanders’s girl.”  Then they became his champions, and this name and pastime seemed out of place.  Only once did he earn any distinguishing sobriquet.  That was when he had saved the girl’s basket, after a sharp fight with a larger and less honest dog.  Sanders then spoke of him, with half-concealed pride, as “the Boss,” but this only lasted a day or so.  Publicly, in the neighborhood, he was known as “Sanders’s dog.”

One morning the dog came limping up the cut with a broken leg.  Some said a horse had kicked him; some that the factory boys had thrown stones at him.  He made no outcry, only came sorrowfully in, his mouth dry and dust-covered, dragging his hind leg, that hung loose like a flail; then he laid his head in the girl’s lap.  She crooned and cried over him all day, binding up the bruised limb, washing his eyes and mouth, putting him in her own bed.  There was no one to go for her father, and if there were, he could not leave the crossing.  When Sanders came home he felt the leg over carefully, the girl watching eagerly.  “No, Kate, child, yees can’t do nothin’; it’s broke at the jint.  Don’t cry, young one.”

Then he went outside and sat on a bench, looking across the cut and over the roofs of the factories, hazy in the breath of a hundred furnaces, and so across the blue river fringed with waving trees where the blessed sun was sinking to rest.  He was not surprised.  It was like everything else in his life.  When he loved something, it was sure to be this way.

That night, when the girl was asleep, he took the dog up in his arms, and wrapping his coat around him so the corner loafers could not see, rang the bell of the dispensary.  The doctor was out, but a nurse looked at the wound.  “No, there was nothing to be done; the socket had been crushed.  Keep it bandaged, that was all.”  Then he brought him home and put him under the bed.