They parted, and Jim Fenton stood perfectly still in the street and looked at her, until she disappeared around a corner.  “That’s what I call a genuine creetur’,” he muttered to himself at last, “a genuine creetur’.”

Then Jim Fenton went into the store, where he had sold his skins and bought his supplies, and, after exchanging a few jokes with those who had observed his interview with Miss Butterworth, he shouldered his sack as he called it, and started for Number Nine.  The sack was a contrivance of his own, with two pouches which depended, one before and one behind, from his broad shoulders.  Taking his rifle in his hand, he bade the group that had gathered around him a hearty good-bye, and started on his way.

The afternoon was not a pleasant one.  The air was raw, and, as the sun went toward its setting, the wind came on to blow from the north-west.  This was just as he would have it.  It gave him breath, and stimulated the vitality that was necessary to him in the performance of his long task.  A tramp of forty miles was not play, even to him, and this long distance was to be accomplished before he could reach the boat that would bear him and his burden into the woods.

He crossed the Branch at its principal bridge, and took the same path up the hill that Robert Belcher had traveled in the morning.  About half-way up the hill, as he was going on with the stride of a giant, he saw a little boy at the side of the road, who had evidently been weeping.  He was thinly and very shabbily clad, and was shivering with cold.  The great, healthy heart within Jim Fenton was touched in an instant.

“Well, bub,” said he, tenderly, “how fare ye?  How fare ye?  Eh?”

“I’m pretty well, I thank you, sir,” replied the lad.

“I guess not.  You’re as blue as a whetstone.  You haven’t got as much on you as a picked goose.”

“I can’t help it, sir,” and the boy burst into tears.

“Well, well, I didn’t mean to trouble you, boy.  Here, take this money, and buy somethin’ to make you happy.  Don’t tell your dad you’ve got it.  It’s yourn.”

The boy made a gesture of rejection, and said:  “I don’t wish to take it, sir.”

“Now, that’s good!  Don’t wish to take it!  Why, what’s your name?  You’re a new sort o’ boy.”

“My name is Harry Benedict.”

“Harry Benedict?  And what’s your pa’s name?”

“His name is Paul Benedict.”

“Where is he now?”

“He is in the poor-house.”

“And you, too?”

“Yes, sir,” and the lad found expression for his distress in another flow of tears.

“Well, well, well, well!  If that ain’t the strangest thing I ever hearn on!  Paul Benedict, of Sevenoaks, in Tom Buffum’s Boardin’-house!”

“Yes, sir, and he’s very crazy, too.”

Jim Fenton set his rifle against a rock at the roadside, slowly lifted off his pack and placed it near the rifle, and then sat down on a stone and called the boy to him, folding him in his great warm arms to his warm breast.