“Say, Keno,” said Jim, “go find Miss Doc’s goat and milk him for the boy.”

“Miss Doc may be home by now,” objected Keno, apprehensively.

“Well, then, sneak up and see if she has gone off real mad.”

“S’posen she ’ain’t?” Keno promptly hedged.  “S’posen she seen me?”

“You’ve got all out-doors to skedaddle in, I reckon.”

Keno, however, had many objections to any manner of venture with the wily Miss Dennihan.  It took nearly half an hour of argument to get him up to the brow of the slope.  Then, to his uncontainable delight, he beheld the disgusted and somewhat defeated Miss Doc more than half-way down the trail to Borealis, and making shoe-tracks with assuring rapidity.

“Hoot!  Hoot!” he called, in a cautious utterance.  “She’s went, and the cabin looks just the same—­from here.”

But Jim, when he came there, with his tiny guest upon his arm, looked long at the well-scrubbed floor and the tidy array of pots, pans, plates, and cups.

“We’ll never find the salt, or nothin’, for a week,” he drawled.  “It does take some people an awful long time to learn not to meddle with the divine order of things.”

CHAPTER VI

THE BELL FOR CHURCH

What with telling little Skeezucks of all the things he meant to make, and fondling the grave bit of babyhood, and trying to work out the story of how he came to be utterly unsought for, deserted, and parentless, Jim had hardly more than time enough remaining, that day, in which to entertain the visiting men, who continued to climb the hill to the house.

Throughout that Saturday there was never more than fifteen minutes when some of the big, rough citizens of Borealis were not on hand, attempting always to get the solemn little foundling to answer some word to their efforts at baby conversation.  But neither to them, for the strange array of presents they offered, nor to Jim himself, for all his gentle coaxing, would the tiny chap vouchsafe the slightest hint of who he was or whence he had come.

It is doubtful if he knew.  By the hour he sat where they placed him, holding his doll with something more deep and hungry than affection, and looking at Jim or the visitors in his pretty, baby way of gravity and questioning.

When he sat on old Jim’s knee, however, he leaned in confidence against him, and sighed with a sweet little sound of contentment, as poignant to reinspire a certain ecstasy of sadness in the miner’s breast as it was to excite an envy in the hearts of the others.