“How in the world did that dog get out?” said the Goodwife wonderingly.  “I shut him in the kitchen the last thing before we left the house.”

Leaving their father and mother to follow at a slower pace, Nancy and Dan tore up the hill and threw open the kitchen door.  There, comfortably dozing on the settle by the fire, sat the Captain!  At his feet lay Zeb—­also sound asleep with the wreckage of several blackened eggs strewn round him on the hearth-stone!  The Captain woke with a start as the children burst into the room and for an instant stood staring in amazement and delight at the scene before them.  Zeb, utterly worn out, slept on, and the Captain, as usual, was the first to find his tongue.

“Well, well,” he shouted, rubbing his nose to a bright red to wake himself up, “here ye be!  And mighty lucky, too, for I ’m hungry enough to eat a bear alive.  If I could have found out where ye hide your supplies, I might have busted ’em open to save myself and this poor lad from starvation.  He appeared nigh as hungry as I be, but he knew better how to help himself.  He found these eggs cooked out there in the ashes of the straw-stack, and all but et ’em shells and all.  Never even offered me a bite!  Don’t ye ever feed him?”

Before the children could get in a word edgewise their father and mother, followed by Nimrod, came in, and, what with the dog barking, the children screaming explanations to the Captain, and their own astonished exclamations, there was such a babel of noise that at last Zeb woke up, too, and stared about him like one dazed.  Nimrod jumped on him and licked his face, and Zeb put his arms around the dog as if glad to find so cordial a welcome.  The Captain stared from one face to another, quite unable to make head or tail of the situation.

[Illustration]

“Well, by jolly!” he shouted at last, “what ails ye all?  Ye act like a parcel of lunatics!”

The Goodman commanded silence, and briefly told the whole story to the Captain.

“Where did you find the lad?” he asked, when he had finished.

“He was here when I came,” said the Captain.  “Settin’ on the hearth-stone eatin’ them eggs as if he had n’t seen food fer a se’nnight and never expected to see any again.  The dog busted out of the house when I came in, and as I could n’t get any word out of the lad, I just set down by the fire and took forty winks.  It was too late for meeting, and besides I reckoned I could sleep better here.”  He finished with his jolly laugh.

Zeb, meanwhile, sat hugging the dog and rolling his eyes from one face to another as if in utter bewilderment.  Perhaps he wondered if the Captain meant to capture him, too, for life must have seemed to the poor black boy just a series of efforts to escape being carried off to some place where he did not wish to go, by people whom he had never seen before.  The Goodman at last sat down before Zeb on the settle and tried to get from him some account of what had happened in the forest.  But Zeb was totally unable to tell his story.  His few words of English were inadequate to the recital of the terrors of the past twenty-four hours.