“All this crowd isn’t going, is it?” he demanded.

“Hush!” Charlotte whispered, peremptorily, and he looked curiously at her.

“What is the matter with you this morning, anyhow?” he inquired, loudly.  Eddy had in a leash a small and violently squirming puppy, which had lately strayed to the Carroll place, and been found wagging and whining ingratiatingly around the stable.  Eddy had adopted it, and even meditated riding in the baggage-car to relieve its loneliness should the conductor prove intractable concerning its remaining in the passenger-coach.  Eddy, of the whole party of travellers, was the only one who presented an absolutely undisturbed and joyously expectant countenance.  He had the innocent selfishness of childhood.  He could still be single-eyed as to the future, and yet blameless.  He loved his father, but had no pangs at parting, when the wonders of the journey and the new country were before him.  His heart also delighted in the puppy, leaping and abortively barking at his side.  He kissed his father good-bye as the train approached, and was following the others, with the little dog straining at his leash, when his onward progress was suddenly arrested, another grimy little hand tugged at the leash.

“Say, what you goin’ off with my dog for?” demanded the owner of the hand, another boy, somewhat older than Eddy, and one of his schoolmates.

Eddy, belligerent at once, faced about.  He caught up the wriggling puppy with such a quick motion that he was successful and wrenched the other boy’s hand from the leash.

“It isn’t your dog.  It’s my dog.  What you talking about?” he growled back.

“You lie!”

“Lie yourself!”

“Gimme that dog!”

“It’s my dog!”

“Where’d ye git it?” sneered the other, making clutches at the puppy.

“My papa bought him for me in New York.”

“Hm!  All the way your father could git a dog like that is to steal him.  Your father ’ain’t got no money.  You stole him.  You steal jest like your father.  Gimme the dog.”

The claimant boy laid such insistent hands on the puppy, and Eddy so resisted, that the little animal yelped loudly.

Carroll stepped up.  His lips were ashy.  This last idiotic episode was unnerving him more than all that had gone before.  “Give that boy his dog,” he commanded Eddy, sternly.

Eddy clung more tightly to the little dog, and began to whimper.  “But, papa—­”

“Do as I tell you.”

“He came to our stable, and he didn’t have any collar on, and a dog without any collar on—­”

“Do as I tell you.”

But Eddy had found an unexpected ally.  Anderson had come on the platform as the train approached.  He was going on business to New Sanderson, and he had furtively collared the owner of the puppy, thrust something into his hand, whispered something, and given him a violent push.  The boy fled.  When Carroll turned, the boy who had been imperiously aggressive at his elbow was nowhere to be seen.  Several of the by-standers were grinning.  Anderson was moving along to be at the side of his car, as the train approached.  It had all happened in a very few seconds.  Eddy clung fast to the puppy.  There was no time for anything, and the female Carrolls were pressing softly about for the last words.