It was the voice he wanted most of all, and when this did not come he choked back a whimper in his throat, and went down to the creek, and waded through it, and came up cautiously behind the cabin, his eyes and ears alert and his loosely jointed legs ready for flight at a sign of danger.  He wanted to set up his sharp yipping signal for the girl, but the menace of the axe choked back his desire.  At the very end of the cabin, where the wood-vine grew thick and dense, Peter had burrowed himself a hiding-place, and into this he skulked with the quickness of a rat getting away from its enemies.  From this protecting screen he cautiously poked forth his whiskered face, to make what inventory he could of his chances for supper and a safe home-coming.

And as he looked forth his heart gave a sudden jump.

It was the girl, and not the man who was using the axe today.  At the big wood-pile half a stone’s throw away he saw the shimmer of her brown curls in the sun, and a glimpse of her white face as it was turned for an instant toward the cabin.  In his gladness he would have leaped out, but the curse of a voice he had learned to dread held him back.

A man had come out of the cabin, and close behind the man, a woman.  The man was a long, lean, cadaverous-faced creature, and Peter knew that the devil was in him as he stood there at the cabin door.  His breath, if one had stood close enough to smell it, was heavy with whiskey.  Tobacco juice stained the corners of his mouth, and his one eye gleamed with an animal-like exultation as he nodded toward the girl with the shining curls

“Mooney says he’ll pay seven-fifty for her when he gets his tie-money from the Government, an’ he paid me fifty down,” he said.  “It’ll help pay for the brat’s board these last ten years—­an’ mebby, when it comes to a show-down, I can stick him for a thousand.”

The woman made no answer.  She was, in a way, past answering with a mind of her own.  The man, as he stood there, was wicked and cruel, every line in his ugly face and angular body a line of sin.  The woman was bent, broken, a wreck.  In her face there was no sign of a living soul.  Her eyes were dull, her heart burned out, her hands gnarled with toil under the slavedom of a beast.  Yet even Peter, quiet as a mouse where he lay, sensed the difference between them.  He had seen the girl and this woman sobbing in each other’s arms.  And often he had crawled to the woman’s feet, and occasionally her hand had touched him, and frequently she had given him things to eat.  But it was seldom he heard her voice when the man was near.

The man was biting off a chunk of black tobacco.  Suddenly he asked,

“How old is she, Liz?”

And the woman answered in a strange and husky voice.

“Seventeen the twelfth day of this month.”

The man spat.

“Mooney ought to pay a thousand.  We’ve had her better’n ten years —­an’ Mooney’s crazy as a loon to git her.  He’ll pay!”