Trouble was made much of and was saved so many tid-bits from the breakfast plates that he was in danger of an attack of indigestion. "I'll never call him a mongrel cur again," said Mary Lee tenderly. "If it hadn't been for him, we might never have been found."
"You forget," said Randolph, with a look across the table at Nan, "that if it hadn't been for Nan, Trouble would never have gone in search of you," and then and there Nan forgave him for his rude speech of the day before.
"If I hadn't come home, I would never have thought of sending him," she acknowledged. "He ought to have a medal, bless him."
"So he shall have," said Ran, and he gravely provided a tin medal on which was scratched: "For Heroic Service." This was fastened to the dog's collar and it was worn proudly.
However much Nan may have felt that Ran had made amends, the boy himself did not consider that he had and came to his cousin as she was tidying up the living-room. "Are you going to church, Nan?" he asked.
"I don't know," she replied. "I feel as if I had been drawn through a knot-hole this morning. Of course, Mary Lee won't go and maybe I'll stay at home to keep her company, though she's still asleep, poor child."
"I thought if you were going I'd wait for you," said Ran.
Nan threw him a mocking smile. "I thought you didn't care for my company," she said.
"That was yesterday," returned Ran. "Besides, I didn't say I didn't want your company; I said I didn't want you to stay up there on the mountain and so I didn't, for I was afraid then that those two were lost and I knew it would be harder for you there than at home. Then I knew if we set out on a search you couldn't go and it would not do to leave you all alone."
"I realized all that afterward," Nan told him frankly.