Joel noticed, with a thrill of sympathy, how painfully he limped. But there on the bowed shoulders was the lamb he had wandered so far to find; and as the welcoming shout arose again, Joel's weak little cheer joined gladly in.
"How brave and strong he is," thought the boy. "He risked his life for just one pitiful little lamb."
The child's heart went strangely out to this rough fellow who stood holding the shivering animal, sublimely unconscious that he had done anything more than a simple duty.
Joel, who felt uncommonly hungry after his supperless night, thought he would mount the donkey and start back alone. But just as he was about to do so, a familiar bushy head showed itself in the door of the sheepfold. Buz had brought him some wheat-cakes and cheese to eat on the way back.
Joel was so busy with this welcome meal that he did not talk much. Buz kept eying him in silence, as if he longed to ask some question. At last, when the cheese had entirely disappeared, he found courage to ask it.
"Were you always like that?" he said abruptly, motioning to Joel's back and leg. Somehow the reference did not wound him as it generally did. He began to tell Buz about the Samaritan boy who had crippled him. He never was able to tell the story of his wrongs without growing passionately angry. He had worked himself into a white heat by the time he had finished.
"I'd get even with him," said Buz, excitedly, with a wicked squint of his eyes.
"How would you do it?" demanded Joel. "Cripple him as he did me?"
"Worse than that!" exclaimed Buz, stopping to take deliberate aim at a leaf overhead, and shooting a hole exactly through the centre with his sling. "I'd blind him as quick as that! It's a great deal worse to be blind than lame."
Joel closed his eyes, and rode on a few moments in darkness. Then he opened them and gave a quick glad look around the landscape. "My! What if I never could have opened them again," he thought. "Yes, Buz, you're right," he said aloud. "It is worse to be blind; so I shall take Rehum's eyesight also, some time. Oh, if that time were only here!"