We have left only one member of the trio to be described, and his outward appearance may be told in few words. Sam was small, yellowish and alert. He had been intended for a fox terrier, perhaps, but had received the wrong colouring. In Missouri or Mississippi he would have been labelled “fice,” which is equivalent to saying that he was a terrier-like dog of no particular breed. But like many of his sort, Sam made up for his lack of aristocracy by possessing all the virtues that one demands in a dog. That small head of his contained a brain that must have felt absolutely crowded! I dare say that that is the way the Lord makes it up to little, no-account yellow dogs like Sam. He gives them big brains and big hearts, and so they get through life without ever feeling the want of blue ribbons on their collars. It would, I think, have been a frightful shock to Sam if anyone had tied a ribbon on him, blue or any other colour! He wouldn’t have approved a bit. In fact, he would have been most unhappy until he had gotten it off and tried the taste of it. So far no one had ever attempted such an indignity. Even a collar was something that Sam had his doubts about. When he had one he put up with it uncomplainingly, but you could see that it didn’t make him a bit happier. Just now he wore a leather strap about his neck. It had once been used to hold Wayne’s schoolbooks together, but Sam didn’t know that, and wouldn’t have cared if he had. I forgot to say that a perfectly good tail had been early sacrificed to the dictates of an inhuman fashion, and that now only a scant two inches remained. To see Sam wag that two inches made you realise what a perfectly glorious time he could have had with the whole appendage had it been left to him. Sometimes in moments of strong mental excitement his keen, affectionate brown eyes seemed trying to say something like that! But my few words have grown too many, and I find that I have devoted nearly as much space to Sam as to his master. But as Sam is not likely to receive much attention hereafter let us not begrudge it to him.
Meanwhile Wayne had laid his plans. If thirty cents was not sufficient to finance the journey to New York, neither was it sufficient to provide food and lodging for them indefinitely in Medfield. Consequently, it behooved them to add to that sum by hook or by crook, and it was decided that they should begin right away and look for work to do. With that object in view they presently left the sunny side of the little shed and set off, Wayne and Sam in one direction and June in another, to reassemble at twilight. Wayne wanted June to take ten of the precious thirty cents to buy luncheon with, but June scoffed. “I don’t need no ten cents, Mas’ Wayne,” he declared. “I can find me somethin’ to eat without no ten cents. An’ I don’t need nothin’ else, anyhow, not before night. I’m jus’ plumb full of food now!”
Wayne’s experiences that day were disheartening. Medfield was a town of nearly thirty thousand inhabitants, but not one of that number, it appeared, was in need of Wayne’s services, nor cared whether he lived or starved. He made his way to the centre of the town and visited store after store, and office after office, climbing many weary flights and knocking at many inhospitable doors while Sam waited outside in patient resignation. At noon Wayne lunched in a shabby and none-too-clean little restaurant on five cents’ worth of beef stew and two pieces of bread, feeling a bit panicky as he did so, because five from thirty left only what June would have called “two bits” and Wayne a quarter, and which, no matter what you called it, was a frighteningly small amount of money to have between you and nothing. But he felt a heap better after that stew and went back to his task with more courage. Sam felt better, too, for he had had a whole slice of bread dipped in gravy and a nice gristly bone.
The trouble was that when, as happened very infrequently, to be sure, but did happen, he was asked what he could do he had to answer either “Anything” or “Nothing.” Of course he chose to say “Anything,” but the result was always disappointing. As one crabbed, much-bewhiskered man in a hardware store told him, “Anything means nothing.” After that Wayne boldly presented himself at the busy office of a dry-goods emporium and offered himself as a bookkeeper. It was more a relief than a disappointment when the dapper man in charge informed him, after a dubious examination of his attire, that there was no present vacancy. Wayne was conscious of the amused glances of the men at the desks as he hurried out. It was almost dusk when he finally gave up and turned his steps toward the deserted shed near the railway. He had trouble in finding it, walking many blocks out of his way and for a space fearing that darkness would overtake him before he reached it. In the end it was Sam who kept him from making a second mistake, for Wayne was for passing the shed a block away until the dog’s insistence on turning down a dim, cobble-paved street brought the search to an end.
June was already on hand, squatting comfortably on the wheelbarrow and crooning to himself in the twilight. Sam showed his delight in the reunion by licking June’s face while Wayne discouragedly lowered himself to a seat at the darkey’s side.
“Any luck?” he asked tiredly.
“Nothin’ permanent, Mas’ Wayne, but I done earned us another two bits. This is a right smart town, this is. Nobody don’t have to go hungry in this town, no, sir!”
Wayne tried to keep the envy out of his voice as he answered: “That’s great, June. How did you do it?”
“Man was rollin’ barrels up a board to a wagon and every time he got a barrel half-way up the board his horses would start a-movin’ off an’ he’d jus’ have to drop that barrel an’ run to their heads. I ask him, ‘Please, sir, don’t you want me to hold ’em for you?’ An’ he ’lowed he did. An’ I say, ‘How much you goin’ to give me, sir?’ And he say if I hold ’em till he got his wagon loaded he’d give me a quarter. ’Twan’t no time till he had the barrels on an’ I had his ol’ quarter in my jeans. Then I see a funny little man with gold rings in his ears sittin’ on a step sellin’ candy, an’ funny twisty pieces of bread an’ apples, an’ things. An’ I say to him, ‘How much are your apples, Boss?’ An’ he say, ‘They’re two for five cents.’ ‘Huh,’ I say, ‘they give ’em poor old apples away where I come from.’ An’ he want to know where was I come from, an’ I tell him, an’ we had a right sociable time a-talkin’ an’ all, an’ pretty soon he find a apple had a rotten spot on it an’ give it to me. An’ after a while I say, ‘Boss, what you-all call them funny, curly things you got on that stick?’ An’ he ’lows they’s—they’s——” June wrinkled his forehead until it had almost as many corrugations as a washboard—“I reckon I forget what he call them, Mas’ Wayne.”