"What is it? What's the matter, old fellow? Why are you growling?" asked Rick, but Ruddy could not answer, and the boy could neither see nor smell anything in the darkness.
The man in the bushes did not stir. Perhaps he had gone to sleep. Ruddy did not know. And then, with a final growl, the dog turned away and, looking up and back to where he dimly saw Rick's form, he followed the boy.
But once, and once again, Ruddy turned, looked back toward the clump of bushes, and growled low and fiercely.
"Was it a tramp or a cat?" asked Rick. "Well, if it's a cat it doesn't much matter. And if it's a tramp, maybe he'll know I have a dog, and I guess he won't come too close to our house. Tramps don't like dogs."
And if it had been light, and if Rick and Ruddy had looked back then, they would have seen, peering out from the screen of the bush, an ugly face. It was the face of a ragged man, and the man, as he saw in the darkness the dog and boy moving away, muttered:
"He nearly smelled me out! Wonder what kind of a dog that was? Looked something like the one I want. Well, I can tell better in the mornin'. This is a good place to sleep." And he curled up again.
Several times more Ruddy growled down in his throat, and then something came that made him forget the man in the bush. The man whose smell he so well remembered.
With Ruddy leaping and barking about him, Rick got a lantern and went to look at the broken-winged crow in the woodshed. The black bird did not seem to have moved since it had nestled down amid the soft grass in the box, over which a wire screen had been placed to keep Haw-Haw from fluttering out.
"To-morrow I will mend your broken wing," said Rick, as he looked at his new pet.
Ruddy, forgetting for the time being about the man smell that came from the bush, stood with head on one side looking wonderingly toward the box where the crow nestled.