They could see a woman moving about through the Camp. She had a fire with a kettle hanging over it. There were two or three other people about, and some starved-looking horses. The dog was lying beside the fire, and there was a baby rolling about on the ground. A little pig was tied by one hind leg to a thorn-bush.
“If the dog comes after us,” said Larry, “I’d drop a stone on him, out of a tree, just the way the good son did in the story, and kill him dead.”
“But there’s never a tree anywhere about,” said Eileen. “Sure, that is no plan at all.”
“That’s a true word,” said Larry, when he had looked all about for a tree, and found none. “We’ll have to think of something else.”
Then he thought and thought. “We might go back to Grannie’s,” he said after a while.
“That would be no better,” Eileen whispered, “for, surely, our Mother would go crazy with worrying if we didn’t come home, at all, and we already so late.”
“Well, then,” Larry answered, “we must just bide here until it’s dark, and creep by, the best way we can. Anyway, I’ve the piece of coal in my pocket, and Grannie said no harm would come to us at all, and we having it.”
Just then the man, who had been coming up the road, reached the Camp. The dog
ran out to meet him, barking joyfully. The man came near the fire and threw the bundle off his shoulder. It was two fat geese, with their legs tied together!