“I gave one last look over my shoulder at the cottage, and the children. They were crying, poor little souls, and their mother had her arms round them.
“The man made me trot pretty fast after him. He did not know and would not have cared if he had known that my thirst was getting more and more painful, and that I was almost choked to death with fear. For we were approaching the railway tracks and all my life long I had been frightened to death of noises, especially train noises.
“Suddenly a suspicion struck me that he might be going to throw me under the wheels of a train. Half mad with fear, I gave a violent leap away from him, dragging the cord from his hand, and then I ran, ran like a creature bereft of its senses, for my flying feet took me right toward the trains, instead of away from them.
“I was aware of a rush and a roar, and then something gave me a pound on the back, then a blow on my head. I rolled over and over, and for a time I knew nothing.
“When I recovered, the Italian was bending over me, his face quite frightened and sympathetic.
“‘Poor dog!’ he said; then when I tried to get up, he lifted me and put me under his arm. I found he was climbing on a train.
“Another man was grinning at him. ‘We gave your dog a fine clip as we came in,’ he said. ‘He got a roll and a turnover fast enough.’
“The Italian said nothing. He was not a bad man. He was just thoughtless. I knew he was sorry for me and his children, but times were hard and the price of food was high, and he thought they could not afford to keep me. He knew the children often gave me bits of their bread, and he knew, too, that sometimes when the hunger rat was gnawing too sharply I would even steal.
“I found out that he was a fireman on a freight train which had a big engine, not like the neat electric ones on the passenger trains.
“He put me down on some lumps of coal, and I sat and stared stupidly at him.