“I’ll have to lie down again, I guess,” he said weakly.
He had just time to move aside out of the dust when he fell like a log.
“What’s the matter? Are you sick?”
The shabby looking youth had dropped to one knee beside Rex and was looking down at him with pitying eyes.
“Yes,” was all Rex had strength to murmur.
Then he closed his eyes and did not care what became of him. The strange lad let his other knee sink to the earth and remained in this attitude for several minutes, gazing earnestly at Rex.
“Poor chap,” he muttered. “I can’t make out what he’s doing tramping the country this way. He don’t look poor. What’ll I do with him?”
The first thing to be done, evidently, was to get him out of the sun, which beat down on the spot where he had fallen with fierce intensity.
The stranger bent over, and exerting all his strength lifted Rex in his arms and bore him back along the road to the grassy strip under the trees where he had recently been lying.
Rex opened his eyes for an instant when he felt himself raised from the ground. Then, when he saw the pity in the plain face looking down into his, he closed them again with a little sigh.