Wainsworth waved his hand toward the wreckage strewed on the floor. “Nothing—here,” he said. Then he made a great effort, the obvious rally of his strength. “Save the—boy,” he implored. “Give him a—chance.... Don’t—tell—about me. I married—his mother—Narragansett—God bless—her.... Give—him—a—chance.... Thanks.”
As he mentioned the child’s mother, his eyes gave up two tears—crystals, which might have represented his soul, for it had quietly escaped from his broken body.
Adam, kneeling above him, looked for a moment at his still face, on which the shadow of a smile rested. Then he looked at the little, brown youngster, half Narragansett Indian, gazing up in his countenance with a timid, questioning look, winking his big black eyes slowly, and quite as deliberately moving his tiny toes.
It was not a situation to be thought out nor coped with easily. To have found any human being in this terrible plight would have been enough, but to have found Henry Wainsworth’s brother thus, and to have him tell such a brief, shocking story, and make of his visitor all the things which Adam would have to become at once, was enough to make him stand there wondering and wondering upon it all.
“You poor little rascal,” he said to the child, at last.
He selected a shovel and a pick, from some tools which he noted, in a corner, and laying aside his sword, he went to work, on the preface to his duties, out by the patch of corn where he found the pretty, young Indian mother, clasped and held down to earth in an all too ardent embrace, by an arm of the fallen tree.
When he had padded up the mound over the two closed human volumes, he was faint with hunger. He carried the tools again to the house, and stood as before, looking at the baby-boy, who still sat where he had left him, on the floor.
“Well, I suppose you are hungry, you little brown man,” he said. “I must see what there is to be had.”
There was little opportunity for extended explorations. The one room had contained the all of Wainsworth and his Narragansett partner. Rust soon found himself wondering what the two had lived upon. What flour and meal there had been, the man, despite his two crushed legs, had pulled down, from a box-like cupboard, on the wall, together with a bit of dried meat. Of the latter only a dry fragment remained, still tied to a string, while of the meal and flour, only the empty bags gave evidence that they once had existed.
There was no way possible for Adam to know that in the forest, not far away, the lone woodsman had set his traps, for squirrels and rabbits, nor that fifteen minutes’ walk from the door a trout stream had furnished its quota to the daily fare. He only knew that there was nothing edible to be found here now. There was salt, a bit of grease, on a clean white chip of pine, and a half gourd, filled with broken-up leaves, which had doubtless been steeped for some manner of tea or drink.