“Then you go, friend,” he ordered. “Make haste and bring me what you can, from your neighbors’!”
The man seemed about to refuse. He changed his mind abruptly.
“I’ll go. I’ll go!” he hastened to say, and without his hat, or waiting for anything further, he hobbled out at the door and was gone.
Rust lost no time in ransacking the cupboard. To his unspeakable disappointment he found that the man had not spoken wide of the truth. There was as little here, in the way of a few gnawed crusts of bread and a rind of cheese, as might well stand between nothing and something to eat and to feed to a starving child. His heart sank within him. But then he thought that inasmuch as the farmer had told the truth about his larder, he would be the more likely to have spoken correctly about the neighbors. He would soon be back with something fit for the wee Narragansett.
Adam looked at the baby-boy compassionately. The little fellow was awake, looking up, winking slowly, asking his dumb, wistful question with his eyes.
Adam patted him softly while he waited. “I’m a wretched mother, little partner,” he said. “But we’ll soon have you banqueting, now. Can’t you speak up a little bit? Don’t you want to give old Adam just one little smile? No? Well, never mind. Little man is tired.”
He had placed his charge in a chair. Soon growing impatient, he limped about the room, crunching a crust of bread in his teeth, abstractedly. Unable to endure the suspense, he went again to the cupboard and threw everything down, in his search for something fit for the child. There was nothing more than he had seen before. He went to the water pail and drank, for his mouth had found the crust a poor substitute for food.
Yet no sooner had he sipped the water than a sense of the deliciousness of the dry bread pervaded his being. He ran to gather up the other crusts at once and limped to the child in a frenzy of gladness.
“Here, little man,” he said, kneeling down on the floor. “If you can only chew that up and then take a sip of water, you will think the King’s kitchen has opened.”
He gently thrust a small piece of the rock-hard bread between the little chap’s lips, where, to his intense disappointment, it remained.