Don was not so much frightened as he was thirsty; he was a brave dog. As he ran along, trying to smell his way to the nearest water, he thought:
“Oh, if ever I get safely back to my kennel once more, I’ll never run away again. That other dog, Rover, was right—it’s no fun to run away.”
Then, all of a sudden, Don smelled water. He looked in the direction from which the smell came, and he saw a big stream of water splashing down into the engine that had drawn the train of freight cars. For the engine has to have water, just as a dog does, only the engine makes steam of it. And it was the engine taking water at a big tank that Don saw.
Some of the water splashed down from the engine tank and made a little puddle beside the track. Don trotted up to this puddle and took a long drink. And oh! how good it tasted.
“Humph! That dog was thirsty all right,” said the engineer as he leaned out of his cab window and watched his engine getting a drink too. “I wonder where that dog came from?”
“I came from a freight car—that’s where I came from,” said Don, but of course he spoke only to himself, sort of thinking like, and the engineer did not hear anything.
Don took another drink of the cool water, and he did not mind if it was a bit muddy. At home, in his kennel, Bob the boy, would never think of giving his pet dog anything but clean water to drink.
“But it’s different, when you run away,” thought Don. “Then you have to take what you can get.”
He felt much better, now that he had quenched his thirst. But he was beginning to feel hungry.