Quickly Nance unrolled the cloth. She counted on the aroma which now arose on the clear air.
“I’m hungry,” she said nonchalantly, “are you?”
The boy nodded.
“And your dog, too?”
“I ’spect so,” he answered gravely.
She broke the food into sections and handed a portion over.
The dirty little hand reached eagerly this time.
“Feed him some,” she said, indicating the dog, but already the child was dividing as best he could without releasing his hold.
The dog grabbed the fragrant meat and bolted it, watching her the while. Quickly she tossed him a bit of her own. He snapped that up also and she fancied the expression of the pale eyes changed. She remembered now the extraordinary lightness of the great furry body, as if there was little beneath the splendid tawny coat save bones and spirit. Plenty of the latter, she reflected, smiling. Whew! but wasn’t he a fighter? But trained to the last degree—though he regarded her as a foe, still at the touch of the small hand for which he had fought he stood obedient. Pretending to eat herself, she managed to give the greater part of the food to the two before her, and they devoured it to the ultimate crumb.
“Where you live?” she asked the child at last off-handedly, but he did not answer. He was picking the crumbs he had dropped from the front of his bleached blue shirt—the pitiful excuse for a shirt, without sleeves, if one excepted the strings that hung from the shoulders, without buttons and all but falling from the scrawny little body underneath. As she watched him Nance’s heart ached for his poverty, for his woe-begone appearance. She was filled with a cautious excitement. The Collie had sat down beside the boy, who had loosed his hold by now. It seemed that hostilities were relaxed, though she took no chances.