in, dipping his
finger in the water and moistening her lips.

She sucked his finger as a baby sucks and the feel of that made him
curse with the tears running down into his beard. The size of the baling
tin seemed horrible beyond words; he couldn't get it to her lips. Still
he went on, not knowing that it was his finger that was giving her back
life; the blessed touch of a human being that had come almost too late.

He was sitting on his heels, and now, casting his great head from side
to side, he saw things stacked behind her, tins and a bag and metal
things that shone dimly. Putting out his hand he caught a corner of the
bag. It was a bread bag, sure enough, and as he pulled it towards him
the other things came clattering down almost hitting her, and amongst
them, God-sent, a little tin spoon.

He seized it and filled it and brought the tip to her lips and she
swallowed the water making movements with her throat muscles as though
it were half a cupful. He did this a dozen times and then rested, spoon
in hand, watching her. She made a couple of slight movements with her
head as if nodding to him and her eyes never left him for a moment, they
seemed holding on to life through him. He offered a spoonful of water
again, she moved her head slightly as though she had had enough, but her
eyes never left him.

He knew. If the whole thing had been carefully explained to him he could
not have known better how she was clinging to him, as a child to a
mother, as a creature to life. And all the time his rough mind in a
tumble of confusion and trouble was trying to think how she came like
this, with a bread bag close to her and a river within reach.

A tin cup had come down with the other things, it gave him an idea, and
getting a biscuit out of the bag he broke it up, put the pieces in the
cup with some water and let them soak. It took a long time and all the
while, now and then, he kept talking to her.

"There. Y'aren't so bad after all--keep up till I get you something
more. There's no use in troubling--you'll be on your pins soon."

He would pause to swear at the biscuit for not softening quicker,
helping it to crumble with his mighty thumb thrust in the cup. To "get
food into her" was his main idea, it didn't matter about thumbs. He was
not without experience of starvation and thirst and what they can do to
people, and, as he worked away talking to her, pictures from the past
came to him of people he had seen like this,