he fragments. He never went
to the house except when he was invited, either to hear Pop read or to
take his dinner with the other men. At this instant Jennie came running
out, the shawl about her head.

"Oh, Carl, did you find my apron? It blew away, and I thought it might
have gone into the yard."

"Yas, mees; an' da goat see it too--luke!" extending the tattered
fragments, anger and sorrow struggling for the mastery in his face.

"Well, I never! Carl, it was a bran'-new one. Now just see, all the
strings torn off and the top gone! I'm just going to give Stumpy a good
beating."

Carl suggested that he run after the goat and bring him back; but Jennie
thought he was down the road by this time, and Carl had been working all
the morning and must be tired. Besides, she must get some wood.

Carl instantly forgot the goat. He had forgotten everything, indeed,
except the trim little body who stood before him looking into his eyes.
He glowed all over with inward warmth and delight. Nobody had ever cared
before whether he was tired. When he was a little fellow at home at
Memlo his mother would sometimes worry about his lifting the big baskets
of fish all day, but he could not remember that anybody else had ever
given his feelings a thought. All this flashed through his mind as he
returned Jennie's look.

"No, no! I not tire--I brang da wood." And then Jennie said she never
meant it, and Carl knew she didn't, of course; and then she said she had
never thought of such a thing, and he agreed to that; and they talked so
long over it, standing out in the radiance of the noonday sun, the color
coming and going in both their faces,--Carl playing aimlessly with
his tippet tassel, and Jennie plaiting and pinching up the ruined
apron,--that the fire in the kitchen stove went out, and the Big Gray
grew hungry and craned his long neck around the shed and whinnied for
Carl, and even Stumpy the goat forgot his hair-breadth escape, and
returned near enough to the scene of the robbery to look down at it from
the hill above.

There is no telling how long the Big Gray would have waited if Cully had
not come home to dinner, bringing another horse with Patsy perched on
his back. The brewery was only a short distance, and Tom always gave
her men a hot meal at the house whenever it was possible. Had any other
horse been neglected, Cully would not have cared; but the Big Gray which
he had driven ever since the day Tom brought him home,--"Old