ess dog. Sanders stood in the road with his flag. A passing
freight train stopped the mob. The dog dashed between the wheels,
doubling, and then bounding up the slope of the cut, sprang through the
half-open door of the shanty. When he saw the girl he stopped short,
hesitated, looked anxiously into her face, crouched flat, and pulling
himself along by his paws, laid his head at her feet. When Sanders came
home that night the dog was asleep in her lap. He was about to drive him
out until he caught the look in her face, then he stopped, and laid his
empty dinner-pail on the shelf.

"I seen him a-comin'," he said; "them rats from the bolt-factory was
a-humpin' him, too! Guess if the freight hadn't a-come along they'd
a-ketched him."

The dog looked wistfully into Sanders's face, scanning him curiously,
timidly putting out his paw and dropping it, as if he had been too bold,
and wanted to make some sort of a dumb apology, like a poor relation who
has come to spend the day. He had never had any respectable
ancestors,--none to speak of. You could see that in the coarse, shaggy
hair, like a door mat; the awkward ungainly walk, the legs doubling under
him; the drooping tail with bare spots down its length, suggesting past
indignities. He was not a large dog--only about as high as a chair seat;
he had mottled lips, too, and sharp, sawlike teeth. One ear was gone,
perhaps in his puppyhood, when some one had tried to make a terrier of
him and had stopped when half done. The other ear, however, was active
enough for two. It would curl forward in attention like a deer's, or start
up like a rabbit's in alarm, or lie back on his head when the girl stroked
him to sleep. He was only a kickable, chasable kind of a dog,--a dog made
for sounding tin pans tied to his tail and whooping boys behind.

All but his eyes! These were brown as agates, and as deep and clear.
Kindly eyes that looked and thought and trusted. It was these eyes that
first made the girl love him; they reminded her, strange to say, of her
father's. She saw, too, perhaps unconsciously to herself, down in their
depths, something of the same hunger for sympathy that stirred her own
heart--the longing for companionship. She wanted something nearer her own
age to love, though she never told her father. This was a heartache she
kept to herself, perhaps because she hardly understood it.

The dog and the girl became inseparable. At night he slept under her bed,
reaching his he