ompanionship,--somebody to sit beside him.

As for the girl--there was now a double bond between her and the dog. He
was not only poor and an outcast, but a cripple like herself. Before, she
was his friend, now, she was his mother, whispering to him, her cheek to
his; holding him up to the window to see the trains rush by, his nose
touching the glass, his poor leg dangling.

The train hands missed him too, vowing vengeance, and the fireman of No.
6, Joe Connors, spent half a Sunday trying to find the boy that threw the
stone. Bill Adams, who ran the yard engine, went all the way home the next
day after the accident for a bottle of horse liniment, and left it at the
shanty, and said he'd get the doctor at the next station if Sanders
wanted.

One broiling hot August day--a day when the grasshoppers sang among the
weeds in the open lot, and the tar dripped down from the roofs, when the
teams strained up the hill reeking with sweat, a wet sponge over their
eyes, and the drivers walked beside their carts mopping their necks--on
one of these steaming August days the dog limped down to the crossing just
to rub his nose once against Sanders as he stood waving his flag, or to
look wistfully up into his face as he sat in the little pepper-box of a
house that sheltered his flags and lantern. He did not often come now.
They were making up the local freight--the yard engine backing and
shunting the cars into line. Bill Adams was at the throttle and Connors
was firing. A few yards below Sanders's sentry-box stood an empty flat car
on a siding. It threw a grateful shade over the hard cinder-covered
tracks. The dog had crawled beneath its trucks and lay asleep, his
stiffened leg over the switch frog. Adams's yard engine puffing by woke
him with a start. There was a struggle, a yell of pain, and the dog fell
over on his back, his useless leg fast in the frog. Sanders heard the cry
of agony, threw down his flag, bounded over the cross-ties, and crawled
beneath the trucks. The dog's cries stopped. But the leg was fast. In a
moment more he had rushed back to his box, caught up a crowbar, and was
forcing the joint. It did not give an inch. There was but one thing
left--to throw the switch before the express, due in two minutes, whirled
past. In another instant a man in a blue jumper was seen darting up the
tracks. He sprang at a lever, bounded back, and threw himself under the
flat car. Then the yelp of a dog in pain, drowned by the shriek