e of them trees, or you'll have
sunstroke. Wait till I fetch somethin'."

She ran across the road and returned with her greasy bundle under one
arm, offering the other to him with a gesture as frank as it was
impersonal.

"Lean on me, an' try to git along--and please kinder hurry!"

She added the last with a note of sudden urgency in her tones and the
same furtively darting glance with which she had swept the road from the
fence-top, but the young man was too deeply engrossed with his painful
effort to rise to observe the look, although her change of tone aroused
his curiosity. Was this scrawny but good-natured kid afraid some of her
people would catch her talking to a stranger by the roadside?

Somehow he managed to hobble, with her aid, across the little bridge and
down the bank of the swiftly racing brook at its farther side to a nest
in the dense thicket of willow-shoots which completely screened them
from the road.

The girl eased him down then upon the sward, and, seating herself beside
him, unrolled the apron she had carried.

"It's the ham that's greased it all up like that," she remarked. "I'd
have brought a pail, only I didn't want to take any more 'n I had to."

The young man gasped with astonishment as the contents of the
apron-bundle were exposed: a whole ham glistening with the brown sugar
in which it had been baked, a long knife, a huge loaf of bread, and,
wrapped separately in a piece of newspaper, a bar of soap, a box of
matches, and a bit of broken comb.

"When there's lots of them, ham sandwiches, together with spring water,
ain't so bad, an' it's near noon," the girl observed, beginning to cut
the loaf into meager slices with a practised hand. "I should've made
them thicker, but I forgot."

A starving gleam had come into the young man's eyes at the sight of
food, but he paused with the sandwich half-way to his lips to glance
keenly at his companion.

"You've enough here for an army," he declared. "Were you taking it to
men working in the fields somewhere?"

"No," she replied without hesitation, but with the same air of finality
with which she had responded to his first question. "You can rest easy
here till sundown, when the men begin to come in from the harvestin',
an' then if you holler real loud some of them will maybe stop an' give
you a lift on your way. There's a railroad about four miles from here,
an' the slow freight goes by along about ten."

The slow freight! So the girl tho