Davy reached home to find his mother out in the
clean-swept yard picking up chips in her apron. From the bedroom window
of the little one-storied unpainted house came a bright red glow, and
from the kitchen the smell of cooking meat. His mother straightened up
from her task with a smile when with his new-found partner he entered
the yard.

"Why, Davy," she asked, "where did you get him?"

"He--he just followed me, Ma."

"But whose dog is he?"

"He's mine, Ma--he just took up with me."

"Where, Davy?"

"Oh, way back down the road--in a pasture."

"He must belong to somebody."

"He's just a ol' hound dog, Ma, that's all he is. Lots of hounds don't
belong to nobody--everybody knows that, Ma. Look at him, Ma. Mighty nigh
starved to death. Lemme keep him. We can feed him on scraps. He can
sleep under the house. Me an' him will keep you in rabbits. You won't
have to kill no more chickens. Nobody don't want him but me!"

From her gaunt height she looked down into the boy's eager eyes, then at
the dog beside him. "All right, son," she said. "If he don't belong to
anybody."

That night Davy alternately whistled and talked to the dog beside him as
he husked the corn he had raised with his own hands, and chopped the
wood he had cut and hauled--for since his father's death he had kept
things going. He ate supper in a sort of haze; he hurried out with a tin
plate of scraps; he fed the grateful, hungry dog on the kitchen steps.
He begged some vaseline from his mother and rubbed it on the sore neck.
Then he got two or three empty gunnysacks out of the corncrib, crawled
under the house to a warm place beside the chimney, and spread them out
for a bed. He went into the house whistling; he didn't hear a word of
the chapter his mother read out of the Bible. Before he went to bed in
the shed-room he raised the window.

"You all right, old feller?" he called.

Underneath the house he heard the responsive tap-tap of a tail in the
dry dust. He climbed out of his clothes, leaving them in a pile in the
middle of the floor, tumbled into bed, and pulled the covers high over
him.

"Golly!" he said. "Oh, golly!"

Next day he hunted till sundown. The Christmas holidays were on and
there was no thought of school. He went only now and then, anyway, for
since his father's death there was too much for him to do at home. He
hunted in the opposite direction from Old Man Thornycroft's. It was
three miles away; barriers of woods and botto