" Open!" to Mary at
any hour of the day he happened to be passing the wood pile.
He stood at a distance, and patiently waited until a gray and black
nut-hatch that foraged on the wood covered all the new territory
discovered by the last disturbance of the pile. From loosened bark
Dannie watched the bird take several good-sized white worms and a
few dormant ants. As it flew away he gathered an armload of wood.
He was very careful to clean his feet on the stoop, place the wood
without tearing the neat covering of wall paper, and brush from his
coat the snow and moss so that it fell in the box. He had heard
Mary tell the careless Jimmy to do all these things, and Dannie
knew that they saved her work. There was a whiteness on her face
that morning that startled him, and long after the last particle of
moss was cleaned from his sleeve he bent over the box trying to get
something said. The cleaning took such a length of time that the
glint of a smile crept into the grave eyes of the woman, and the
grim line of her lips softened.
"Don't be feeling so badly about it, Dannie," she said. "I could have
told you when you went after him last night that he would go back as
soon as he wakened to-day. I know he is gone. I watched him lave."
Dannie brushed the other sleeve, on which there had been nothing at
the start, and answered: "Noo, dinna ye misjudge him, Mary. He's
goin' to a coon hunt to-nicht. Dinna ye see him take my gun?"
This evidence so bolstered Dannie that he faced Mary with confidence.
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