t death makes no reply. His lifelong playmate lay straightened out
in that last unalterable, mysterious sleep.

The boy was too stunned for tears. He knelt beside his dog in silent
misery. After a long while he rose from the ground and going to a
moss-covered rock near by where laurel and forget-me-nots blossomed
and rhododendron bells hung in clusters, with a stout stick and his
sturdy hands he dug beneath the rock an opening large enough to hold
his dead dog. Then he went back to where his old playmate lay, and
lifting the stiffened body in his arms he stumbled blindly to the rock
and laid it away.

Towards evening he slowly made his lonely way home.

Mirandy, missing the dog at last, inquired: "Whar's Tige?" and Steve's
stiff lips articulated the one word, "Dead."

She replied indifferently, "Wal, he want no 'count any mo'. I reckons
hit's a good thing."

Steve had no answer and with swelling heart made his way to the woods
to sleep alone. It was long before he could sleep, and as he lay in
the unbearable loneliness, he decided that next morning he would start
on that journey to the unknown. Perhaps to that new world sorrow would
not follow! He would not need so much food now; he had enough saved
already. The death of the dog urged him on to his purpose as nothing
else could have done.

He went down to the cabin next morning for the last time. It was a
warm spring morning. Passing Mirandy sitting on the door-step, her
breakfast dishes not yet washed, he paused a minute, longing to say
something, for although the bond between them was of blood and not of
the heart, yet she was part of the life from which he was tearing
himself away, and he longed to sob out a good-bye. But he must not, so
choking down words and tears he stumbled off, never once looking back.
His father sat in the chimney corner smoking his morning pipe, but
father and son had always lacked interests in common, and the coming
of the watch had put an insurmountable barrier between them. So
Steve's only thought in passing him had been to escape suspicion. It
was to his mother that the boy had always shyly told his day-dreams in
the woods,--dreams which reached out into a wonder world lying beyond
the mountains. And she had smoked her pipe in silent sympathy,
occasionally asking: "Did ye see big houses, rows and rows of 'em on
land, and some a-ridin' the water? I've hearn tell of 'em in my day,"
so furnishing inspiration for more dreams in the futu