hing akin to triumph. For there was no
awkwardness in the boy's procedure, no flushing embarrassment, no
shame-facedness nor painfully self-conscious attempt to cover his
ignorance. Instead, he sat and waited--sat and watched openly until
Miss Sarah had herself selected knife or fork, as the case might
be--and then, turning back to those beside his own place, frowning
intently, he made painstaking selection therefrom. Nor did he once
make a mistake. And Caleb, after he had begun to mark a growing
softness in the color of his sister's thin cheeks, ventured to draw
into conversation their small guest.

The boy talked freely and openly, always with his wide eyes upon the
face of his questioner, always in the grave and slightly drawling
idioms of the woods. Again he confided that he had never before been
out of the timber; he explained that "Old Tom's" untimely taking-off a
fortnight back had been alone responsible for this pilgrimage. And
that opened the way for a question which Caleb had been eager to ask
him.

"I suppose this--this 'Old Tom' was some kin of yours?" he observed.

The boy shook his head.

"No," he answered, "no, I ain't never hed no kin. I ain't never hed
nobody--father ner mother, neither!"

Caleb saw Sarah start a little and bite her thin lips. But the
bird-like movement of surprise was lost upon the speaker.

"I ain't never hed nobody," he re-averred, and Caleb, straining to
catch a note of self-pity or plea for sympathy in the words, realized
that the boy didn't even know what the one or the other was. "I ain't
never hed nobody but Old Tom. And he was--he wasn't nuthin' but what
he called my--my"--the sentence was broken while he paused to get the
phrase correctly--"he was what he called my 'logical custodian.'"

Guiltily Caleb knew that his next question would savor of indelicacy,
but he had to ask it just the same.

"Still, I suppose his--his taking-off must have been something in the
nature of a blow to you?" he suggested.

The boy pursed his lips.

"Wall, no," he exclaimed at last, nonchalantly. "No-o-o! I can't
say's it was. We'd both been expectin' it, I reckon. Old Tom, he
often sed he knew that some day he'd go and git just blind, stavin'
drunk enough to try an' swim the upper rapids--and two weeks ago he
done so!"

And the rest of the words were quite casual.

"I kind-a reckon he'd hev made it, at that," he offered his opinion,
"if they'd hev been a trifle more wa