when she was churning
he would stay until the butter came. It was as if he knew he didn't have
very much longer to abide.

Then Frank Jennings came home, a doctor, with his degree. That was in
the fall, just before bird season. Because of the deficiencies of his
early education he had had to spend the summer making up certain courses
in biology.

He was now a fine, tall, grave young fellow of twenty-eight; even
handsome and distinguished. His ambition, he told his father, was to be
a surgeon in children's deformities. To this end he hoped to get an
appointment as assistant to a certain surgeon, the most famous
children's surgeon in the world.

Frank was a quiet fellow; "hoped" was the word he used, but the father
knew it was more than hope--it was ardent desire. He thought maybe he
had attracted some attention, Frank said, and that his work had reached
the ears of the surgeon. If he could get the appointment he felt that
his future was secure.

"What do you want to be a child's surgeon for?" asked the father. "To
make money?"

Frank looked at him quietly and shook his head, and that was all they
said.

He left soon after that. Tom drove him to the station, the blind dog
sitting in the foot of the buggy.

"Don't you and Mother let your hopes get too high," warned the young
man. "There'll be a hundred applicants besides myself. I'll telegraph
the result."

A few days afterward bird season opened and Tom Jennings and Mac set off
after dinner. There had been three or four days of heavy rains but now
the weather had cleared. It was a silent, gorgeous afternoon, high
colours everywhere, gold in the sky and in the frosty air.

As he walked along Tom was thinking of his boy and of his girls; for if
Mac was growing a bit doting, so, perhaps, was he. Before him old Mac,
head high, circled slowly, with ever-wagging tail. Suddenly, not very
far from the river, he stopped, and his tail stiffened.

"Comin', ol' boy," said Tom.

The birds rose and the gun barked twice. One bird tumbled dead. The
other, only winged, recovered itself and, fluttering across the field,
came down near the bank of the river. Mac brought the dead bird, and Tom
Jennings, stooping first to pat his head, dropped it in his pocket. Then
they went on after the wounded one, which had come down near the river.
Even now Tom was thinking in a mooning sort of way of his children.

The river made a sharp curve inward near the point where the bird had
g