He closed his burning eyes to shield them from the glare of the sun, and a confused memory returned to him of that invitingly green, shady pasture which had tempted him as a short cut toward the next village, and of something which thundered down upon him from behind and lifted him into chaos. Good Lord, and he had only six days left! "You'd better take a drink of this first an' I kin use the rest on your head." A composed, practical voice advised by his side, and he looked up gratefully into the snub-nosed, freckled face of his benefactress as she held the brimming cap to his lips. He drank deeply, then struggled to a sitting posture, his face whitening beneath its tan at the sudden wrench of pain which twisted the muscles of his back. "Kin you hold the cap steady?" The girl thrust it into his hands without waiting for a reply, and, sitting down with her back to him, calmly turned back the hem of her gown and tore a wide strip from the coarse but immaculately white cambric petticoat beneath. Dipping it into the water, she bandaged his head not unskilfully, and then rose. "There! I gotta git you over to the shade of them trees, or you'll have sunstroke. Wait till I fetch somethin'." She ran across the road and returned with her greasy bundle under one arm, offering the other to him with a gesture as frank as it was impersonal. "Lean on me, an' try to git along--and please kinder hurry!" She added the last with a note of sudden urgency in her tones and the same furtively darting glance with which she had swept the road from the fence-top, but the young man was too deeply engrossed with his painful effort to rise to observe the look, although her change of tone aroused his curiosity. Was this scrawny but good-natured kid afraid some of her people would catch her talking to a stranger by the roadside? Somehow he managed to hobble, with her aid, across the little bridge and down the bank of the swiftly racing brook at its farther side to a nest in the dense thicket of willow-shoots which completely screened them from the road. The girl eased him down then upon the sward, and, seating herself beside him, unrolled the apron she had carried. "It's the ham that's greased it all up like that," she remarked. "I'd have brought a pail, only I didn't want to take any more 'n I had to." The young man gasped with astonishment as the contents of the apron-bundle were exposed: a whole ham glistening with the brown sugar in which it had been baked, a long knife, a huge loaf of bread, and, wrapped separately in a piece of newspaper, a bar of soap, a box of matches, and a bit of broken comb. "When there's lots of them, ham sandwiches, together with spring water, ain't so bad, an' it's near noon," the girl observed, beginning to cut the loaf into meager slices with a practised hand. "I should've made them thicker, but I forgot."