“Poor little soul!” she said dropping to her knees and putting her arms about him. “Wake up, dear, and don’t you be scairt a mite, for it’s only Suly; you know Suly, don’t you?” her voice broke and a tear or two ran over her cheeks. The child, coming slowly back to consciousness, gazed blankly into her face, then turned and peered into the woods, drawing his breath in hard, dry sobs. Then he recognized Dixie and felt of his tattered ears with a weakly caressing motion. “Yes, Dixie’s here,” coaxed Suly, “and I’m here and Thad’s here with the wagon and we’re goin’ to carry you right home to your gran’daddy.” By now Thaddeus was beside them. “Well, what about it!” was all he could say, but he acted promptly upon Suly’s bidding and lifted the boy into the wagon. Suly wrapped him in a time-worn blanket of confederate gray that had been doing duty as a cushion and set him between them. “Now where was you a-goin’ to?” interrogated the amazed Thaddeus, taking up the reins and driving slowly on. “I—don’t—know,” sobbed the child. “Why he was going home,” kindly assisted Suly. “Where have you been at?” persisted Thaddeus. “I—don’t—know.” “Well how’d you _git_ here, anyway?” “Now Thad, you quit pesterin’ him,” commanded Suly. By now the boy was quite himself and making desperate efforts to breathe without sobbing. “It’s powerful mizzable to be borned with ways that you can’t help,” he faltered, and the girl essayed to change the current of his thoughts. “You knowed your Aunt Carliny and little Jakey had come back here to live, didn’t you, Grover Cleveland?” “She done gran’daddy mean,” answered the boy and added after a long, tremulous breath, “Jakey’s shoes is wore out.” They drove on in silence. When the boy had become quiet and too sleepy, Arsula believed, to take notice of what she was saying, she ventured to relieve her mind of some of its distracting emotions. “If Carliny was where she’d ought to be, a-keepin’ house for her father, this little soul’d never get out of the house at night without her knowin’ it—I’m plumb sure of that. To think of her livin’ away off up there in that gully where nary somebody passes, month in and month out, in a ole hut with nothin’ but a dirt floor and no window; and chinks between the logs that you can put your hand into and her father the best-off man round yer! What you reckon he’d say if they was found froze plumb to death? And he such a powerful pious man and a-standin’ way up high in the church! Free-handed too—where he takes a notion—givin’ the preacher his rent free and all the wood he’s a mind to cut and haul and all the apples and corn and potatoes he’s a mind to harvest; and a-pilin’ up fodder stacks close to ole Mis’ Jimson’s fence and a-pullin’ out a rail with his own hands so’s her ole cow can get her head through and help herself.