The dog wagged a muscular tail and grinned at Tommy, as though inviting him to share the joke. The stable door was darkened by a form. Even in the difficulties of repulsing the dog's attention without irritating it, the child found time to be glad that the darkening form was that of a stranger. "Call him off, if he's your dog," Tommy urged, thickly, backing against the manger. "Might as well call him off, sir," Robert--now almost awake--conceded. The stranger stepped forward, a snap clicked, and Charles, still widely smiling, was straining at the end of a leathern thong. "I hope he didn't frighten you," said the stranger. "He bunted at me with his great head," said Tommy, with half a sob, "and then he eat up what I'd got, and hooked it off again afore you could say knife." "What had you got?" "Nothing," said Tommy, remembering caution, "at least--" "The jingling of the guinea heals," said the stranger, incomprehensibly. "Would sixpence be any comfort to you?" Tommy's eyes answered, and the stranger held it out. "Thank you, sir," said Tommy, and added, in close imitation of his father's manner to thirsty travelers, "Going far to-day, sir?" "I was thinking," said the stranger, "of putting up here." "Then," said Tommy, with great presence of mind, "please don't say anything to them about the dog eating--what he did eat--nor me being here in my shirt, nor about Robert being asleep. If you'll go round to the front, sir, you'll find the bar, and that'll give me a chance to slip back to bed, sir, if you'd be so kind." "I see," said the stranger, "you were sent to bed." "In punishment like," said Tommy, "so you see I don't want to. . . ." "Exactly. An unobserved retreat. I will draw the enemy's fire from the front premises. Come, Charles." Charles obeyed, only pausing to entangle the lead in the handle of a shovel and to bring this down upon the feet of Robert, to upset a sieve of chaff and run between his master's legs with a sudden violence which, but for the support of the door-post, would have thrown him to the ground. "Nice-spoken young man," said Robert. "Now, young Tommy, you cut along back where you belong. I'll be asking Gladys the time to keep her off of the back door while you slips in, you young limb." He strolled across to the window as Tommy's bare feet trod the sun-warmed bricks to the back door. As the child crept up the stairs he heard the stranger's voice in the bar. "Sixpence," said Tommy, in ecstasy, "and him going to put up here." He cuddled down into his bed well satisfied with the afternoon's adventure. Adventures are, indeed, to the adventurous. "If I'd 'a' bin a good boy and stayed in bed nothing wouldn't have happened," was how he put it to himself. Meanwhile the stranger, encumbered by the striving Charles, was "being shown the rooms"--the bare, much-scrubbed bedroom, the all-too-full and too-carpeted parlor. "They are exactly what I want," he said, and so won the heart of his hostess.