Part 24 (1/2)

There seemed to be no way out of it but to telegraph home, and he had better do it, he decided, before he was too ill to attend to it.

But there was no place now from which to send a message. He must keep on till he came to the next town.

He rose to his feet and had taken but a few steps when some one came up from behind and touched him on the shoulder.

He turned quickly, in fear of another tramp. It was a tramp truly, but a mere boy, not much older than himself. He was very pale and sickly looking, his clothes were torn in two or three places and his shoes were worn clear down to the uppers.

He did not speak. He stood there looking at Rex, amazement depicted in his gaze.

”I-- I made a mistake,” he stammered out at last ”I thought you were one of us. I saw you lying down there under the tree. Your shoes were all dusty. I knew you'd been tramping.”

But Rex did not feel astonished. He felt so ill and faint that his head swam, and he began to totter.

”I'll have to lie down again, I guess,” he said weakly.

He had just time to move aside out of the dust when he fell like a log.

”What's the matter? Are you sick?”

The shabby looking youth had dropped to one knee beside Rex and was looking down at him with pitying eyes.

”Yes,” was all Rex had strength to murmur.

Then he closed his eyes and did not care what became of him. The strange lad let his other knee sink to the earth and remained in this att.i.tude for several minutes, gazing earnestly at Rex.

”Poor chap,” he muttered. ”I can't make out what he's doing tramping the country this way. He don't look poor. What'll I do with him?”

The first thing to be done, evidently, was to get him out of the sun, which beat down on the spot where he had fallen with fierce intensity.

The stranger bent over, and exerting all his strength lifted Rex in his arms and bore him back along the road to the gra.s.sy strip under the trees where he had recently been lying.

Rex opened his eyes for an instant when he felt himself raised from the ground. Then, when he saw the pity in the plain face looking down into his, he closed them again with a little sigh.

And now once more the strange youth sat contemplating the boy, who seemed to be a tramper like himself, but who, in every other respect, was so vastly different.

He noted the fine, delicately chiseled features, the smallness of his feet, the whiteness and smoothness of his hands. He had seen boys like this before, but he had never before touched one, never had one of them dependent on him, as it were, as this fellow appeared to be now.

Miles Harding did not know just what to do with the responsibility.

And yet he was happy at having it; he felt glad that he had been able to do that little thing of carrying the boy from the sun into the shade.

It was not often that he was able to do anything for anybody. He was always in need of having something done for himself.

He tried to think of something else he might do. He noticed that Rex's head did not seem to rest very comfortably.

He took off his coat and started to make a roll of it for a pillow.

But he stopped when he had it half finished.

”Maybe he wouldn't like that,” he muttered, looking down at the garment as he unrolled it again.

It had been made for a man. There were rents in two places and plentiful sprinklings of grease spots.