But I'm here meself now, and I'll have her out to-night
if I work till daylight. Here, cap'n, pull yerself together.
This is the boss."
Then catching sight of the boy turning a handspring behind the
horse, she called out again:--
"Now, look here, Cully, none of your skylarkin'. There's the
dinner whistle. Unhitch the Big Gray; he's as dry as a bone."
The boy loosened the traces and led the horse to water, and
Babcock, after a word with the Captain, and an encouraging smile
to Tom, turned away. He meant to go to the engineer's office
before his return to town, now that his affairs with Grogan were
settled. As he swung back the door in the board fence, he
stumbled over a mere scrap of humanity carrying a dinner-pail.
The mite was peering through the crack and calling to Cully at the
horse-trough. He proved to be a boy of perhaps seven or eight
years of age, but with the face of an old man--pinched, weary, and
scarred all over with suffering and pain. He wore a white
tennis-cap pulled over his eyes, and a short gray jacket that
reached to his waist. Under one arm was a wooden crutch. His
left leg was bent at the knee, and swung clear when he jerked his
little body along the ground. The other, though unhurt, was thin
and bony, the yarn stocking wrinkling over the shrunken calf.
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