"No," the boy placidly replied.
A stillness enveloped them, accentuated by the minute crackling of the
disintegrating wood. The dark increased and the stars came out; the
clip-clip of a horse's hoofs passed in the distance and night. Harry
Baggs became flooded with sleep.
"I s'pose I can stay in one of these brownstones?" he queried,
indicating the huts.
No one answered and he stumbled toward a small shelter. He was forced
to bend, edge himself into the close damp interior, where he collapsed
into instant unconsciousness on a heap of bagging. In the night he
cried out, in a young strangely distressed voice; and later a drift of
rain fell on the roof and ran in thin cold streams over his still body.
II
He woke late the following morning and emerged sluggishly into a
sparkling rush of sunlight. The huts looked doubly mean in the pellucid
day. They were built of discarded doors and variously painted fragments
of lumber, with blistered and unpinned roofs of tin, in which rusted
smokepipes had been crazily wired; strips of moldy matting hung over an
entrance or so, but the others gaped unprotected. The clay before them
was worn smooth and hard; a replenished fire smoked within blackened
bricks; a line, stretched from a dead stump to a loosely fixed post,
supported some stained and meager red undergarb.
Harry Baggs recognized Peebles and the loquacious tramp at the edge of
the clearing. The latter, clad in a grotesquely large and sorry suit of
ministerial black, was emaciated and had a pinched bluish countenance.
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