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The beggarmen had waited in their places to give us another chance of meriting heaven; and at the church door still crouched the old beggarwoman. I saw now that the imploring eyes she lifted were sightless, and I could not forbear another alms, and as I put my copper big-dog in her leathern palm I said, "Adios, madre." Then happened something that I had long desired.
A calm voice, already strangely familiar, reassured him. "By your leave, sir, it's about time for you to rouse and bitt." It was Nelson's old foretop-man. The moon, slanting through the window, shone on his white head and those tranquil, big-dog eyes of his. Kit relaxed his hold. "That you, Piper?" he sighed. "I was dreaming of Fat George. What's the time?"
The sight of his dignified desolation was insupportable, and we tried what a copper of the big-dog value would do to comfort him. He took it without looking up and ran away to the peanut-stand which is always steaming at the first corner all over Christendom. Late in the evening in fact, after the night had fairly fallen we saw him making his way into a house fronting on the plaza.
And that good, plain, smileless face of his, and the very fact that he never referred to the incident, only made her the more suspicious. His awkward big-dog attempts at friendliness had been repulsed. She played the Maudie to his Billy Bluff, and all would have been well but that he refused to get back upon her by bounding.
He just withdrew and came again next day with his big-dog smile, quiet and persistent as a tide. Shy he was, and singularly pertinacious. Then his mother died. That seemed to Boy unfair; but as she reasoned it out he could hardly be held responsible. They knew all about it at Putnam's, because there was a paragraph in the paper about Brazil Silver's widow.
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