Bud did not remember, bat for all that his thoughts went back across
those two years and clung to his own baby, and he wished poignantly that
he knew how it was getting along; and wondered if it had grown to be
as big a handful as this youngster, and how Marie would handle the
emergency he was struggling with now: a lost, lonesome baby boy that
would not go to sleep and could not tell why.
Yet Lovin Child was answering every one of Bud's mute questions. Lying
there in his "Daddy Bud's" arms, wrapped comically in his Daddy Bud's
softest undershirt, Lovin Child was proving to his Daddy Bud that his
own man-child was strong and beautiful and had a keen little brain
behind those twinkling blue eyes. He was telling why he cried. He wanted
Marie to take him and rock him to sleep, just as she had rocked him
to sleep every night of his young memory, until that time when he had
toddled out of her life and into a new and peculiar world that held no
Marie.
By and by he slept, still clinging to the watch that had Marie's picture
in the back. When he was all limp and rosy and breathing softly against
Bud's heart, Bud tiptoed over to the bunk, reached down inconveniently
with one hand and turned back the blankets, and laid Lovin Child in his
bed and covered him carefully. On his bench beyond the dead line Cash
sat leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, and sucked at a pipe
gone cold, and stared abstractedly into the fire.
Bud looked at him sitting there. For the first time since their trails
had joined, he wondered what Cash was thinking about; wondered with a
new kind of sympathy about Cash's lonely life, that held no ties, no
warmth of love. For the first time it struck him as significant that
in the two years, almost, of their constant companionship, Cash's
reminiscences had stopped abruptly about fifteen years back. Beyond that
he never went, save now and then when he jumped a space, to the time
when he was a boy. Of what dark years lay between, Bud had never been
permitted a glimpse.
"Some kid--that kid," Bud observed involuntarily, for the first time in
over three weeks speaking when he was not compelled to speak to Cash. "I
wish I knew where he came from. He wants his mother."
Cash stirred a little, like a sleeper only half awakened. But he did not
reply, and Bud gave an impatient snort, tiptoed over and picked up the
discarded clothes of Lovin Child, that held still a faint odor of wood
smoke and rancid grease, and, removing his shoes that he might move
silently, went to work.
He washed Lovin Child's clothes, even to the red sweater suit and the
fuzzy red "bunny" cap. He rigged a line before the fireplace--on his
side of the dead line, to be sure--hung the little garments upon it and
sat up to watch the fire while they dried.