It is doubtful if he knew. By the hour he sat where they placed him,
holding his doll with something more deep and hungry than affection,
and looking at Jim or the visitors in his pretty, baby way of gravity
and questioning.
When he sat on old Jim's knee, however, he leaned in confidence against
him, and sighed with a sweet little sound of contentment, as poignant
to reinspire a certain ecstasy of sadness in the miner's breast as it
was to excite an envy in the hearts of the others.
Next to Jim, he loved Tintoretto--that joyous, irresponsible bit of
pup-wise gladness whose tail was so utterly inadequate to express his
enthusiasm that he wagged his whole fuzzy self in the manner of an
awkward fish. Never was the tiny man seated with his doll on the floor
that the pup failed to pounce upon him and push him over, half a dozen
times. Never did this happen that one of the men, or Jim himself, did
not at once haul Tintoretto, growling, away by the tail or the ear and
restore their tiny guest to his upright position. Never did such a
good Samaritan fail to raise his hand for a cuff at the pup, nor ever
did one of them actually strike. It ended nearly always in the pup's
attack on the hand in question, which he chewed and pawed at and
otherwise befriended as only a pup, in his freedom from worries and
cares, can do.
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