Page:Cornelia Meigs-The Pirate of Jasper Peak.djvu/120

 to speak cheerfully. “We can only go on looking until we make sure it is hopeless.”

He closed his book since Hugh’s continued questions had evidently made reading impossible. They sat together looking down the valley, so green and quiet in the sun. A lovely place, but a very lonely one, Hugh was thinking.

“I should think you would have a dog, Oscar,” he observed aloud. “It would be such company for you.”

The grimness of Oscar’s tone as he answered startled Hugh into turning square about.

“I had one,” he said, “and Jake killed him.”

“What,” exclaimed the boy, “are they so bad as that?”

“They are as bad as anything you can think of,” his friend answered.

He looked down again at his hand and Hugh noticed that over the back of it ran a long puckered scar that extended upward under his sleeve.

“That was the time when I lost count of Sunday,” Oscar went on. “It was before I had been here very long and Jake and his friends were