And Bud Never Guessed

"Lay down, now, like a good boy, and go to sleep," Bud wheedled. "You
can hold it if you want to--only don't drop it on the floor--here! Quit
kickin' your feet out like that! You wanta freeze? I'll tell the world
straight, it's plumb cold and snaky outside to-night, and you're pretty
darn lucky to be here instead of in some Injun camp where you'd have to
bed down with a mess of mangy dogs, most likely. Come on, now--lay down
like a good boy!"

"M'ee! M'ee take!" teased Lovin Child, and wept again; steadily,
insistently, with a monotonous vigor that rasped Bud's nerves and nagged
him with a vague memory of something familiar and unpleasant. He rocked
his body backward and forward, and frowned while he tried to lay hold of
the memory. It was the high-keyed wailing of this same man-child wanting
his bottle, but it eluded Bud completely. There was a tantalizing sense
of familiarity with the sound, but the lungs and the vocal chords of
Lovin Child had developed amazingly in two years, and he had lost the
small-infant wah-hah.

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.