Buff: A Collie and Other Dog-Stories — Chums, Part 1

CHUMS

Arnon Flint had not volunteered to take the money-satchel to the bank.

Indeed, he had tried hard to crawl out of the errand.

A tennis-hour, with a swim to follow, had beckoned right alluringly to him.

There was no fun in missing all this and taking a hot trolley-ride into town just for the honour of acting as bearer, to the bank, of the church bazaar’s satchelful of change and small bills.

Arnon said so, with engaging frankness, at lunch that noon, when his mother told him of the task that had been deputed to him.

Whereat his father looked up gloweringy; from his task of plate-clearing, and added his quota to the argument: “As long as you eat my bread, you’ll obey my orders, and your mother’s, too.

I don’t want to hear any grumbling.

You’ll take that money to the bank, and you’ll get a receipt for it.

And you’ll look sharp to get there before three, too.

Let it go at that!

” For perhaps thirty seconds, Arnon wisely “let it go at that.

” Then human endurance broke down before equally human indignation.

“You talk a lot about my eating your bread,” sniffed the boy.

“But it isn’t my fault I eat it.

If you’d let me take a job, instead of making me get ready to go to that measly old college, I’d have been eating my own bread by this time.

” “You’d be wasting another man’s time and money instead of mine,” retorted his father.

“And you’d be back on my hands inside of a week.

No, thanks.

You’re going to college--if ever you have sense enough to pass your entrance exams.

College may make a man of you.

Nothing else will.

In the meantime, you’ll do something for your keep, besides sulking.

For instance, you’ll take the bazaar’s ninety-eight dollars to the bank, this afternoon.

And you’ll do it without any more whining.

” As he stood, jammed with eight other people upon the interurban trolley-car’s back platform that afternoon, Arnon morosely went over in his mind this lunch-table dialogue.

He fell to chewing on the unpalatable mess of grievances that had led up to the scene.

And he was hot and sick with resentment.

* * * * * Some conscienceless liar once said that schooldays are the happiest time in life.

That same liar would make Ananias or Munchausen look like the original Truthful James.

In many ways, the school-years of a growing boy are worse than a term in prison.

They are perhaps a delight to the model youth.

But to the average lad they hold more torture than any grown man could endure.

It is only the miraculous elastic power of youth that makes them bearable.

It is the distorting and falsifying magic of retrospect that gives them their only charm.

A grown man, let us say, is in disgrace.

If worst comes to worst, he can vanish; and he can start life, afresh, somewhere else, with a clean slate.

Let a boy fall into disgrace at school or at home.

What road of escape is open to him?

Not one.

He is much more at the mercy of parent and teacher than any convict is at his warden’s mercy.

There are strict laws governing the treatment of prisoners by their keepers.

But, within normal bounds, no law holds back a teacher or a parent--or both--from making a boy’s life a continuous Hades.

Add to all this the fact that every one of youth’s countless misfortunes is a hopeless black tragedy in its victim’s eyes, and perhaps you will understand why boyhood is not a ceaseless delight.

If any man of thirty-six were subjected to the tyranny, the terrors, the bitter dependence, the unescapable and heavy penalties for petty faults that encompass the average half-grown boy, he would go insane in a night.

There is no appeal, no way out, for the boy who is in a scrape.

For a man, in such trouble, there are fifty exits.

Small wonder that so many lads yearn for a chance to make their own way in the world, and that they shrink in loathing from the proposed college course which will keep them in penniless slavery during four more endless years!

They have not yet the wit to understand that the so-called Higher Education is often a pompously windy fetish; whose chief advantage consists in the fact that it enables its possessors to look down on its non-possessors.

This philosophy is faulty, of course.

It is also non-essential to the story; except that it throws a light on Arnon Flint’s mental processes as he stood there, the hated money-satchel at his feet, trying to keep his balance on the crowded rear platform of the trolley-car.

People were forever boarding or leaving the car.

A dozen times, Arnon was shoved from one spot to another as his fellow-standees milled and jostled about him.

Always, with his toe, he managed to push the satchel to his new standing place.

He could not stoop to pick it up.

The platform was too crowded.

He could not even stoop down far enough to keep his eye on the bag.

But he kept in constant touch with it by means of his boot-toe.

At the ball-ground gate, on the outskirts of the town, three-fourths of the passengers debarked.

As the car started on, its rear platform was empty except for Arnon and the conductor and a sawdusty man in overalls.

Breathing was easier now.

So was standing.

A few blocks farther on, a woman got out, leaving a seat vacant on the rear bench.

Arnon spied the seat and prepared to take it.

As a preliminary, he bent to pick up the satchel from between his toes.

“Drop that, sonny!

” exhorted the sawdusty man in overalls.

At the same moment Arnon was aware that his fingers had met around a canvas strap and not around the satchel’s leathern handle.

He peered down, in dull amaze.

Between his feet was a carpenter’s kit.

The money-bag was nowhere in sight.

The thing he had been guarding with his toes was this kit.

Someone had long since taken away the satchel.

It is an old trick, this “lifting” of a bag from the floor of a crowded vehicle.

But to youth no misfortunes are old.

All of them have the horrible charm of novelty.

The satchel was gone.

And it had not been taken by mistake.

For the sawdusty man’s kit was the sole bit of luggage on the platform.

The satchel was gone.

And with it was gone the ninety-eight dollars collected, the night before, at the church bazaar--the charity money that had been entrusted to Arnon Flint to take to bank--the money which, just then, represented Arnon Flint’s honour.

Now, as any sane reader will know, the one simple and natural thing for the boy to do was to notify the police and thence to go home and tell his parents what had happened.

His father was moderately well-to-do, and readily could have made up the deficit.

Yes, that would have been the one normal thing for Arnon to do:--to go home and confess.

And--his first name being neither Rollo nor Percival--it is the very thing he did not do.

From across the eternal chasm which divides boyhood from middle age, the lad’s right course seems absurdly simple.

But to no boy, and to no one who recalls the mental agony of boyhood disgraces, will it appear so.

As wisely ask an unsuspected sinner to write out a list of his misdeeds and to mail them to his wife and to the police.

Arnon had a lively imagination.

He had no trouble at all in picturing the scene of his home-coming with such tidings as were his.

He, who had begged to go to work,--whose father had fifty times told him he had not enough level-headedness or sense of responsibility to hold a job for one week,--he must go home and admit his father was right.

He--whose weekly spending money was just seventy-five cents--must confess he had lost ninety-eight dollars.

The magnitude of the sum gripped him with panic force.

A few minutes ago he had regarded the bag’s contents as merely a heavy mass of small change.

Now he knew it for Wealth.

The knowledge that he had committed no sin did not buoy him up in the very least.

A consciousness of innocence is an excellent anchor, no doubt.

But what good is an anchor after the ship has sunk?

Blindly illogical fright seized the boy as he thought of reporting the loss of such a fortune--and of the present penalty and the interminable naggings to follow.

The Unknown has a host of terrors lurking at its heels.

But, once or twice in a lifetime, these are outweighed by the more tangible terrors of the Known.

Which accounts for suicides.

Beyond, lay the Unknown.

Behind, lay the Known.

Arnon Flint, in a rush of consequence-fear, chose the Unknown.

In his pocket was the best part of three dollars, the sum still left from his month’s allowance received that morning.

He stayed on the trolley-car until it reached the railroad station.

Then he entered the station and bought a ticket for Silk City--one hundred and twenty miles to westward.

Three and a half hours later, he stepped down upon the Union Station platform in Silk City.

* * * * * His plan was made.

There was always work for willing hands.

Arnon knew there was.

He knew it because he had read it--yawningly but repeatedly--in _The Boys’ Uplift Magazine_, a dreary juvenile monthly for which his father had subscribed in Arnon’s name.

Arnon intended to get a fair-paying job, work hard, live frugally and save that lost ninety-eight dollars as quickly as possible.

When he should have saved it, he would send it home to make up the church-bazaar deficit.

At the same time, he could lay pipes for his own immune home-coming.

The plan was perfectly feasible.

In the meanwhile, Arnon had eighteen cents in his pocket.

Now, it would be most laudable at this point to say that Arnon’s search for work was at once rewarded by a good job and that his industry and talents won him swift promotion; until at last he was Silk City’s merchant king.

_The Boys’ Uplift Magazine_ would probably be eager to print such a yarn.

But the temptation must be fought down.

This is merely the true account of one unlucky boy’s life in a strange city.

So, back again to our story.

Eighteen cents is a wabbly foundation for a fortune.

Arnon had enough sense to waste none of it in buying a night’s lodging.

The weather was hot.

He had had plenty of experience in camping.

So, after buying a big bag of broken soda-crackers and a wedge of dryish cheese for eight cents, he began to scout for a camp-site.

An hour’s wandering brought him to the very place for his needs.

Silk City was a “boom-burg.

” Thus, its east end chanced still to be unfinished.

Indeed, this section was all but untouched by the hand of man.

Arnon left behind him the business blocks, the tangle of residence streets, the scattered tenements and hovels; and came at last to a dreary stretch of Common whither even the hopeful development-company promoter had not yet ventured.

A corner of the Common, nearest the junction of two unpaved cross-streets, had been used as a dumping ground.

Here Arnon Flint found his “house.

” This was an overturned piano box, one of whose sides was caved in.

It was a heavy, cumbrous rickety thing.

Yet, by use of all his care and strength, Arnon managed to roll and drag and shove it into a shallow sand-pit, a hundred yards from the street.

Here he righted the box, planted its base as deeply as possible in the scooped-out sand at the pit’s bottom and went back to the dump in search of boards to reinforce its crack-strewn roof, and for jute and straw to serve as a bed.

By sunset he had rigged up a fairly watertight abode, six feet long by four wide and five in height, with a soft, if bumpy, carpeting of straw and jute.

And, as he proved by further scouting, the shack was invisible from the street.

Then he tramped to a leaking hydrant, a quarter-mile distant, washed and scoured a small and a large can (both battered but leakless) he had found on the dump; and carried home his night’s supply of clean water.

After which he sat down in the doorway of his piano-box shack and prepared his evening meal.

Dusk was creeping over the day.

Back at home, just now, the family were sitting down to a repast of fricasseed chicken and dumplings and pie and all sorts of things.

Still, crackers and cheese and fresh water are not to be despised as an evening meal--particularly when they are spiced with adventure and reinforced by the hunger of a hustling day.

So it was not the frugality of his meal that made the fare so hard for Arnon to eat.

At first he did not know just what caused the lump in his throat and what made even the tiniest morsel of food impossible to swallow.

Being only a normal boy, he had never so much as heard of psychology.

Nor was there any psychologist there to prate of “reaction” and “nerve exhaustion” and of any of the dozen kindred causes which made the lad feel as he did.

One of these causes alone did Arnon understand.

And this one--to which he would not confess--was bitter, lonely homesickness.

He had cut himself loose from everything and everybody.

He was an exile and on the threshold of a new world.

For all he knew, he might also be a fugitive from justice.

For, when the money’s loss should be discovered, the bazaar people would probably think him a defaulter and set the police after him.

Three hours earlier Arnon had felt himself a true blend of martyr and explorer.

Now he was all at once aware that he was just a lonesome and heavy-hearted boy who had no one to love him and whose only home was a smelly packing box.

The lump in Arnon’s throat began to swell to unbelievable size.

And the eyes wherewith he gazed up over the pit-edge at the dying day, grew foolishly misted.

This would never do!

Angrily he cleared his throat and winked very fast indeed.

Then he forced himself to day-dreams of the splendid job he was going to win on the morrow and of the brevity of the time that must pass before he should save up ninety-eight dollars and be able to go home.

But the effort was a pitiful failure.

The lump nearly strangled him.

And the mist would not behave itself and keep out of his silly eyes.

Just then came the diversion that saved him from the eternal shame of crying.

The dusky skyline at the edge of the shallow pit was broken suddenly by a small dark silhouette.

The boy winked away his rising tears once more, and stared.

There at the top, looking inquisitively down, head on one side, stood a dog--not much of a dog, perhaps, for looks or for contour or for size, but still a dog; certainly not a wolf or a lion, as the lad’s worn-out nerves had at first made him think.

Presently a second dog came alongside the first.

Together they blinked down at the lonely youngster.

Arnon returned their gaze with keen interest.

There was still light enough for him to gain a clear view of his two guests.

The first dog was a black-and-tan.

At least, he was more black-and-tan than anything else.

He held one forefoot gingerly in air, as though he were lame.

And his left ear had evidently been chewed off, as to tip.

The second dog was a pale grey--formerly white--and had longish hair.

He was of the general build and specifications of a Dandy Dinmont.

He and the black-and-tan were about of a height.

Both were collarless, wolf-thin and of a totally disreputable aspect.

Every city has scores of such strays--forlorn mongrels that eke out a rickety living on the dumps and in garbage cans until they fall prey to dogcatcher or police or vivisector, or until a gang of pursuing boys frighten them into a blind panic and thereby start a new mad-dog scare,--a scare which wins a credit-mark for the fearless bluecoat whose pistol is emptied into the harmless and terrified little fugitive.

Yes, to a dog-fancier’s eye, Arnon Flint’s visitors were merely a brace of fleasome mongrels.

To Arnon, though, they meant all the difference between abject loneliness and loving companionship.

Timidly the boy chirped to the dogs.

Up went their ears.

He groped for a chipped soda-cracker, broke it in half and held out the two pieces to them.

At his gesture, the dogs instinctively shrank back--a result of the piteous experience which had taught them that a movement of the human arm is far more likely to mean a flung stone than a proffered dainty.

But it had been a barren day on the dumps.

And the sight and smell of food were mighty temptations.

Also, the boy was talking to them in a wondrous friendly way.

And--whether they can understand words or not--dogs can read the human voice as can few humans themselves.

In Arnon’s call the two strays recognised not only friendship, but appeal.

They recognised the tones of a fellow-stray.

Here was no little devil, coaxing them into range in order to tie a tin can or a firecracker to their stumpy tails.

This lad was as much a waif as was either of them.

And he craved chumship, even as did they.

Slowly, hesitatingly, mincingly, the puppies slid down the pit-bank into the hollow.

Nervously, yet greedily, they nipped the offered fragments of the big soda-cracker.

Ravenously they ate.

Then, as their fears lessened, they fawned upon the human for more food.

Arnon, as they chewed the cracker-bits, ran his fingers gently along their ears and backs, scratching their heads; all the while talking to them.

At first they flinched a little from the unwonted caress.

But soon they courted it.

The boy, of a sudden, found himself not only happy, but ravenously hungry.

He and his two pets finished the crackers and cheese with a zest.

Then all three curled up close together in the straw and went to sleep.

At sunrise Arnon awoke.

Both the dogs were already astir.

As he raised his head and sat looking bewilderedly about, they ran frisking up to him.

And thus began the life of the three chums--in the sand-pit’s piano-box shack.

It was a wonderful life for all of them.

For Arnon, the dogs’ presence was a veritable godsend.

The boy set forth early that first morning, to look for a job.

Naturally, he did not find one.

Not only do business houses cut down their working force in summer, instead of adding to it; but a boy with no references has, at best, a hard time in landing a steady position,--especially if he stammers and grows red when he is asked where he lives and the name of his father.

No, in spite of _The Boys’ Uplift Magazine_, no kindly merchant was so impressed by Arnon’s manliness and good manners as to offer to teach him the business from the bottom up, with a view of making him, later on, a partner.

Arnon, after a half-day’s futile job-hunt, began to see how matters stood.

He was sore inclined to give up the fight and to tramp all the way back to his parents’ home.

But at once he remembered he could not.

He had responsibilities,--responsibilities he could not shirk.

At the shack his two dog-chums were waiting for his return.

He could not take them a hundred and twenty miles, afoot.

He had no means of feeding them on the way, even if no farm dogs should kill them or rural poundmasters seize them.

No, they relied on him.

And he had no right to fail them.

He must stick.