Buff: A Collie and Other Dog-Stories — Chums, Part 2

* * * * * That afternoon, by three hours of hanging around the Union Station, he cleared up twenty cents, carrying suit-cases and opening motorcar doors.

He stopped at a tenement-district grocery, on his way back to the sand-pit, and continued his journey with a very respectable armful of provisions.

As he neared the Common, Arnon quickened not only his steps but his heartbeats.

Suppose he were wrong in his estimate of his two new friends.

Suppose they were only of the cadging, garbage-snooping type, and had deserted the shack the moment his back had been turned!

The thought sickened him.

It was for his dogs, not for himself, he had been working that day.

He reached the sand-pit edge and halted.

At the same instant two furry little whirlwinds burst forth from the shack, whizzed up the steep sandy bank and, with barks of ecstasy, hurled themselves bodily upon the returning bread-winner.

What sweeter home-coming could a heartsick and tired exile ask?

Arnon dropped his parcels, fell on his knees and gathered his loyal little comrades into one expansive, squirming, yapping embrace.

Through his delight at their welcome ran a thrill of joy in his own correct judgment of dog nature.

After which the entire party adjourned to the shack for supper.

A

glorious meal it was.

During its progress, the black-and-tan revealed himself as a personage of rare education by sitting up on his hind-legs to beg for food-morsels and by rolling over, twice, in gratitude at receiving such gifts.

The Dandy Dinmont had fewer accomplishments.

But he showed himself a dog of great natural gifts by mastering, at the third attempt, the art of catching in his mouth a piece of cracker placed on the tip of his nose.

Arnon was quite certain that never before had two such remarkable animals come into any one boy’s life.

They not only learned tricks with the bewildering quickness that a mongrel always possesses and a thoroughbred so seldom acquires, but they speedily learned to look on their new master as a god and to worship him as such.

Arnon named the hairy dog “Dandy” and the black-and-tan “Buck”--chiefly because the names seemed to fit like gloves.

Morning after morning, Arnon tramped Silk City, looking in vain for a steady job.

Every afternoon he spent at the Union Station, rustling the hand-baggage of passengers and opening automobile doors for them;

for which service he averaged from fifteen to forty cents a day.

On the lean days he and his chums breakfasted and supped on crackers and cheese.

On days of larger wealth they banqueted regally on bread and butter and tinned meats and ginger snaps.

For an hour, morning and night, the three romped and frolicked together and added to the marvelous list of tricks they had studied.

All night, through summer heat or summer rain, they slept in the piano-box shack, cuddled into one loving triple heap.

Oh, but it was a jolly life for them all!

As to the future--the winter, for instance--Arnon had no thought nor care.

You see, he was only a youngster.

So how could he be expected to have greater forethought than have the army of grown men who live up to every penny of their yearly income, with no constructive worry concerning joblessness or old age?

* * * * * For a long, happy month, life was sweet; in the tumble-down pineboard shack.

Arnon had occasional twinges of homesickness, and he had more than occasional twinges of conscience at his failure to begin saving the missing ninety-eight dollars.

But, on the whole, he was having the time of his life.

This was true adventure, this outcast summer routine of his.

And it was a truer comradeship, too, than any he had known.

On the Fourth of July he celebrated by adorning each of his chums with a red-white-and-blue bow, culled from a length of bedraggled tricolour ribbon he had found in a gutter.

On his own birthday, a week later, he spent thirty-five cents upon a truly regal spread, in honour of the event.

After the sumptuous meal he treated an invisible audience to the full programme of his dogs’ tricks.

It was a gala night at the shack.

Next afternoon Arnon came home a half-hour later than usual, having had to carry a suit-case to a new neighbourhood, and having made a wrong turn on his way back to the Common.

As he neared the sand-pit, he whistled.

Then he paused to watch for the usual scurrying race of his chums up the pit-bank to meet him.

But no frantic joy-barks or multiple patter of feet followed upon his whistle.

At a jump, Arnon was down in the pit.

The dogs were not there.

It was twilight before his search of the region was ended.

This was its end: Stammeringly he asked a passing patrolman whether he had seen two little dogs--one black, one light grey--trotting anywhere along the beat.

And the policeman made curt answer: “Nope.

I didn’t see ’em.

But the dog-catchers was roundin’ up a bunch of mutts in this ward, ’s aft’noon.

Better ask at the pound.

It’s down at the foot of Water Street.

” “Down at the foot of Water Street” was two miles away.

Arnon Flint made the trip in eighteen minutes--only to find the pound-pier was closed for the night.

At grey dawn next morning after ten hours of sleeplessness, Arnon was at the pier again, waiting for its landward gate to swing open for the day.

After an endless delay, one of the poundmaster’s men arrived.

Arnon followed him along the pier to the enormous grated pen and the adjoining office at the far end of the dock.

In the cage were more dogs than Arnon had ever before seen together in all his life.

“_Mongrel, puppy, whelp and hound, and curs of low degree.

_” They were crowded into the big barred inclosure--a pitiful assemblage.

Some dogs were howling, some were barking, some were fox-trotting feverishly back and forth, from corner to corner, pressing close against the bars.

Others, mystically aware of their coming fate, lay, trembling convulsively from time to time; heads between forepaws, eyes abrim with dumb grief.

At the pier’s outer edge, just beyond the barred pen, an iron cage swung over the river.

It hung from a derrick.

Daily, this cage was filled with the dogs that had been longest at the pound.

Then it was dipped under water for five minutes, in full sight of the doomed survivors in the pen.

* * * * * A dog-pound is not pleasant to look upon.

It is little pleasanter to think upon.

It is one of the needful evils of every large town--an evil that is needful to public health and to public safety, so say the city fathers.

It is also needful because--though people talk much about birth-control among humans (where it cannot be enforced)--no one bothers about birth-control among dogs--where it can very easily be enforced.

Litters of dogs are allowed to grow up.

The dogs are portioned among people who grow tired of them or who move away.

The erstwhile pets are turned out to run the streets and to starve or to pick up a scavenger living.

The grim dog-pound does the rest.

The luckless waifs are done to death by water or by gas or in the legalised hell of vivisection.

May the all-pitying God of the Little People have mercy upon them!

For, most assuredly, mankind will not.

* * * * * Arnon stared into the thronged pen.

At first, in the dim light, he could make out nothing.

Then, through lips that would not steady themselves, he gave the old familiar whistle.

Instantly there was a scuttling and scampering from amid the ruck of dogs.

Two series of wildly eager barks cut the looser volume of howls.

And Dandy and Buck came racing up to the bars that separated them from their adored master.

A minute later, a very set-mouthed and white-faced Arnon Flint stalked into the poundmaster’s office.

Forcing his voice raspingly through the emotion that sanded his throat, he demanded of the man in charge: “How much does it cost to get a dog out of the pound?

I’ve--I’ve got a couple of them in there.

” The fat man at the desk looked up, wholly without interest.

Heart-broken children, coming to plead for the return of their law-snatched pets, were no novelty at all to him.

Pound-keepers have no silly sentiment.

If they had, they would not be pound-keepers, but normal humans.

“Dollar apiece,” he grunted.

“That pays their license fee.

” He turned back to his newspaper and promptly forgot the existence of the shaky and ash-faced boy.

Arnon ventured one more question.

“How long,” he quavered, “how long do you keep them here, before--before you----” “Depends on how many there are,” snapped the man, this time without looking up.

“In summer we dowse about twenty a day.

” That was all.

Arnon stood gaping uncertainly, for a moment.

Then he lurched out of the office and back to where his chums pawed at the bars, waiting for him to take them home.

Some time later, an attendant dumped a bucketful of food-scraps into the centre of the pen.

Immediately the larger and fiercer dogs fell upon the food, crowding or scaring the smaller curs away from it.

It was all wolfed down by the bullies of the pen before their weaker or more timid brethren had had a mouthful.

The boy recalled now that he had crammed most of last night’s untasted supper into his pockets, to serve him as breakfast during his search for his chums.

Quickly he emptied his pockets; apportioning the contents between Buck and Dandy, and harshly ordering off such larger dogs as came snooping around for a share in the meal.

At last he went away.

There was no time to waste, if he was to earn that two dollars for his dogs’ ransom.

Two dollars!

Why, the largest sum he had ever earned in one day at Silk City was forty-five cents!

And oftener he had not earned half that amount.

Yet the money must be gotten somehow--and soon.

Then there was another handicap: Out of his earnings he must buy food for Buck and Dandy during their imprisonment, if he did not want them to starve.

Incidentally, he himself must have food--though he wanted none--in order to keep strong enough to work.

All day he haunted the Union Station.

At sunset he was back at the pound, with a bagful of meat-scraps for his chums.

He sat beside the bars, talking to them and putting them through their tricks until the pier closed.

Then he ran all the way to the theatre district, in the hope of earning a few cents more by opening the doors of motorcars and carriages.

At the end of three days of self-starving and of day-and-night work, he had collected ninety-four cents.

This was all he had been able to save after buying food for his pets and a daily cracker or two for himself.

And he had sought work in every waking hour, except such times as he set aside for visiting the pound.

At dawn on the fourth day he found a dollar bill in the street.

An early-morning traveller gave him twenty-five cents more for carrying a heavy suit-case a mile to the station.

The moment the fee was paid, Arnon dashed off for the pound.

He had not only the two-dollar ransom, but fourteen cents left over wherewith to buy the materials for a reunion feast at the shack.

His dizzy weakness and hunger were clean forgot in the mad joy of victory.

Panting, unsteady on his legs, he rushed down the pier.

Before going into the office he paused at the pen to tell his glorious news to the two prisoners.

But his shrill whistle brought no response.

He bent down, shading his eyes; and stared into the pen.

Neither Buck nor Dandy was there.

The souse of the derrick-cage as it smote the water, and the simultaneous crazed screams of its twenty passengers, reached his ears.

And he understood.

No longer did Arnon try to fight back the babyish tears.

He fell face downward on the pier and gave way to hysterical weeping.

His chums!

His dear, wonderful chums!

The little loyal dogs that had loved him and had comforted him so prettily in his stark aloneness and that had been so perfectly trustful in his power to save them!

A man’s hand gripped Arnon’s heaving shoulder and sought to raise him to his feet.

The touch turned his desolate grief into a rage that was all but murderous.

This pound-keeper, by one word, could have saved Dandy and Buck.

And instead, he had drowned them.

With a beast snarl, the half-delirious boy was on his feet.

“You _swine_!

” he screeched, as he whirled towards the man.

“When I’m big enough, I’m coming back to smash every bone in your fat body!

And I’m going to----” His words caught in his throat with a click.

This was not the fat pound-office man.

It was Arnon Flint’s father.

The boy gaped dazedly.

Yes, it was his father.

But Arnon cared not one whit for that.

His father could send him to jail for theft or could whale him with a horsewhip or do anything rotten he chose.

It didn’t matter.

All that mattered was that Buck and Dandy were dead.

He glowered up into the man’s face, ready for anything that might befall.

Then his glower turned to a look of perplexity.

His father did not glower back.

Instead, Mr. Flint’s face was unspeakably tender.

“Oh, my little boy!

” he was saying, brokenly.

“Dad’s own crazy, _gallant_ little boy!

You’re worn to a shadow!

We’ve looked everywhere for you.

It wasn’t till yesterday our detectives struck the trail.

And I came right on.

” “I didn’t steal the money,” said Arnon, dully, “the bazaar money.

I

lost it on the trolley-car.

I tried to get a job to make it up to the church, but----” “I know, I know,” broke in his father, in that same unbelievably tender and quivering voice, “Don’t think any more about it.

I’ve paid it.

Why, dear lad, no one ever supposed you stole it.

We knew you couldn’t. Will you come back home with me, Son?

Mother is pretty nearly as thin as you are, from worry over you.

” “I’ll come, if you like,” agreed Arnon, listlessly.

“It doesn’t matter much, now, either way.

I might as well be there as anywhere.

” “Good!

” approved his father.

“We can just make the ten o’clock train, if we hurry.

I’ve got a taxi waiting at the other end of the pier.

” Side by side, father and son walked away from the pound.

The boy’s eyes were downcast.

His face was haggard.

His heart was dead.

From time to time, as they walked, the man stole a covert glance at him, and his own face contracted as in sharp pain.

“Here’s the taxi,” said Mr. Flint at last.

“Open the door, will you?

You’re nearer to it than I am.

” Mechanically, Arnon turned the handle.

As he pulled the taxi door ajar, two furry catapults from within the vehicle launched themselves, rapturously and yelpingly, upon him.

“You see,” explained Mr. Flint, to his unhearing son, “I had quite a talk with the poundmaster before you got here, this morning.

He’s been noticing you, it seems.

And he told me a rather pathetic little story.

When I heard it I decided to make an investment in livestock.

I was putting these two puppies into the taxi when you hobbled past me on your way to the pound.

I----”

“_Buck!

_” Arnon was sobbing, in a frenzy of bliss.

“Buck!

_Dandy!

_” At sound of their names, the dogs wriggled free from Arnon’s embrace--just for the uproarious fun of hurling themselves once more upon him.

“Hurry up, Son!

” suggested Mr. Flint, clearing his throat noisily.

“Get aboard--you and the pups.

We’ll miss that train!

” “Not on your sweet life, we won’t miss it!

” exulted Arnon, scrambling into the taxi with his pets.

“We’ve _got_ to catch it.

You see, I--I want my chums to--to meet Mother; just as soon as they can.

They’re dead sure to like her.

”