Читать книгу The Critter and Other Dogs - Albert Payson Terhune - Страница 8

Table of Contents

There was blurred memory, ever fainter, of a broad and shaded kennel-yard, with lawns and hills and blue water beyond its wire fence’s loops, and of a soft-eyed golden mother against whose warm underbody he nestled on cold nights.

But every day these recollections waned and dimmed and merged and became more like half-recalled dreams than realities. A two-months collie puppy’s mental background is sketchy, at best. And there were a million newer and unlovelier impressions, to drive out the sweet little past.

For example, the world, nowadays, was six feet long by four feet wide, by ever so high. On three sides it was bounded by wooden partitions. On the fourth side it was hemmed in by something vast and invisible and bruisingly hard.

Beyond this plate-glass show window of the dog-and-bird shop was another world; a world unreachable and unsmellable, but starkly visible; a world of gray streets and gray buildings and of sidewalks along which streamed hordes of humans. Now and again these humans, singly or in knots, would pause at the window and peer grinningly in; or they would tap on the glass and waggle their fingers invitingly; or chirp and whistle with no sound.

But hurtful experience with the glass’s unyielding hardness had taught the pups not to bounce forward against the barrier, be the onlookers’ fingers twiddled ever so provocatively in their faces.

For the most part, they drowsed or else stared out through the pane. But sometimes their birthright of playfulness would lead them into mild romps and mock-fights; even in this cheerless prison of theirs. At times, too, ancestral urge would cause them to battle for a moment in clownishly gusty rage over the uninviting food they none of them yearned for.

Dan Veltin had been living in a noisy little city flat for seven years; ever since his marriage to Amy. Before that, he had lived in a noisier little boarding-house for another seven years; indeed, ever since he left his father’s farm and came to New York to make a living. But his soul and his yearnings and his dreams were drenched with the mountain country where he had been born and bred and which his ancestors had snatched from the Indian-infested wilderness. Always, in the bottom of his heart, was a sick little subconscious ache for the hills and for the distances.

Perhaps that was why he took to pausing, on his walk between the subway station and his office, to peer in at the unlovely show window of the unlovelier dog-and-bird store. He had given only a casual glance to it and its prisoners, one morning. Then his gaze had focused on a mournful-eyed and fluffy and pudgy brown collie pup that was looking wistfully through the smeared glass out into the dreary street.

There was something of the country and of the open about the little dog’s aspect. There was something of the same achy homesickness that pestered Dan Veltin himself. Dan stood watching the puppy so long that he was almost late at the office. Every day thereafter he stopped to watch.

One afternoon Amy came to the office to meet him. They stopped, together, to look in at the collie of which Dan had told his wife. Then they went into the smelly shop.

Five minutes later they emerged; Dan carrying a wiggly wooden box wherein pattered and danced and whined a wigglier brown collie pup.

“Yes, I know it was a fool thing to do,” Dan was saying in self-excuse as he and Amy boarded the Bronx subway train for their home-flat. “I know, in the first place, we can’t afford it—though if the invention ever goes through, we can afford a thousand puppies and a real place in the country to keep them in. And I know a collie has no more right in a city flat than a hawk has in a canary-cage. But—well—he’ll be better off with us than in that measly window or if he was sold to some other New York chap who wouldn’t know how to exercise him or take care of him. So——”

“So you were perfectly right to get him!” supplemented Amy. “I told you that, a week ago. As for not being able to afford him—I think it’s always lots best to get things we want and don’t need, when we can’t afford them. You see, people always can scrape together enough money, somehow, for the grim necessaries of life. But the luxuries ought to be bought when they’ll give the most pleasure. We oughtn’t to wait till we are so rich that the luxuries won’t seem luxuries at all. Besides,” she rebuked, “you’re not to say ‘if the invention ever goes through.’ You know perfectly well it will go through. Why, the Coenen-Byng people are——”

“Lots of other people were, too, from time to time,” sighed Dan. “There’s no more reason to think I can put it across with the Coenen-Byng outfit than with any of them. Don’t let’s worry over that, though. I’ll bet Ken will go wild when he sees this pup. Every boy ought to be brought up with a dog. I’ve always said that. And Ken is old enough to——”

“Indeed he is!” agreed Amy. “And he’s a born animal-lover, too. I’ve told you that, ever since he was old enough to walk in the Park with me. The animals in the zoo mean more to him than anything else in the world. That’s the best of living in the Bronx. We’re so close to the Park, it’s almost like our own back yard that we haven’t got.”

“He’s six,” mused Dan. “I was younger than that when I had a dog. I cut my teeth on the ears of Jock, our old pointer.”

“The very name!” broke in Amy.

“The what?” asked Dan, puzzled.

“Jock. For the puppy. It’s Scotch and it’s short and——”

“And it’s easy to call, at a distance,” added Dan, eagerly. “That’s what people ought to think of when they name a dog. Not that he’ll have a chance to stray far enough in this cramped city to need any loud calling. I’m glad to have the good old pointer’s name handed on. He was worth it.”

Thus did the mournful-eyed brown collie puppy find a home. Thus, daily, did he become a more and more loved and honored house-mate in the Bronx flat; and make more and more of a place for himself in the hearts of Dan and Amy Veltin and of their stocky six-year-old son, Kenneth.

It was a jolly little household; though its future was bound up in Dan’s tediously perfected and unsold invention and in that sad-glad word, “If.” The flat held five rooms and it was on the fifth floor of a five-story walk-up apartment house.

“The only reason we live on the fifth,” airily explained Dan to a puffing guest, “is because there’s no sixth. The higher the cheaper. Besides, there’s sunlight in every room.”

Of late, six-year-old Kenneth had become a problem. The child was gifted or cursed with a queer energy. Splendidly strong and healthy, he did not know the meaning of fatigue. The walks with his mother in the Park left him eagerly unwearied. He needed the country and its all-day outdoorness as vent for his spirits and strength.

But the coming of Jock helped to ease the strain. In wild romps with the fast-growing puppy, Kenneth wore off some of his own excess energy. Boy and dog were adoring chums from the first. Their Park scampers were grand exercise for both of them, and called forth infinitely more effort and excitement on Kenneth’s part than had the sedate rambles with Amy. The chums throve apace.

In the two years that followed, Kenneth took on legginess. Jock developed into a mighty and magnificent bronze-hued collie; faultless of manner, and with his intelligence deepened and humanized to the full by constant association with his three owners. Such training will do uncannily strange things to a collie’s sensitive brain.

Kenneth’s own brain was doing much developing, nowadays; but along one line which made his parents worry gloomily. He was as energetic of imagination as of body. In earlier years, this imagination had taken the form of sagas whereof he was the hero and wherein bears and Indians figured as his easily-conquered victims.

But when Kenneth grew older and when the romances took a less fantastic slant, both parents ceased smiling and frowned.

For instance, there was the time when he came running home and told them joyously that he had been chosen to go down to the City Hall, next morning, as delegate from Grammar School Number Fifty-nine, to present a huge bouquet to the governor of the state. There was to be a picture in the papers of it, too, the principal had said.

Thrilled at the honor to her son, Amy took a non-sparable slice of the housekeeping money and went out and bought the boy a complete new outfit of clothes for the ceremony—and never suspected the hoax until she and Dan arrived at City Hall, next day, to witness the mythical presentation.

Then there was the time when Kenneth came to the flat nursing a bloody nose and a left eye which was the epitome of all the banked thunderclouds in all the skies. A strange boy, he said, of twice his size, had been beating a little crippled girl. Mindful of Dan’s lectures on chivalry, Kenneth had rushed to the rescue. He had had no great trouble in thrashing the larger boy to a pulp. But in the course of the fray a chance blow had marred the young crusader’s victory by bruising his nose and eye and spoiling his looks.

Vastly proud of his son’s heroism was Dan Veltin; and loudly did he boast. Then the janitor had cast murk on the shining war-episode by saying that Kenneth had merely assailed a somewhat smaller if much tougher boy because the boy refused to credit Ken’s declaration that Jock had killed four wolves which had escaped from the dens in the zoo and which had pitched on to the collie during a stroll through the park.

Attacked by Kenneth, the tough boy had retaliated. Two blows only, said the janitor, had been struck in that actual fight. One was when the tough boy landed on Kenneth’s nose and the other was when Kenneth’s head hit the pavement. The tough youth had been bent on following up his own swift victory. But Jock had flown to his young master’s relief. The collie had rolled the tough boy in the gutter and had amputated the seat of his ragged trousers; and thereafter had chased him two blocks down the street, chivvying the fugitive’s legs as he ran. Had a grown man assailed Kenneth, the collie’s vengeance would have been tenfold more drastic. As it was, he had treated the tough youngster with only sample-sized severity; inflicting it to an accompaniment of wagging tail and mischievous eye-glint.

Then there were other recitals of Kenneth’s, which Amy characterized sighingly as “unbridled imagination” and which Dan branded bluntly as “lies.”

He was their only child. Their own childhood memories were blurred. Thus there was no way whereby they could know, and find comfort in the knowledge that thousands of normally truthful children of keen imagination and mental energy go through a stormily brief phase of untruthfulness somewhere between the ages of six and eight. To Dan and Amy, the case seemed as unique as it was hopeless and hideous. They mourned the seemingly permanent demise of truth in their son.

Amy took it out in mourning. Dan, to his wife’s horror, rewarded with a thrashing Kenneth’s garish account of seeing a policeman fire three shots at a bald-headed car thief, a few blocks from home. Next morning, at the breakfast table, Dan read a newspaper account of the shooting—similar in every detail to Kenneth’s version of it. Head in hands, the father groaned:

“What the blue blazes are we going to do, sweetheart? I can stand anything except a lie. Ken is a chronic liar. When I try to lick him into truthfulness for telling one of his luridest lies—why, the lie turns out to be true! Now I’ve got to apologize to him for whaling him unjustly. And that’ll make him lie all the harder. Lord! Why couldn’t he turn out to be anything but a little liar?”

That evening, Kenneth, newly proven truthful in the matter of the shot car thief, celebrated his rehabilitation with a really artistic account of a king cobra which had gotten out of its glass cage in the zoo reptile house and had found its way into his bedroom. By merest chance he had seen the coiled creature as he entered the room; and had crushed the life out of it by jumping on its murderous head.

Amy all but wept.

Dan said, quietly: “That was brave of you, son. Mighty brave. What did you do with the body?”

“Body?” quavered Kenneth.

“Yes. You killed the snake, just now, in your bedroom. So its body must still be there. Go and bring it to me.”

“I—I don’t think mother would like to see it—not while she’s eating,” demurred the slayer. “It’s awful messy. I stamped on it pretty hard, you see; and——”

“She will be so proud of your courage that she won’t mind seeing your victim. Go and get it.”

Kenneth slithered from the room. Presently—indeed, before Dan and Amy could more than exchange miserable glances—he was back again.

“It’s too late, Dad!” he exclaimed, dramatically. “Jock’s eaten it. I got there, just in time to see him swallow the last bit of its tail. He——”

“Dear,” said Dan, solemnly, to his wife. “I’m terribly sorry about this. You see, a king cobra is about the most venomous snake on earth. Anything that eats a king cobra is certain to die in terrible agony, within a few hours, from the effects of the poison he has swallowed. Poor old Jock!”

Kenneth tried to look somber. The effort was a failure; though he loved the collie above all things, save only his parents.

“I’m going to save Jock all that torture,” continued Dan. “I’m going to shoot him. That will be swift and painless. I’ll take him out into the Park, at once, before the poison has a chance to act; and put a merciful bullet through his head. I hate to do it. But it’s the only——”

A screech of mortal terror smashed in on the homily. Bellowing and blubbering, Kenneth cast both arms about his worshiped chum’s furry throat.

“You—you shan’t!” he sobbed, hysterically. “You shan’t shoot Jock! He—oh, Dad, it—it wasn’t true. Honest, it wasn’t, Dad! He didn’t really eat the cobra. It—it must have been something else he was eating. He—You’re not going to kill Jock! You’re not!”

“You can’t be certain he didn’t eat the snake,” answered Dan. “I won’t take any chances. Amy, please get me my pistol. It’s in the——”

Then burst the flood-gates; and through them gushed and spattered the truth.

“I—I didn’t really kill the cobra, at all!” wailed Kenneth. “There wasn’t any cobra. And it was all just a—just a lie. You can lick me again, Dad, if you want to. You can lick me all night. But you’re not going to shoot Jock! I——”

“Good!” said Dan to himself, with a long inward breath of relief. “I’ve got the cure, at last.”

Aloud, he said, slowly and impressively: “Very well. I won’t shoot him. Now stop bawling and listen to me.”

Kenneth fought back his sobs right manfully. His arms still around his squirmingly sympathizing dog, he looked tearfully up at his father.

“Ken,” began the impressive voice, “your mother and I have worried ourselves sick, over this filthy habit of yours of telling lies every time you open your mouth. I’ve tried to explain to you what an unutterably rotten thing a liar is, and how all the world despises him. It hasn’t done any good for me to tell you how unhappy we are about it. You go right on lying. But here is where you stop it.”

Kenneth blinked inquisitively at the set-faced man. Dan paused, to let the boy’s curiosity sharpen; then he went on:

“Mr. Coit is a friend of mine, downtown. He has bought a little home in the country. He wants a really good dog. He’d rather have a collie than any other kind. A collie belongs in the country; not in a city flat. So I’d be doing Jock a real kindness by giving him to Mr. Coit. We’d never see the dog again, of course. But we’d know he was happy out there in the fields and the woods. We’d all miss him terribly. But——”

Upon his slow-uttered harangue burst afresh the noise of heart-rent grief. Kenneth forgot once more that he was a sturdy boy of eight. He remembered only that he loved Jock with all his might; and that the collie was his chum and guard and adoring servant. Life without Jock was not to be considered, on any terms at all.

“Quiet!” ordered Dan; proceeding with voice raised above the gulping sobs. “Now this is what I want you to listen to and to remember: The next time your mother or myself catches you in any kind of a lie at all, or if we hear of your lying to anyone else, we aren’t going to whip you. We aren’t going to scold you. We aren’t going to say a word to you about it. But you will come home from school some day and find Jock gone.”

“No! No, Daddy! I——”

“Jock can stay here as long as he lives,” continued Dan, “or he can go to Mr. Coit’s place in the country. It all depends on you. Understand? It depends on you. If he is sent away, it will be because your lies send him. If you tell the truth, he will stay on with us. You have the say, whether we are to lose him or not. Think it over.”

Kenneth thought it over. Indeed, he thought it over, for hours after he went miserably to bed that night. His processes of thought did not include any hesitancy as to the ceasing of lies.

On that he was wholly resolved. He was done with lying, once and for all. Sooner than lose Jock, he would have gone without eating or playing. There could be no question in his mind about anything like that.

Then one afternoon, on the way home from school——

“What’s the names of the twin kids Miss Gusepple was telling us about?” asked Spike Burney. “The kids what lived in a wolf’s den? Some queer Irish names. What——”

“Romulus and Remus,” glibly answered the erudite Kenneth. “They——”

“That’s the ones,” assented Spike. “Some nerve those twins had, I’ll say! Think of going into a wolf’s den and staying there, with the wolves li’ble to chew you up as quick as look at you! Some nerve!”

“Huh!” scoffed Kenneth, loudly, stung by the wistful admiration in Spike’s voice. “That’s nothing. Why, one night, when I couldn’t sleep, it was so hot, I got up and dressed me and I whistled to Jock to come along; and I went out to sit around in Bronx Park, where it was nice and cool. And pretty soon I got to feeling kind of sleepy and I didn’t want to go to sleep out there on the benches for fear a cop would nab me. So I went over to the wolf-dens; and I just opened the first den’s door, the way you’ve seen the keepers do when they clean the dens. The wolf came hopping out, as mad as wrath. But Jock pretty soon finished him. So I crawled inside the den, as easy as anything; and I lay down and——”

Something invisible clutched at his bragging throat; crushing the boastful words to a gurgling silence. Not even Spike Burney’s derisive yells of incredulity could move Kenneth to further speech.

He had lied! He had told another lie! He had told it so loudly that any passer-by could easily have heard it and could run to Dad with the news.

Jock!

Choking back his sobs, Kenneth broke into a run, deserting Spike and racing home. Jock was waiting for him at the door, as always. Kenneth could have shouted aloud in sheer reaction. Then the exaltation died. Of course, Dad hadn’t had time to hear about his lie so soon; all-wise as Dad was. It might be a day or two. But Jock’s fate was sealed. Dear splendid old Jock! Kenneth had lied him away.

That evening Kenneth had further respite. Dan telephoned to Amy that he had been sent for, to a downtown hotel, for a conference with the Coenen-Byng people; who, after dropping the whole subject of Dan’s invention, had been nibbling recently at it in tentative and nerve-teasing fashion. Nothing would come of the conference, Dan warned Amy over the telephone; but it was not safe to leave a single chance untaken.

As ever when there was the ghost of a hope for the invention’s possible success, Amy lost herself in golden daydreams.

Thus she did not notice that Kenneth ate nothing; and that every now and then he would hug Jock spasmodically; and that he was a horribly woebegone little boy. He even went to bed without being told to. In his brain rang his mother’s absent-minded words: “Daddy’s not coming home till late. It is something terribly important. You’ll know all about it, tomorrow—if there is anything to know.”

“Something terribly important!” Dad was on the trail of Kenneth’s lie. How he was tracing it to earth the overwrought boy could not guess. But he knew Dad could be relied on to discover it. Dad always got what he went after. Mother had said so, again and again.

After a million wide-awake hours of numb despair, Kenneth’s desperate brain began to work. He had told Spike Burney that he had gone out into Bronx Park by night, and that he had opened a wolf-den door and had gone inside and lain down there. That was his lie. Oh yes, and that Jock had taken care of the wolf! That was it. (Not that Jock couldn’t thrash a whole pack of wolves, as easily as he could tree a cat. The boy had not the remotest doubt as to his collie chum’s ability to overcome any foe on earth.)

Well, now, suppose! Suppose he was to turn the lie into the truth? Hey? How about doing that? Then, he could say to Dad: “It was a lie when I told it. But it’s true, now!” That would square it. Just as the policeman and the car thief story was all right, as soon as it was proved to be true. Dad had apologized to him for doubting that yarn. The thing to do when one was trapped into telling a lie was to make the lie come true. That squared it.

Cautiously, swiftly, he slid out of bed and began to wriggle into his clothes. Dad might come home any time now. There mightn’t be a second to lose. Jock had sprung up, eagerly, as he saw Kenneth begin to dress. The boy whispered sharply to him. Presently, holding the dog by the collar, Kenneth tiptoed down the short hallway of the flat. He peeped into the living-room as he passed. Amy was dozing in her chair, a magazine lying on her lap. The mantel clock was at five minutes before ten.

Kenneth let himself and his dog out of the house, and sped toward the Park’s nearest practical entrance. The park itself had been his playground, the zoo his favorite haunt, since he could toddle. Hence, the way was as well known to him as was his own bedroom furniture. He did not even stick to the Zoological Gardens’ twisting asphalt paths; but cut across, under the trees.

Past the bear-dens, past the reptile-house, he made his way, and on to the line of wolf-lairs, set against the solid rock. What was it he had told Spike? Oh, yes: “I just opened the first den’s door.” To the first den he went.

Like many another boy of that region, he had had long experience in dodging the casual guards during law-forbidden evening rambles in the park. To Kenneth it was pitiably easy. Easy was it, too, from frequent observing, to master the none-too-complicated door-catch of the wolf-den he had chosen for a resting-place.

As he neared the line of dens, Jock, as ever, hesitated. The dog hated wolves; and their very scent made him angry and suspicious. Thus it is with three collies out of four. More than once, Kenneth had had to scold Jock for threatening the secrecy of their evening walks by barking furiously at his enemies. Hence the collie’s hesitance, now. But Jock’s night-seeing eyes showed him not only every wolf in the line springing snarlingly to the front of the dens, but also his loved young master tackling fearlessly the catch of one of these dens. Jock leaped forward to throw himself between Kenneth and the courted danger.

He was a fraction of a second too late.

The iron door swung wide. Something evil-scented and gray hurtled forth with such impetus that it hit the opening door out of Kenneth’s grasp and knocked the boy himself to the ground.

Outward the wolf launched himself; perhaps for the earth, perhaps for the boy who sprawled beneath the door. And forward flashed a tawny shape, out of the night; with a wild-beast snarl in its deep throat; forward to meet in mid-air the down-leaping wolf.

Together came the two huge furry bodies, with a breath-expelling impact. To the asphalt they crashed, in a murderous embrace. Then they were on their feet again, rearing and roaring and tearing for each other’s throat.

From every den arose a chorus of lupine battle howls. The cry was taken up from spot to spot in the darkness. Far down in the lion-house, the giant carnivora smashed the night’s silences with roar and scream.

Heedless, and in maniac fury, the wolf and the collie battled on, there on the dark path, bursting through shrubbery, rolling, recovering, charging, rending. Collie and wolf—thousand-year mortal hereditary enemies—they were fighting to the death, amid the ever-swelling racket of the zoo’s multiple inmates.

Sublimely calm in his belief that Jock could thrash every wolf alive, Kenneth made good his lie by scrambling up into the den and laying himself at full length there; whence he proceeded to view the conflict.

The wolf emerged from a close-quarters scrimmage, and dived for the collie’s nearest forepaw. This leg-breaking trick is the oldest and the favorite fight-ruse of wolves. Collie puppies copy it unconsciously in their play.

Instinctively, Jock yanked back his imperiled forefoot, out of reach of the terrible jaws. His hindleg slipped on a scrap of orange peel dropped there during the day by a park visitor. For the briefest part of an instant, the collie lurched sidewise, clawing to recover his balance. In that moment, the wolf flashed in, to gain the fatal throat-hold.

Jock shrank back to avert the grip. But he was not quite fast enough; for his balance was still uncertain. In tore the wolf, driving his teeth to the throat as Jock pulled back. He missed the jugular by a half-inch; his mouth filling with collie hair and with little else.

But his in-curving lower eyeteeth hooked upward, about the thin round collar the dog wore. Jock’s backward jerk pulled the collar taut. His teeth still clenched on hair and his lower tusks hooked fast in the collar, the wolf struggled and threw himself from side to side to break free. He was tied as securely to the dog’s collar as if by a rope; for the thin round loop of leather behind the curve of his eyeteeth held firm as wire.

Around and around, the battlers flung themselves; neither able, because of the absurd predicament, to bite the other. Then it was that Kenneth became aware of dancing flashlights and the rush of men’s heavy feet toward the wolf-dens.

The darkness was abruptly turned into day by arc lights in front of the dens. Then a rope was passed around the wolf’s neck and was held tight from two opposite directions. Out of the cage rolled Kenneth, indignant, voluble.

“What did y’ want to stop ’em for?” he shrilled. “Jock was licking him, with one hand behind him. He——”

“It’s the Veltin kid!” announced one of the guards. “And—yep, it’s his collie, too. Tackling a timber wolf, he was! ’S a wonder that both him and the boy weren’t chewed up. For the love of Mike, kid, what were you doing in that wolf-den?”

“I was telling the truth,” was Kenneth’s astounding reply. “And now that I’ve told it, I’m going home. C’mon, Jock!”

Up the long flights of the apartment house, to his own top-floor flat, Dan Veltin mounted at a run. Open he threw the flat’s door and swirled in like a cyclone. Amy started from her doze in the big living-room chair and came dazedly forward to meet the man.

“Girl of mine!” he shouted, half delirious. “Girl of mine, they’ve taken it. They’ve taken it! The good old invention. The papers are all signed; and—look at this advance check they gave me, against my royalties! Look at it, I tell you! Do you know what it means? It isn’t the million-dollar fortune we used to dream about, of course. Nothing like it. But it means comfort for the rest of our lives, if we live sanely. And we’re going to live sanely, sweetheart. We’re going to live out in the country—in North Jersey, at that—you and I and Ken and Jock. All four of us! Get that, dear? Now, let’s wake Ken and tell him. The janitor and the neighbors will be lucky if I don’t wake them, too, and tell them. I’ve got to tell everybody in reach!”

His rapturous pæan came to a halt. He had burst into Kenneth’s little bedroom; still half leading and half carrying the excitedly bewildered Amy along with him. The bed was empty. So was the bedside mat where Jock was wont to sleep.

“What—where—?” stammered Dan.

On the heels of his first words came a fumbling at the flat’s lock. Dan opened the front door, revealing on the threshold a huge dog bleeding from a half-dozen superficial hurts and a small boy much disheveled and very dirty.

“Of all the—!” began Amy.

“Where on earth have you been, Ken?” demanded Dan in the same breath.

“I’ve—I’ve been telling the truth!” reiterated Kenneth, shakily. “I’ve been lying down in one of the wolf-dens while Jock licked the wolf. If you don’t believe me, ask the guard that has the red hair and the wart. And—and now Spike Burney can tell you anything he wants to. Whatever it is, it’s true. I used to tell lies. I don’t, any more. I don’t have to. Things happen when I tell the TRUTH. Don’t they, Jock?”