Читать книгу A Dog Named Chips: The Life and Adventures of a Mongrel Scamp - Albert Payson Terhune - Страница 3

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She had begun life, as far as any record can be found, tucked under the right arm of a mangy-looking man. The man stood on a New York street corner with her, when no policeman was in sight, and strolled along the busy shopping-block with an air of aloof preoccupation whenever a patrolman chanced to glance toward him.

Under the mangy man’s left arm was tucked another fuzzy puppy. Both pups were scrubbed and combed to a fictitious state of clean fluffiness. Each of them was adorned with a huge scarlet neck-ribbon.

It was the little doglet under the vender’s right arm that drew the bulk of such attention as passers-by bestowed. For she had the wistfulest eyes and the pudgiest body and the most appealingly lovable air imaginable.

Mrs. Johannes Crake was piloting her two children through the milling sidewalk throng, on the way to the Pennsylvania Station and thence to her suburban home, at the end of a nerve-frazzling day of shopping.

Suddenly Mrs. Crake found herself brought to anchor, through no volition of her own. This because both children had come to an abrupt halt. As Mrs. Crake was holding tightly to a hand of each of them, their halt entailed hers.

Oblivious of her absent-minded commands to get into motion again, Carlie and Stella Crake were staring upward in rapt interest at the two pups under the mangy man’s arms.

Without seeming to note their fascinated gaze, the man stopped directly in front of them and fell to rearranging the scarlet bow on the neck of the puppy under his right arm. It was on this wistfully lovable puppy that the children’s round eyes were fixed.

With reluctance Mrs. Crake came out of a bothersomely engrossing set of calculations as to whether she had left the umbrella at the candy-shop lunchroom or at the department store before the department store whereat she had missed it.

It was her sister-in-law’s umbrella, at that. She had borrowed it, early in the morning, when she started for New York, and without the formality of asking leave. She knew, wherever she had lost it, there was less than no use in going back to make inquiries.

Then it was that a dual clamor of admiration from the children brought her to reality. This and the fact that her hold on their hands prevented her from moving onward. Motherwise, a single glance at the pudgily fluffy pup told her the reason for the halt and for the clamor.

“No!” her incisive voice cut through her offsprings’ pleadings. “No, dears. You canNOT have him. Now, don’t tease any more! Mamma has such a frightful headache and we must hurry for our train and——”

Carlie burst into a torrent of high-pitched pleading. The gist of his harangue was that if he could have that grand puppy for Stella and himself he wouldn’t ask for a single other Christmas present; and that if he could not have it, then mamma might as well throw away any Yule gifts she might be planning for him, for he wouldn’t touch one of them.

Stella hit on an even more efficient method for winning her mother’s consent to the buying of the fuzzy pup. Throwing herself face downward, in her best winter coat, on the sidewalk among the numberless tramping feet of the shoppers, she lifted her voice to high heaven in a series of hysterical screeches, keeping time to her vocal rhythm by banging her stubby patent-leather toes furiously upon the pavement.

“Your pretty little folks seems to have took a reel fancy to this dawg, mum,” volunteered the mangy man as Mrs. Crake endeavored to haul Stella to her feet and to silence the double din, and as passers-by stopped to watch grinningly the embarrassing scene. “Seems ’most a shame not to buy it for ’em. Pure Saint Bernard, this pup, mum. I paid me a cool century for it, last month. But I’m kind of pressed for cash just now. It’s yours for ten small round dollars, mum, and a sacrifice at that.”

“Gee!” proclaimed a fat man in the fast-gathering crowd—a man who seemed to have lunched well and none too dryly—“Gee! If I had kids like that, and a ten-spot present would make them happy—why, me, I couldn’t get the cash out of my pocket quick enough. Folks that can’t bother to make children happy haven’t any right to children, say I.”

He addressed nobody in particular; but in this pre-holiday concourse his words evoked a wordless murmur of assent. A prim woman in black touched the horribly exasperated Mrs. Johannes Crake on the arm.

“It’s none of my business, madam,” she sighed, “but the day may come when you’ll look back more happily on having gotten your children a gift they cried for than on saving money by not doing it. I know what I’m talking about,” she finished, pointing with much pathos to the mourning she wore.

Again that wordless murmur from the ever-thickening knot of onlookers. Carlie and Stella ceased to wake the echoes and peered longingly once more at the wistful pup. Something told them their case was in far abler hands than theirs.

“Seeing that Christmas is coming on, mum,” wheedled the vender, “and seeing your two darling angels has took such a fondness to this grand little dog, I’ll let you have it for eight dollars, cash, mum. If you was my own daughter, I couldn’t do more for you than offer the puppy to you for that; grand-looking and pretty as you are. I——”

“Hey!” spake the bibulous fat man. “How about us taking up a little collection and getting the pup for the kids, if their mommer can’t afford to? I’ll lead off with a two-spot. I sure do hate to see a kid cry. Especially ’round Christmas-time. How about it?”

Throughout the crowd there was a semi-general movement toward cash pockets. The two children sought to smile in cherubic gratitude on the fat man. They succeeded in achieving a resemblance to two smugly hypocritical little gargoyles.

Mrs. Johannes Crake’s plump visage deepened from pink to red, from red to blackened purple. Devoutly she prayed there might be no people from her own suburb in the tight-packed crowd about them.

It was bad enough to be made hideously conspicuous like this by her two spoiled children, right here in a public street, without having a collection taken up for their benefit. She went dizzy with the infuriating shame of it.

To cut short the nightmare experience in the quickest and easiest and cheapest way, she opened her wristbag, yanked therefrom a ten-dollar bill, thrust it loathingly at the vender, and permitted him to lower the fuzzy little wisp of doghood into the avidly upstretched arms of Carlie and Stella—who well-nigh dismembered the luckless puppy by struggling with each other for the bliss of carrying him.

On the way to the station there was a scarce less vehement struggle, verbal, this time, between the youngsters, as to what the puppy should be named. Carlie wanted to call it Lindbergh. But Stella held out for Evangeline, which, to her, was the most sonorously fascinating of names.

They called on mamma to arbitrate. But mamma was past speech. She was conserving such few energies as she still had, for the ensuing clash with Johannes Crake over her mushiness in letting herself be whipsawed into buying a pedigreeless she-dog.

For this and for the task of explaining to her sister-in-law how she had chanced to borrow an eleven-dollar umbrella without asking leave, and then how she had been so abominably careless as to lose it somewhere.

This was no time for merry badinage with her loving children as to the naming of a hated beast.

Left to themselves, Carlie and Stella blundered upon a compromise which satisfied them both. On a magazine cover, as they were hurried through the Pennsylvania Station on the way to their train, they beheld a photograph. Under it, in letters large and plain enough for both of them to read as they ran, was the name, “BABE RUTH.”

Stella thought it a lovely name for the dog. It suggested fluffiness and dainty beauty. Carlie, more sophisticated, knew it stood for a hero whom he admired as much as he admired Lindbergh himself. So, without a dissenting vote, the new-bought puppy became Babe Ruth. “Ruth” for short.

This is not a super-realistic war chronicle, nor the day-by-day tale of rancorous internecine strife. Hence the homecoming of Mrs. Johannes Crake and of her son and daughter and of Babe Ruth can be slurred over mercifully and with no damage to the general plot.

The wrath of Mrs. Crake’s sister-in-law over the misappropriated umbrella; the mockery-streaked diatribe of Johannes Crake as to the wasting of ten good dollars in these hard times on the purchase of a fifteen-cent mongrel pup, and his freely expressed opinion of his whimpering wife’s attributes as a child-trainer and a salary-saver—are they not written, or smeared, into the slimy chronicles of a myriad households like the Crakes’?

Suppose we let it go at that, except to say that the blameless storm-center of the wholesale family squabble was a bewildered and hungry and thirsty and frightened and homesick baby female puppy, a puppy alternately mauled and neglected by its two juvenile owners, and scorned by everyone else under the Crake roof.

A pure-bred dog of the same age would have died from the neglect or would have developed running fits from the mauling. But most mongrels are uncannily hardy, even as the best of them are uncannily clever.

This is one reason why Babe Ruth not only lived, but changed swiftly from pudgy appealingness to scrawnily wiry adolescence. The other reason for her survival is that the cook of the house next door to the Crakes’ had a heart the size and softness of three overripe watermelons.

This cook saw the grievous plight of the unwanted and ill-treated Babe Ruth. Surreptitiously she sneaked huge nourishing platefuls of table scraps, daily, to the puppy’s packing-box kennel behind the Crake home.

Yes, and when the Crakes were absent the cook would tiptoe over to the kennel and gather the unhappy pup into her ample arms and croon to her and pet her and feed her red bits of steak-end and the like.

(For which—somewhere a trillion miles beyond the frontier of the stars—Some One snatched up a rainbow-tipped celestial pen and drew swift obliterating lines across the Judgment Book’s black page which contained that same cook’s life record; canceling a long list of such sins as petty pilfering and gin-guzzling and lying and lesser and greater evils, and writing in a bold hand at the bottom of the once-damnatory sheet: “She helped the helpless. ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have done it unto Me.’”)

So matters went on for the greater part of a year. The once-fluffy and appealing bunch of puppyhood was a leggy cur. It would have taken a clairvoyant, rather than a dog expert, to tell what breeds had gone into the make-up of Babe Ruth’s cosmos. Without doubt, the blood of fifty champions ran in her non-azure veins. But if there were fifty such champions, they belonged to at least fifty breeds.

Yet she was gentle and friendly and wise and, in her own way, beautiful. Her wistful dark eyes mirrored a soul.

A professional dog-fancier would have sneered at her, as did Johannes Crake. A man or woman in whose brain was the understanding of dog-nature would have welcomed her eagerly as a pal and would have developed the latent wisdom and loveliness of her nature and would have made her supremely happy.

But there was no such understander of dog-souls in or near the Crake domicile, except the cook next door. And the cook could only feed the lanky body and soothe the ever-tormented feelings of Babe Ruth.

Then, one evening, when Johannes Crake came home from a month’s trip on the road for the firm which hired him, he took a long and comprehensive look at Babe Ruth, and came to a Napoleonic decision. To his wife he said, disgustedly:

“Here’s where I do what you’ve been at me to do. I’d have done it long ago if it wasn’t that the brats both bawled so every time I hinted at it. I knew if I got rid of her, they wouldn’t give us any peace till we got them another. And the other, most likely, would have been no better than this one when it grew up. But I’ve been watching both of them for quite a while. And I had a talk with them tonight before they went to bed. They’re sick and tired of the mutt. They want a couple of rabbits instead. They told me so. They promised to give up Babe Ruth if I’d promise to bring them home the rabbits from New York tomorrow night. They——”

“Yes, they told me the same thing, last week. I——”

“It was bad enough to have this cur on our hands, and having folks laugh at us for owning such a dog. But in another few days there’ll be a full half-dozen more mutts, just like her or maybe worse, if we don’t get rid of her. I’m taking her for a ride. Don’t sit up for me.”

A few minutes later Johannes Crake crossed from the garage to Babe Ruth’s kennel-box in the back yard. With no gentleness at all, but with no undue roughness, he picked up the sleeping mongrel by the scruff of the neck and carried her bodily to where his battered motor-coupé stood with engine running.

He lifted her aboard and climbed into the machine, closing its door behind him and stepping on the gas.

Babe Ruth came out of dreamland to find her owner carrying her toward the car. From the fact that he swung her by the scruff she augured a beating, perhaps a series of kicks.

But, to her relieved surprise, he merely laid her on the seat of the coupé and got into it beside her and started off toward the dark country beyond.

This was Babe Ruth’s first experience at motoring. Like nine dogs in ten, she thrilled to it. In gratitude for the outing and for the unhoped-for immunity from a beating, she sat up and strove to lick the man’s face.

He thrust her aside, but with less than his wonted aversion, and with almost no roughness at all.

She cuddled back onto the springy car-seat; and gave herself over to the joy of the brand-new experience of spinning through miles of darkness through no effort at all. Drowsily, happily, she cuddled against Crake’s side, reveling in the ride and in his absence of hostility.

Perhaps he and she were going to be dear friends, after all. Again she sought to lick his face. Again he pushed her away; but not roughly.

For perhaps twenty miles the ancient coupé chugged on through the night; at first over smooth roads, but, later, on narrower and bumpier byways. Then Johannes Crake brought the car to a standstill midway across a bridge which spanned a narrow river. Stooping down to the floor, he lifted a clock weight, to which was tied a stout cord.

This cord he wound about Babe Ruth’s neck; tying it firmly. Apparently it was some new game he was teaching her. The dog tried to play her part in it by patting friskily at his hands and by wagging her tail with much vehemence. He slapped her into cringing movelessness.

Then, Crake lifted her once more by the scruff of the neck, the clock weight bumping against her hindlegs and its taut cord almost choking her. But she forbore to make any protest. Perhaps this still was part of some game.

Stepping out onto the bridge, Crake raised her on high; and tossed her over the rail, into the fast-running river below.

With a mighty splash Babe Ruth and the clock weight smote the water. The dog never had swum a stroke. But nature teaches dogs how to swim, without lessons. She struck out, dazed and scared and chilled, for the unseen shore.

But the clock weight dragged her far below the surface, struggle as she would.

Johannes Crake climbed into his car and drove placidly homeward. His work was done, and done far from home. Tomorrow a pair of pink-eyed white rabbits with wiggly noses would take the place of Babe Ruth as official torture victims in the gentle Crake household. Not being wiry mongrels, their ordeal would be over the sooner.

To the river bottom, fighting gamely for release at every inch, swirled poor Babe Ruth. Struggle as she would, the lump of iron forced her inexorably down.

A freak of nature once had flung Babe Ruth into the world, and now another freak of nature gave her a one-in-fifty chance to battle her way back into it.

The heavy rains of early spring had swollen the narrow river to a torrent, days before. Though the flood had subsided, it had left a high and fairly solid sand-riffle where until now the channel had flowed deep.

On the upsloping side of this sand-bar the clock weight came to a sullen rest. Into the sand Babe Ruth drove her frantic claws.

Her head was more than fifteen inches under water. But she did not thrash about deliriously until she was exhausted. The instinct and calculating wit of the best type of mongrel came to her aid.

Clawing desperately, she strove to mount the sandspit’s slope. She may have taken that direction by mere chance, instead of following the steeper downward pitch to death.

The clock weight dragged heavily upon her clawing advance. But the gallant little dog threw every atom of her wiry strength into her climb. She was strangling. She was in increasing anguish. But she clawed onward.

Presently her courage-scourged forces were all but spent. A last brave forward lunge was followed by a back-jerk of her straining neck as the iron weight tugged against her.

The jerk threw her head high—and her mouth and nostrils were above the surface.

For the first time in all her pathetic life—except in her friendship with the fat cook next door—fate was giving Babe Ruth a break. Deep she drew the chilly night air into her tormented lungs.

The long breaths were agony. But they were life. Her foreface still above water, she lunged onward. Another three plunges brought her head and shoulders clear of the river.

Then it was that her mongrel wit came again to her help. Wheeling, she felt for the taut cord which held her to that impeding clock weight. She caught it in her mouth and scissored it between her sharp front teeth until it fell back limply into the water.

Babe Ruth was free, free to huddle there on the summit of the submerged sand-riffle. She was stomach-deep in water and she was shivering and she was in pain. But her heart was flame-brave and her keen brain was working.

Never before had she swum. But between her and the river-bank was forty feet of fast-running water. She could not stay where she was.

Fearlessly she launched herself from the abrupt end of the riffle and toward the shore. High and awkwardly she splashed, after the manner of dogs on their first essay at swimming. And she was heavy and unwieldy and suffering.

But she made progress. True, the current carried her downstream and once or twice its eddies all but sucked her under. But she swam on, ever aiming for the elusive bank.

And now her groping forefeet touched the pebbly bottom. A final spurt landed her, spent and panting and dizzy, on dry land. Yes, fate had given Babe Ruth a break, at long last, such as it was.

Worn out, she lay grunting and gasping on the shore. But, as her strength crept reluctantly back to her, an all-encompassing need spurred her to new activity. Age-old instinct shouted to her that she must find a lair for herself, and that right speedily.

She staggered drunkenly to the by-road and jogged along it, wavering; whimpering to herself as she went.

From side to side she peered. After a few hundred feet of painful journeying she saw outlined against the sky a low building of some kind. Up the bank from the road she toiled pantingly toward it.

It was a shed, whose door sagged a quarter-way open. Behind and beyond it, a small clump of other buildings showed dimly against the glum clouds. But there was no time to investigate these.

Into the shed Babe Ruth nosed timidly. It was warm in there, for a cow with a new-born calf occupied a shut-off stall at one side of it. In an opposite corner was a thick scatter of bedding. To this snugly soft refuge the suffering dog gratefully made her way.

Her Hour was upon her.

A little after sunrise, next morning, the creaking shed door was shoved wide. A child, perhaps seven years old, trotted in, followed by a man in sheepskin coat and overalls.

Dorothy Murrel had come with her father to see the new-born calf. But she paused midway to the stall, attracted by a softly squeaking sound from the opposite corner. The child gaped star-eyed at what she saw there.

Stretched out on the soft hay reclined Babe Ruth. Around her were strewn four dead puppies, smaller than rats. A fifth puppy was nuzzling at her soft underbody ravenously, squeaking and chuckling to itself as it fed.

Why their dam’s fearsome experience, just before their premature birth, had not killed all five of the puppies, instead of only four of them, is one of the minor mysteries of mongrel biology. But one of the quintet had lived and was as aggressively vigorous as any eugenic product of a ten-thousand-dollar kennel. The survivor was runty and shapeless and of an indeterminate fuzzy yellow.

“Daddy!” shrilled Dorothy Murrel, half breathless with wonder, as she ran eagerly toward Babe Ruth and the tiny puppy. “Look over here! Look!”

Babe Ruth had stared up in languid apprehension at sound of the stubby childish feet on the ground outside and at the dainty little figure that shoved open the door of her refuge.

The outcast crossbreed had scant reason to like or to trust children. Moreover, she had now her own baby to fend for and to guard from mauling.

She was too weak to flee, even had she been willing to leave her infant to the fate that seemed in store for it, which she was not. She essayed to shove the pup out of sight beneath her own underbody and to defend it as best she might.

But there was no need. A second appealing glance at Dorothy told her in some mystic way that all children are not torturers and that this laughing little girl was of far different type from the Crake brats.

Babe Ruth did not have the remotest idea how she knew this, but know it she did, even before Dorothy had knelt beside her and had begun to stroke her tousled head and rumple her furry ears.

The child’s touch had infinite gentle friendliness in it. Babe Ruth expanded to the unwonted caress. Then she glanced apprehensively past Dorothy to the bulky man who had crossed the shed behind her. But after that first worriedly appraising look, Babe Ruth had the same odd feeling of security that had been hers when Dorothy knelt to pet her.

This man was bigger and was rougher of aspect than had been Johannes Crake. But somehow Babe Ruth felt at once that he was a man from whom helpless creatures need feel no harm.

She wagged her tail weakly, and sank back on the hay with a contented sigh. For the first time since she could remember, fear departed from her.

“Oh, Daddy,” the child was exclaiming in rapture, “isn’t it wonderful! And, see, God has sent her a perfectly splendid little son! He sent her—let’s see—He sent her five of them. God is awfully good to dogs and cats, that way, isn’t He? But only one of them is awake. And—and I can keep them, can’t I, Daddy? Just for ours. Can’t I?”

“Well, we’re sure not going to kick out a poor dog that’s wished herself on us like that,” her father reassured the girl as a note of worry crept into her voice at his slowness in answering her plea. “They say it’s lucky to keep such dogs. Seems a cunning little thing, at that, don’t she? Couldn’t have happened in on us at a better time, either, with good old Tige dying last week. Sure she can stay, Dot. Her and her baby.”

“Oh, thank you! She——”

“Only—well, the others aren’t asleep, Dot. They’re dead. You keep between me and her, so she can’t see me while I take ’em out and bury ’em. Then I’ll rustle her some breakfast. I—Don’t go looking all sad, now, ’count of the four others dying! They never lived long enough to know what ’twas about. They didn’t suffer any. And you’ll have heaps of fun with the one that’s left, soon as it gets frisky and big. The mother’s got a real wise face onto her. I’ll bet she’s good comp’ny, too; and I’ll bet we can make a crackerjack farm dog of her. But she looks like she’s been bad treated. Did you see how she flinched when we came in here? We’ll cure her of that, easy enough, hey?”

“And—and we’ll call her ‘John,’ I think, Daddy. I never heard of a dog named John, and it’s a lovely name for her. And Mama will be crazy glad to have her. It wasn’t more ago than just yesterday that she said it seemed so kind of lonesome without a dog underfoot. Since Tige went to heaven, it has seemed lonesome. But it won’t, any more.”

So did Babe Ruth come into her own. So, for the first time in her abused life, did she learn that there are friendliness and pity and square treatment in the grim world which had buffeted her so roughly.

Her personal story might almost end here and now, with the statement that for twelve long and happy years—until her death of old age—she abode at the farm in whose outermost shed she had taken refuge in her hour of agony; and that she was the loved and useful housemate of the Murrels, learning with ease her simple duties as watch-dog and cattle-driver and reveling in the light toil and full happiness of her peaceful routine.

It might end thus, but for one incident.

Early April had sweetened into late spring, and late spring had melted into the heat of July.

On a Sunday afternoon Murrel and Dot fared forth for a swim in the river, less than a furlong from the farm. Frisking ahead of them ran Babe Ruth.

Clumsily at the mother dog’s side galloped her three-months-old puppy—the puppy that was destined to win fame on a much later day under the non-poetic name of “Chips.”

Long ago Babe Ruth had recovered from her first horror of the stream wherein once she had battled for her life against such impossible odds. She had learned to love the river, with its cool shadows and its revivingly sparkling waters. Often she swam there, after a hot gallop in search of some strayed cow. She had even coaxed her puppy to make a few scrambling attempts to navigate in its shallower backwaters.

Today the puppy cantered along the bank, barking in gay excitement, while its mother swam beside Murrel across the stream and back, and then while Murrel made the same dual trip with seven-year Dorothy sitting proudly astride his thick shoulders.

After which, man and child sprawled in the shade, by the water’s edge, in their frayed bathing-suits, lazily chatting and staring up at the deep-blue sky through the deeper green of the waterside trees.

Babe Ruth would have been well content to loll thus with them. But the puppy was at an age which knows but two extremes—bouncing activity and dead slumber.

The pup found no sport at all in sitting sedately beside its dam and the two humans on the mossy verge of the creek. An exploring spirit took possession of the fat youngster.

It frisked off from the somnolent trio and made its way awkwardly up the steep bridgeside bank, to the by-road above. There, for a few seconds, it paused, looking in every direction for new worlds to conquer.

Reluctantly, yet urged by conscientious mother-care, Babe Ruth quitted the shady river-edge and the man and the child who lounged so comfortably there, and she toiled up the bridge embankment in quest of her errant puppy.

She arrived at the by-road ditch just as a motor chugged into sight around the bend.

The vehicle was driven by a sour-faced man. A stout woman sat beside him. In the rumble, at the back, squirmed a boy and a girl, not more than a few years older than Dorothy Murrel.

At sight and scent of the invaders a queer horror swept through Babe Ruth. Back she sidled into the wayside’s long grass, flattening herself in swift fright.

Then, by far greater effort of will than she had used to drag herself out of the river three months earlier, she darted forward. For her bumblepuppy youngster was frisking, unafraid and uncomprehending, athwart the byway, directly in the path of the oncoming car.

With a scurry and a swoop Babe Ruth flung herself at the menaced pup. Almost under the front wheels of the coupé she came up with the wanderer. By the neck she caught the whiningly struggling puppy, and by sheer force yanked it out of peril.

The car came to a standstill as its driver observed this mildly dramatic act of life-saving. The children in the rumble leaned out from either side, to find what it was all about.

“Why,” ejaculated Johannes Crake, “if it isn’t that very dog I drowned that night!”

His exclamation was lost in the dual screech of recognition from the rumble. Carlie and dear little Stella recognized their lost victim as quickly as did their sire.

More—they saw, at the roadside, beside Babe Ruth, a frowsily fluffy pup—a pup with many possibilities as a mauling-bag, even as its mother once had been until they had tired of her.

The pair of white rabbits which Johannes Crake had given them in place of the no-longer-desired Babe Ruth, had suffered only a few days of such rough handling before digging a tunnel under their hutch and escaping through it to the freedom of the woods.

With morbid longing the children’s thoughts had turned again to a puppy. Not to a scraggly grown dog, but to such a helpless and maulable pup as Babe Ruth had been when first they had owned her.

And now, at the side of this road which they were traversing on their Sunday afternoon drive, frisked just such a puppy.

Their voices arose in a snarling demand to their parents for this miraculously sent gift.

“Better find who owns it,” suggested Mrs. Crake to her husband as the din of her children’s plangent demands smote upon her ears, “and buy it for them if it doesn’t cost too much. They’ll give us no peace if you don’t. Oh dear! They do make my head ache so with their awful racket! Buy the puppy, if you can, and——”

“Buy nothing!” declared Johannes Crake. “That’s Babe Ruth’s pup, isn’t it? There’s Babe Ruth, to prove it. Babe Ruth belongs to us, don’t she? You paid good money for her. Nine-dollars-and-ninety-cents too much good money. By law, her pup belongs to us. Wait!”

He barged out of the car and down onto the hotly dusty byway. In a stride he had reached the spot where the ungainly pup was gamboling around its tremblingly crouching dam. His children applauded loudly as Crake stooped to lift the nondescript youngster.

Then, mad with terror, yet scourged on by a mightier impulse, Babe Ruth went into action.

These humans who had made her own life hell were seeking to carry away her belovéd baby to a like fate. For the first and the last time in her gentle life Babe Ruth waxed savage.

Lunging forward, she drove her teeth deep into the fleshy part of Johannes Crake’s hand as the man bent down to reach for the puppy.

With a yell, Crake hopped backward, shaking his bloody hand and swearing loudly. Then, recovering his balance and quite daft with fury, he rushed at the brave little dog as she was pressing protectively in front of her imperiled puppy.

One of Johannes Crake’s heavy-shod feet poised itself for a rib-crushing kick at the unflinching mother-dog.

But the kick was not delivered.

This because a great hand clapped itself on the raging man’s shoulder and spun him about, jamming him against the bridge rail. Towering above him was a giant in a frayed bathing-suit.

“Dot,” said Murrel to a bathing-suited child who had run up the embankment behind him, “pick up the puppy and hurry on home. Do as Daddy says, dear. And don’t look back! Hurry, now!”

He spoke gently, but his big voice was shaking with ill-held emotion. Marveling, yet as ever obedient, Dorothy gathered the wriggling puppy into her chubby arms and trotted off homeward, heroically resisting the temptation of even a single backward look.

“You ruffian!” Mrs. Crake was screaming to Murrel. “Let go of my husband or I’ll send for the police! And call that child of yours back here with our puppy. It belongs to us. I paid ten good dollars for its mother there.”

“If this dog of mine belonged to you, ma’am,” asked Murrel, without relaxing his grip on Crake’s shoulder, “how did she happen to come into my shed to have her puppies? I know all the folks that live anywhere near here. And I don’t know either of you. No, nor yet those two hollering kids in the back of your car. If——”

“That dog is ours!” vociferated Mrs. Crake. “We can prove it. And we can prove how she happened to be in this neighborhood. My husband drove out here with her, all the way from Garth Center, last April, just before her puppies were going to be born, and he tied a clock weight around her neck and he threw her into this very river, from this very bridge. And he——”

“Shut up, Margie!” snapped Johannes Crake as he felt the mighty grip tighten spasmodically on his shoulder. “Shut up, you! I——”

“Yes,” drawled Murrel, his deep voice all at once slow and somber—“yes, she can shut up now, if she wants to. She’s told me enough. I guessed what might have happened, when I found that chewed cord around the poor critter’s neck and a lot of river mud and sand in her coat. But I didn’t like to think any man would be skunk enough to do such a filthy thing, ’specially to a dog in that condition. She can’t pay her own bill for what you done to her. But maybe I can try to pay a half-portion of it for her, Mister Dog-drowner. So——”

His drawling speech broke off. Johannes Crake had struggled vainly to free himself from the iron grasp that held him pinned by the shoulder to the bridge rail. Now he bethought him of something he carried always in his hip pocket during long back-country rides, as a protection against possible holdup men.

Writhing impotently to get free from this humiliating position which he was forced to occupy in the presence of his wife and children—all three of whom, he knew well, would remind him tauntingly of it for many a long day thereafter—he sought to release himself in the only possible way.

His bitten right hand flashed back toward his hip, reappearing instantly with its bleeding fingers gripping a heavy-caliber pistol.

Then several things happened in immediate succession.

First, a hammer-blow from Murrel’s open palm sent the weapon scudding from Crake’s grasp and far out into the rushing river beneath. Next—it seemed to occur in practically the same gesture—Johannes Crake was jerked from his feet into the air.

Down he fell, athwart Murrel’s knee, face to the earth. Followed a prolonged sound as of violent applause, punctured by Crake’s blasphemous yells and by Mrs. Crake’s shrieks. Again and again Murrel’s free hand smote Johannes Crake agonizingly on the nearest and most salient part of the latter’s squirming anatomy. Every slap carried with it the scientific strength of the strongest arm in Preakness County.

Crake’s blasphemy, under that frightful punishment, changed to tearful howls for mercy as he wrenched himself vainly from side to side in a futile effort to escape.

“There!” remarked Murrel, at last, setting the bellowing Crake on his feet once more, but renewing his grip on the man’s shoulder. “From the way that poor little dog used to look up at me and crouch and shiver away from me when she first came here, I’m figgering I’ve treated you to only a misses’-and-children’s-size sample of the lickings you gave her. But it’s enough to pay off a few per cent of the score. If you want to sue me for assault and battery, my name’s Hiram A. Murrel, and I live in that house up yonder. At the same time we’ll tell the court what you did to that poor, suffering mother-dog. I’ll leave you to guess how the trial will come out, and what the S. P. C. A. will do to you afterward. So much for the beatings you handed out to a dog that couldn’t defend herself. Now for the time you threw her off this bridge. I’m sorry I haven’t any clock weights handy to pin onto you. Over you go!”

As he spoke, he shifted his position, too suddenly for his victim to guess what was toward. In the same instant Johannes Crake arose once more in the air. This time he spread-eagled through space for several feet, then dropped like a plummet into the turbulent depths of the narrow river.

Far beneath the surface he dived, to an accompaniment of a renewed series of screams from his wife and yells of delighted excitement from his children.

Presently his head appeared, sleek and dripping, above the surface, denuded of the six-dollar straw hat he had worn for the first time this day. His new Sunday clothes were soaked and stained by river mud. A pint or more of water had gushed down his windpipe.

Blindly, panic-stricken, Crake struck out for shore, the current toying tumultuously with him as once it had toyed with Babe Ruth.

Pausing only long enough to see Crake’s shoulders begin to emerge from the river shallows’ mire as the man toiled, weeping and puffing and gurgling, up the steep bank, Murrel turned to Babe Ruth. Petting tenderly the head of the trembling dog, he called down to the dripping man on the shore below.

“Drop around any time you want to pay off another installment, friend. So long!”

With Babe Ruth padding lovingly along at his heels, he turned homeward.

This disturbing scene alone marred the glad peace of Babe Ruth’s life, from the time Dorothy and Murrel discovered her and her one surviving puppy cuddling in the shed corner’s hay to the long-distant day of her death.

It would be pleasant to record that her puppy followed her example and shared her joyous years. But the puppy, for some unexplained reason, found scant plaisance either in farm duties or in peace.

From the outset the pup was a problem. Imbibing all the nourishment which nature had supplied for a litter of five, it waxed strong and lively. But there was something queer about its brain’s make-up. Perhaps it was mentally a throw-back to its unknown sire. Assuredly it had inherited none of the traits of its dam.

Instead of emulating Babe Ruth’s ecstatically grateful devotion to the Murrels, and her quick adaptation to their mode of life, the youngster seemed to look upon the family, and its own mother, as some humorously snobbish sprig of nobility might regard a group of slum-dwellers. Incidentally, it had an uncanny genius for mischief.

It was clever—elfinly clever in many ways—but it would not learn to do farm work. It was glad enough to dash in among a bunch of slowly plodding cattle as they moved down the lane toward the barn, and scatter their formation by a series of nips and a harrowing fanfare of falsetto barks. But it would not consent to drive them to and from pasture.

It would run the indignant farrow sows for half a mile, in circles, dodging easily their efforts to turn and rend their pursuer. But it would not stir a step to drive the pigs out of the truck garden when a rift in the cornfield fence gave them greedily eager ingress to that forbidden ground.

It would bark ragingly at members of the family as they approached the house, but it would gambol in gay friendliness about the feet of any well-dressed stranger.

Most exasperating of all was its air of amused contempt toward the Murrels. For none of the family did it evince an atom of affection. None of them would it obey unless it chose to.

When prosperous motorists chanced to stop at the gate to inquire the way, the pup hailed them with its only semblance of cordial equality. There are many dogs obsessed by inbred snobbery. Babe Ruth’s pup carried it to wild extremes.

“The purp ought to have been born in one of those palaces you was reading about in your fairy-book, Dot,” commented Murrel to his daughter, after one such motor visitation. “The only folks it treats like they amounted to anything are the ones that stop here in five-thousand-dollar cars. It treats the rest of us like we was dirt. Its mother is pure gold, all through. But that snooty purp ain’t worth the powder and shot it’d take to blow it up.”

“But, Daddy——”

“There’s dogs like that,” expounded Murrel. “I’ve run across one or two of ’em. Dogs that was meant to live in towns and with rich folks, and that turns up their noses at anything quieter than a three-ring circus, and despises folks that work for a living. This one is what you might call an ‘own-your-own-soul’ purp, too. Don’t give a hoot for anyone but itself. If one of these rich motor folks would buy it offn us, the purp would think it was in heaven, to go to a big house in a big city and forget all about us backwoodsers that brought it up.”

When the pup was about ten months old a big sports-model car ran out of gas, one morning, while negotiating the by-road in front of the farm.

The driver got down, swearing, and clumped into the house to telephone to the nearest garage. The puppy escorted him, right hospitably, all the way from the car to the house door, lavishing on the fur-coated stranger a wealth of friendliness it never had been known to waste upon its owners.

The fur-coated man vanished into the kitchen, shutting the door in the pup’s face. Left alone, the nondescript yellow youngster frisked back to the road to inspect the car.

The front seat’s door had been left open. The pup leaped nimbly up into the driver’s place on a tour of investigation. From there it hopped over into the rear seat.

On the tonneau floor lay a fur rug, a rarely enticing rug. The pup jumped down upon it, thrilled by the scent and the texture of the fur. Joyously, it stretched itself out among the soft folds of the rug.

There, with a wholly new sense of satisfied luxury-love, the stowaway snoozed. So comfortable was the fur couch that the sleeper did not bother to stir or even to awaken as the garage’s rattletrap roadster clattered up with a supply of gas for the big car.

The fur-coated man got aboard, presently, and drove away, the pup still nestling luxuriously deep in the rug.

For perhaps thirty miles the driver kept on, at a pace that lulled and rejoiced the drowsy puppy. This was adventure—which it loved; plus a new costly comfort—which it adored.

How much farther the stowaway might have traveled, nobody knows. But a flea began to nibble at its neck, just below the right ear.

Ensued a noisy scratching, accompanied by small yelps of reproof at the presumptuous insect. The sound soared above the smooth purr of the car’s engine. The driver looked back and saw the gleesome and fleasome pup scratching loose hair from its ear all over his eight-hundred-dollar rug.

In a moment he had brought the car to a halt. In another moment he had reached back and lifted the pup bodily from its luxurious nest. Leaning out, he dropped the squirming canine to the roadside. Then the car sped on.

The pup stood blinking and bewildered at its sudden marooning. But nothing had the power to bewilder it long. It stared curiously about, taking stock of its surroundings.

The sweet countryside where it had been born and brought up was nowhere to be seen. All around was wholly new territory, the chief residence street of a big suburb. Across the street from the gutter where the driver had dropped his unwanted passenger was a hedge which divided two acres of carefully laid-out grounds from the highway.

Here stood a house of much size and beauty. In a garden at the house’s rear a woman was bending over some rose bushes, a gardener standing just behind her, listening in a pose of respectful attention to something she was saying.

Perhaps it was the strange luxury of the place that lured the wanderer; perhaps it was the gardener’s air of respect toward the woman; perhaps it was but a freak of canine mentality. But all at once the pup’s mind was made up.

Across the street it darted—almost ditching a fast-traveling delivery wagon whose driver had much ado to keep from crushing the foolhardy country dog to death under his wheels—and through the hedge and straight up to the woman who bent over the rose bushes.

With no cringing at all it approached her, but with the manner of one who after long absence accosts a loved equal. For an instant the woman did not see it, but moved on to a border of Lilium auratum, just beyond the roses. The pup shifted its position, with hers, and danced up to her afresh, once more greeting her in gayly eager equality.

With a start, the woman caught sight of the newcomer, and stared.

The pup was not at its best in point of attractiveness, unprepossessing as was its best from any standard of canine beauty. For, that morning it had tumbled into the river while chasing a baby mink along the shelving bank. Swimming to shore, it had sought to dry itself by rolling in the dust of the by-road edge. It still had been engaged in that cleansing operation when the big car had stopped at the farm gate and the fur-coated man had claimed the luxury-loving youngster’s attention.

Thus, Mrs. Tredway—unquestioned leader and social arbiter of the only worthwhile set in the pretty suburb of Lothian—shrank, just at first, at sight of the grimily muddy pup that gamboled so merrily up to her. The gardener, too, stepped officiously forward to serve as barrier between his employer and the dirty mutt which had thrust itself upon her august presence.

But the pup, with a gesture of cold aloofness, moved past the protecting gardener and once more pranced up to Mrs. Tredway in jocund goodfellowship.

Something stirred far down in Claire Tredway’s cosmos—something she could not analyze—as she looked at the audaciously jocund cur which hailed her as its peer. Had the pup slunk up to her cadgingly, had it sheered off in terror at the gardener’s menace, she would not have given it a second glance.

But, at its absurdly self-assured greeting, her memory flashed back, for no reason she could understand, to the days when she and her husband had been desperately poor and when by sheer audacity and fearless impudence she had forced for them a foothold among people who were only too ready to snub them forth into outer social darkness.

That had been long ago. Since then, wealth had completed for Claire Tredway what brains and impudence had begun. Yet——

Urged by that same inexplicable impulse, she stooped and patted the canine waif on the head. Gravely the pup sat down in the Lilium auratum border and tendered her its grimy paw.

The gesture had as much calm assurance as had had Claire Tredway’s own when first she had offered her hand in welcome to the great old Miss Ginevra Garrod—a terrible grande dame, last survivor of THE Philadelphia Garrods, and undisputed ruler of any surroundings she might care to grace with her presence.

Urged on by that mysterious sensation of “deep calling unto deep,” Mrs. Tredway accepted the pup’s impudently proffered paw. To her gardener she said, with a stiffness that sought to mask her own amaze at the impulse which possessed her:

“Take him to the stables and have Symonds wash him and comb him. Then bring him to me at the house. I’m—I’m going to keep him. I’ve been wanting a dog for some time, and I think he is just what I have been wanting.”

Strutting proudly, the pup kept pace with the wondering gardener on the short journey to the stables. Deep in the wanderer’s heart was a sense of smug satisfaction, a feeling of being wholly at home for the first time in all its brief life. The strut merged into a swagger.

Thus came into its self-appointed heritage the own-your-own-soul mongrel—the dog that was destined to be known as Chips and to carry that staccato name through a myriad staccato adventures.

“No, Dot,” Murrel was saying. “No news of the purp anywheres at all. I’ve asked, for a couple of miles in both directions. And I kept an eye on the ditches, too, on the chance it had been hit by some car and throwed there. Not a sign of it, though.... Now, don’t go worrying yourself. That purp would land four square on its feet if it fell out of an airship. It’s that kind of a dog. And it’s got brains enough to find its way back here, right now, if it wanted to. It——”

“But, Daddy, don’t you s’pose it wants to come home? I should think——”

“It’ll find the home it wants, Dot. It’s that kind of dog, like I just said. It never felt at home here where it was born. You’ve said so, over and over again, and so have your Mamma and me.... There’s a whole lot of wanderings, in this funny life of ours, kid, but I’ve taken notice that soon or late everything and everybody finds its way home—to whatever place seems to be home for them. The purp’s done that. Or it will. I’d make a big bet on it.... It’ll find its home. Just as its good little mother, here, has found hers.”

Babe Ruth wagged her scrubby tail with glad good-fellowship as Murrel’s hand dropped affectionately on her rough head. Then she fell to drowsing again in front of the loved kitchen fire. It was monstrous good to be at home—forever at home!