I am a middle-sized dog, with spots on me here and there, and several
different colours of hair mixed in even where there aren't any spots,
and my ears are frazzled a little on the ends where they have been
chewed in fights.
At first glance you might not pick me for an aristocrat. But I am one. I
was considerably surprised when I discovered it, as nothing in my inmost
feelings up to that time, nor in the treatment which I had received from
dogs, humans or boys, had led me to suspect it.
I can well remember the afternoon on which the discovery was made. A
lot of us dogs were lying in the grass, up by the swimming hole, just
lazying around, and the boys were doing the same. All the boys were
naked and comfortable, and no humans were about, the only thing near
being a cow or two and some horses, and although large they are scarcely
more human than boys. Everybody had got tired of swimming, and it was
too hot to drown out gophers or fight bumblebees, and the boys were
smoking grapevine cigarettes and talking.
Us dogs was listening to the boys talk. A Stray Boy, which I mean one
not claimed or looked out for or owned by any dog, says to Freckles
Watson, who is my boy:
“What breed would you call that dog of yours, Freck?”
I pricked up my ears at that. I cannot say that I had ever set great
store by breeds up to the time that I found out I was an aristocrat
myself, believing, as Bill Patterson, a human and the town drunkard,
used to say when intoxicated, that often an honest heart beats beneath
the outcast's ragged coat.
“Spot ain't any _one_ particular breed,” says Freckles. “He's
considerably mixed.”
“He's a mongrel,” says Squint Thompson, who is Jack Thompson's boy.
“He ain't,” says Freckles, so huffy that I saw a mongrel must be some
sort of a disgrace. “You're a link, link liar, and so's your Aunt
Mariar,” says Freckles.
I thought there might be a fight then, but it was too hot for any
enjoyment in a fight, I guess, for Squint let it pass, only saying, “I
ain't got any Aunt Mariar, and you're another.”
“A dog,” chips in the Stray Boy, “has either got to be a thoroughbred or
a mongrel. He's either an aristocrat or else he's a common dog.”
“Spot ain't any common dog,” says Freckles, sticking up for me. “He can
lick any dog in town within five pounds of his weight.”
“He's got some spaniel in him,” says the Stray Boy.
“His nose is pointed like a hound's nose,” says Squint Thompson.
“Well,” says Freckles, “neither one of them kind of dogs is a common
dog.”
“Spot has got some bulldog blood in him, too,” says Tom Mulligan, an
Irish boy owned by a dog by the name of Mutt Mulligan. “Did you ever
notice how Spot will hang on so you can't pry him loose, when he gets
into a fight?”
“That proves he is an aristocratic kind of dog,” says Freckles.
“There's some bird dog blood in Spot,” says the Stray Boy, sizing me up
careful.
“He's got some collie in him, too,” says Squint Thompson. “His voice
sounds just like a collie's when he barks.”
“But his tail is more like a coach dog's tail,” says Tom Mulligan.
“His hair ain't, though,” says the Stray Boy. “Some of his hair is like
a setter's.”
“His teeth are like a mastiff's,” says Mutt Mulligan's boy Tom. And
they went on like that; I never knew before there were so many different
kinds of thoroughbred dog. Finally Freckles says:
“Yes, he's got all them different kinds of thoroughbred blood in him,
and he's got other kinds you ain't mentioned and that you ain't slick
enough to see. You may think you're running him down, but what you say
just _proves_ he ain't a common dog.”
I was glad to hear that. It was beginning to look to me that they had a
pretty good case for me being a mongrel.
“How does it prove it?” asked the Stray Boy.
“Well,” says Freckles, “you know who the King of Spain is, don't you?”
They said they'd heard of him from time to time.
“Well,” says Freckles, “if you were a relation of the King of Spain
you'd be a member of the Spanish royal family. You fellows may not know
that, but you would. You'd be a swell, a regular high-mucky-muck.”
They said they guessed they would.
“Now, then,” says Freckles, “if you were a relation to the King of
Switzerland, too, you'd be just _twice_ as swell, wouldn't you, as if
you were only related to one royal family? Plenty of people are related
to just _one_ royal family.”
Tom Mulligan butts in and says that way back, in the early days, his
folks was the Kings of Ireland; but no one pays any attention.
“Suppose, then, you're a cousin of the Queen of England into the bargain
and your grand-dad was King of Scotland, and the Prince of Wales and
the Emperor of France and the Sultan of Russia and the rest of those
royalties were relations of yours, wouldn't all that royal blood make
you _twenty times_ as much of a high-mucky-muck as if you had just _one_
measly little old king for a relation?”
The boys had to admit that it would.
“You wouldn't call a fellow with all that royal blood in him a
_mongrel_, would you?” says Freckles. “You bet your sweet life you
wouldn't! A fellow like that is darned near on the level with a
congressman or a vicepresident. Whenever he travels around in the old
country they turn out the brass band; and the firemen and the Knights of
Pythias and the Modern Woodmen parade, and the mayor makes a speech, and
there's a picnic and firecrackers, and he gets blamed near anything he
wants. People kow-tow to him, just like they do to a swell left-handed
pitcher or a champion prizefighter. If you went over to the old country
and called a fellow like that a mongrel, and it got out oh you, you
would be sent to jail for it.”
Tom Mulligan says yes, that is so; his grand-dad came to this country
through getting into some kind of trouble about the King of England, and
the King of England ain't anywhere near as swell as the fellow Freckles
described, nor near so royal, neither.
“Well, then,” says Freckles, “it's the same way with my dog, Spot, here.
_Any_ dog can be full of just _one_ kind of thoroughbred blood. That's
nothing! But Spot here has got more different kinds of thoroughbred
blood in him than any dog you ever saw. By your own say-so he has. He's
got _all_ kinds of thoroughbred blood in him. If there's any kind he
ain't got, you just name it, will you?”
“He ain't got any Great Dane in him,” yells the Stray Boy, hating to
knuckle under.
“You're a liar, he has, too,” says Freckles.
The Stray Boy backed it, and there was a fight. All us dogs and boys
gathered around in a ring to watch it, and I was more anxious than
anybody else. For the way that fight went, it was easy to see, would
decide what I was.
Well, Freckles licked that Stray Boy, and rubbed his nose in the mud,
and that's how I come to be an aristocrat.
Being an aristocrat may sound easy. And it may look easy to outsiders.
And it may really be easy for them that are used to it. But it wasn't
easy for _me_. It came on me suddenly, the knowledge that I was one, and
without warning. I didn't have any time to practise up being one. One
minute I wasn't one, and the next minute I was; and while, of course,
I felt important over it, there were spells when I would get kind of
discouraged, too, and wish I could go back to being a common dog again.
I kept expecting my tastes and habits to change. I watched and waited
for them to. But they didn't. No change at all set in on me. But I had
to pretend I was changed. Then I would get tired of pretending, and be
down-hearted about the whole thing, and say to myself: “There has been a
mistake. I am _not_ an aristocrat after all.”
I might have gone along like that for a long time, partly in joy over my
noble birth, and partly in doubt, without ever being certain, if it had
not been for a happening which showed, as Freckles said, that blood will
tell.
It happened the day Wilson's World's Greatest One Ring Circus and
Menagerie came to our town. Freckles and me, and all the other dogs and
boys, and a good many humans, too, followed the street parade around
through town and back to the circus lot. Many went in, and the ones that
didn't have any money hung around outside a while and explained to each
other they were going at night, because a circus is more fun at night
anyhow. Freckles didn't have any money, but his dad was going to take
him that night, so when the parade was over, him and me went back to
his dad's drug store on Main Street, and I crawled under the soda-water
counter to take a nap.
Freckles's dad, that everyone calls Doc Watson, is a pretty good fellow
for a human, and he doesn't mind you hanging around the store if
you don't drag bones in or scratch too many fleas off. So I'm there
considerable in right hot weather. Under the soda water counter is the
coolest place for a dog in the whole town. There's a zinc tub under
there always full of water, where Doc washes the soda-water glasses, and
there's always considerable water slopped on to the floor. It's damp and
dark there always. Outdoors it may be so hot in the sun that your tongue
hangs out of you so far you tangle your feet in it, but in under there
you can lie comfortable and snooze, and when you wake up and want a
drink there's the tub with the glasses in it. And flies don't bother
you because they stay on top of the counter where soda water has been
spilled.
Circus day was a hot one, and I must have drowsed off pretty quick after
lying down. I don't know how long I slept, but when I waked up it was
with a start, for something important was going on outside in Main
Street. I could hear people screaming and swearing and running along
the wooden sidewalk, and horses whinnying, and dogs barking, and old Si
Emery, the city marshal, was yelling out that he was an officer of the
law, and the steam whistle on the flour mill was blowing. And it all
seemed to be right in front of our store. I was thinking I'd better go
out and see about it, when the screen doors crashed like a runaway horse
had come through them, and the next minute a big yellow dog was back
of the counter, trying to scrouch down and scrooge under it like he was
scared and was hiding. He backed me into the corner without seeing me or
knowing I was there, and like to have squashed me.
No dog--and it never struck me that maybe this wasn't a dog--no dog can
just calmly sit down on me like that when I'm waking up from a nap,
and get away with it, no matter _how_ big he is, and in spite of the
darkness under there I could see and feel that this was the biggest
dog in the world. I had been dreaming I was in a fight, anyhow, when he
crowded in there with his hindquarters on top of me, and I bit him on
the hind leg.
When I bit him he let out a noise like a thrashing machine starting up.
It wasn't a bark. Nothing but the end of the world coming could bark
like that. It was a noise more like I heard one time when the boys dared
Freckles to lie down between the cattle guards on the railroad track and
let a train run over him about a foot above his head, and I laid down
there with him and it nearly deefened both of us. When he let out that
noise I says to myself, “Great guns! What kind of a dog have I bit?”
And as he made that noise he jumped, and over went the counter, marble
top and all, with a smash, and jam into the show window he went, with
his tail swinging, and me right after him, practically on top of him. It
wasn't that I exactly intended to chase him, you understand, but I was
rattled on account of that awful noise he had let out, and I wanted to
get away from there, and I went the same way he did. So when he bulged
through the window glass on to the street I bulged right after him, and
as he hit the sidewalk I bit him again. The first time I bit him because
I was sore, but the second time I bit him because I was so nervous I
didn't know what I was doing, hardly. And at the second bite, without
even looking behind him, he jumped clean over the hitch rack and a team
of horses in front of the store and landed right in the middle of the
road with his tail between his legs.
And then I realized for the first time he wasn't a dog at all. He was
the circus lion.
Mind you, I'm not saying that I would have bit him at all if I'd a-known
at the start he was a lion.
And I ain't saying I _wouldn't_ 'a' bit him, either.
But actions speak louder than words, and records are records, and you
can't go back on them, and the fact is I _did_ bite him. I bit him
twice.
And that second bite, when we came bulging through the window together,
the whole town saw. It was getting up telephone poles, and looking out
of second-story windows, and crawling under sidewalks and into cellars,
and trying to hide behind the town pump; but no matter where it was
trying to get to, it had one eye on that lion, and it saw me chasing him
out of that store. I don't say I would have chased him if he hadn't been
just ahead of me, anyhow, and I don't say I wouldn't have chased him,
but the facts are I _did_ chase him.
The lion was just as scared as the town--and the town was so scared it
didn't know the lion was scared at all--and when his trainer got hold of
him in the road he was tickled to death to be led back to his cage, and
he lay down in the far corner of it, away from the people, and trembled
till he shook the wagon it was on.
But if there was any further doubts in any quarter about me being an
aristocrat, the way I bit and chased that lion settled 'em forever. That
night Freckles and Doc went to the circus, and I marched in along with
them. And every kid in town, as they saw Freckles and me marching in,
says:
“There goes the dog that licked the lion!”
And Freckles, every time any one congratulated him on being the boy that
belonged to that kind of a dog, would say:
“Blood will tell! Spot's an aristocrat, he is.”
And him and me and Doc Watson, his dad, stopped in front of the lion's
cage that night and took a good long look at him. He was a kind of an
old moth-eaten lion, but he was a lion all right, and he looked mighty
big in there. He looked so big that all my doubts come back on me, and
I says to myself: “Honest, now, if I'd _a-known_ he was a lion, and that
_big_ a lion, when I bit him, _would_ I have bit him or would I not?”
But just then Freckles reached down and patted me on the head and said:
“You wasn't afraid of him, was you, old Spot! Yes, sir, blood will
tell!”