I had a dreadful time after that accident with Mr. Martin's eye. He
wrote a letter to father and said that "the conduct of that atrocious
young ruffian was such," and that he hoped he would never have a son
like me. As soon as father said, "My son I want to see you up-stairs
bring me my new rattan cane," I knew what was going to happen. I will
draw some veils over the terrible scene, and will only say that for the
next week I did not feel able to hold a pen unless I stood up all the
time.
Last week I got a beautiful dog. Father had gone away for a few days and
I heard mother say that she wished she had a nice little dog to stay in
the house and drive robbers away. The very next day a lovely dog that
didn't belong to anybody came into our yard and I made a dog-house for
him out of a barrel, and got some beefsteak out of the closet for him,
and got a cat for him to chase, and made him comfortable. He is part
bull-dog, and his ears and tail are gone and he hasn't but one eye and
he's lame in one of his hind-legs and the hair has been scalded off part
of him, and he's just lovely. If you saw him after a cat you'd say he
was a perfect beauty. Mother won't let me bring him into the house, and
says she never saw such a horrid brute, but women haven't any taste
about dogs anyway.
His name is Sitting Bull, though most of the time when he isn't chasing
cats he's lying down. He knows pretty near everything. Some dogs know
more than folks. Mr. Travers had a dog once that knew Chinese. Every
time that dog heard a man speak Chinese he would lie down and howl and
then he would get up and bite the man. You might talk English or French
or Latin or German to him and he wouldn't pay any attention to it, but
just say three words in Chinese and he'd take a piece out of you. Mr.
Travers says that once when he was a puppy a Chinaman tried to catch him
for a stew; so whenever he heard anybody speak Chinese he remembered
that time and went and bit the man to let him know that he didn't
approve of the way Chinamen treated puppies. The dog never made a
mistake but once. A man came to the house who had lost his pilate and
couldn't speak plain, and the dog thought he was speaking Chinese and so
he had his regular fit and bit the man worse than he had ever bit
anybody before.
Sitting Bull don't know Chinese, but Mr. Travers says he's a "specialist
in cats," which means that he knows the whole science of cats. The very
first night I let him loose he chased a cat up the pear-tree and he sat
under that tree and danced around it and howled all night. The neighbors
next door threw most all their things at him but they couldn't
discourage him. I had to tie him up after breakfast and let the cat get
down and run away before I let him loose again, or he'd have barked all
summer.
The only trouble with him is that he can't see very well and keeps
running against things. If he starts to run out of the gate he is just
as likely to run head first into the fence, and when he chases a cat
round a corner he will sometimes mistake a stick of wood, or the
lawn-mower for the cat and try to shake it to death. This was the way he
came to get me into trouble with Mr. Martin.
He hadn't been at our house for so long (Mr. Martin I mean) that we all
thought he never would come again. Father sometimes said that his friend
Martin had been driven out of the house because my conduct was such and
he expected I would separate him from all his friends. Of course I was
sorry that father felt bad about it, but if I was his age I would have
friends that were made more substantial than Mr. Martin is.
Night before last I was out in the back yard with Sitting Bull looking
for a stray cat that sometimes comes around the house after dark and
steals the strawberries and takes the apples out of the cellar. At least
I suppose it is this particular cat that steals the apples, for the
cook says a cat does it and we haven't any private cat of our own. After
a while I saw the cat coming along by the side of the fence, looking
wicked enough to steal anything and to tell stories about it afterwards.
I was sitting on the ground holding Sitting Bull's head in my lap and
telling him that I did wish he'd take to rat-hunting like Tom McGinnis's
terrier, but no sooner had I seen the cat and whispered to Sitting Bull
that she was in sight than he jumped up and went for her.
He chased her along the fence into the front yard where she made a dive
under the front piazza. Sitting Bull came round the corner of the house
just flying, and I close after him. It happened that Mr. Martin was at
that identicular moment going up the steps of the piazza, and Sitting
Bull mistaking one of his legs for the cat jumped for it and had it in
his teeth before I could say a word.
When that dog once gets hold of a thing there is no use in reasoning
with him, for he won't listen to anything. Mr. Martin howled and said,
"Take him off my gracious the dog's mad" and I said, "Come here sir.
Good dog. Leave him alone" but Sitting Bull hung on to the leg as if he
was deaf and Mr. Martin hung on to the railing of the piazza and made
twice as much noise as the dog. I didn't know whether I'd better run for
the doctor or the police, but after shaking the leg for about a minute
Sitting Bull gave it an awful pull and pulled it off just at the knee
joint. When I saw the dog rushing round the yard with the leg in his
mouth I ran into the house and told Sue and begged her to cut a hole in
the wall and hide me behind the plastering where the police couldn't
find me. When she went down to help Mr. Martin she saw him just going
out of the yard on a wheelbarrow with a man wheeling him on a broad
grin.
If he ever comes to this house again I'm going to run away. It turns out
that his leg was made of cork and I suppose the rest of him is either
cork or glass. Some day he'll drop apart on our piazza then the whole
blame will be put on me.