Beautiful Joe | Page 7

how to dodge him.
After he finished milking, he took the pails of milk up to the house for Mrs. Jenkins to
strain and put in the cans, and he came back and harnessed his horse to the cart. His horse
was called Toby, and a poor, miserable, broken-down creature he was. He was weak in
the knees, and weak in the back, and weak all over, and Jenkins had to beat him all the
time, to make him go. He had been a cab horse, and his mouth had been jerked, and
twisted, and sawed at, till one would think there could be no feeling left in it; still I have
seen him wince and curl up his lip when Jenkins thrust in the frosty bit on a winter's
morning.
Poor old Toby! I used to lie on my straw some times and wonder he did not cry out with
pain. Cold and half starved he always was in the winter time, and often with raw sores on
his body that Jenkins would try to hide by putting bits of cloth under the harness. But
Toby never murmured, and he never tried to kick and bite, and he minded the least word
from Jenkins, and if he swore at him Toby would start back, or step up quickly, he was so
anxious to please him.
After Jenkins put him in the cart, and took in the cans, he set out on his rounds. My
mother, whose name was Jess, always went with him. I used to ask her why she followed
such a brute of a man, and she would hang her head, and say that sometimes she got a
bone from the different houses they stopped at. But that was not the whole reason. She

liked Jenkins so much, that she wanted to be with him.
I had not her sweet and patient disposition, and I would not go with her. I watched her out
of sight, and then ran up to the house to see if Mrs. Jenkins had any scraps for me. I
nearly always got something, for she pitied me, and often gave me a kind word or look
with the bits of food that she threw to me.
When Jenkins come home, I often coaxed mother to run about and see some of the
neighbors' dogs with me. But she never would, and I would not leave her. So, from
morning to night we had to sneak about, keeping out of Jenkins' way as much as we
could, and yet trying to keep him in sight. He always sauntered about with a pipe in his
mouth, and his hands in his pockets, growling first at his wife and children, and then at
his dumb creatures.
I have not told what became of my brothers and sisters. One rainy day, when we were
eight weeks old, Jenkins, followed by two or three of his ragged, dirty children, came into
the stable and looked at us. Then he began to swear because we were so ugly, and said if
we had been good-looking, he might have sold some of us. Mother watched him
anxiously, and fearing some danger to her puppies, ran and jumped in the middle of us,
and looked pleadingly up at him.
It only made him swear the more. He took one pup after another, and right there, before
his children and my poor distracted mother, put an end to their lives. Some of them he
seized by the legs and knocked against the stalls, till their brains were dashed out, others
he killed with a fork. It was very terrible. My mother ran up and down the stable,
screaming with pain, and I lay weak and trembling, and expecting every instant that my
turn would come next. I don't know why he spared me. I was the only one left.
His children cried, and he sent them out of the stable and went out himself. Mother
picked up all the puppies and brought them to our nest in the straw and licked them, and
tried to bring them back to life; but it was of no use, they were quite dead. We had them
in our corner of the stable for some days, till Jenkins discovered them, and swearing
horribly at us, he took his stable fork and threw them out in the yard, and put some earth
over them.
My mother never seemed the same after this. She was weak and miserable, and though
she was only four years old, she seemed like an old dog. This was on account of the poor
food she had been fed on. She could not run after Jenkins, and she lay on our heap of
straw, only turning over with her nose the scraps of