Bruce | Page 7

away."
"I won't," said the boy, speaking very slowly, and with no excitement at
all.
A slap on the side of his head, from his mother's punitive palm, made
him stagger a little. Her hand was upraised for a second installment of
rebellion-quelling--when a slender little body flashed through the air
and landed heavily against her chest. A set of white puppy-teeth all but
grazed her wrathful red face.
Lass, who never before had known the impulse to attack, had jumped to
the rescue of the beaten youngster whom she had adopted as her god.
The woman screeched in terror. Dick flung an arm about the furry
whirlwind that was seeking to avenge his punishment, and pulled the
dog back to his side.
Mrs. Hazen's shriek, and the obbligato accompaniment of the

washerwoman, made an approaching man quicken his steps as he
strolled around the side of the house. The newcomer was Dick's father,
superintendent of the local bottling works. On his way home to lunch,
he walked in on a scene of hysteria.
"Kill her, sir!" bawled the washerwoman, at sight of him. "Kill her!
She's a mad dog. She just tried to kill Miz' Hazen!"
"She didn't do anything of the kind!" wailed Dick. "She was pertecting
me. Ma hit me; and Lass--"
"Ed!" tearily proclaimed Mrs. Hazen, "if you don't send for a
policeman to shoot that filthy beast, I'll--"
"Hold on!" interrupted the man, at a loss to catch the drift of these
appeals, by reason of their all being spoken in a succession so rapid as
to make a single blurred sentence. "Hold on! What's wrong? And where
did the pup come from? He's a looker, all right a cute little cuss. What's
the row?"
With the plangently useless iterations of a Greek chorus, the tale was
flung at him, piecemeal and in chunks, and in a triple key. When
presently he understood, Hazen looked down for a moment at the
puppy--which was making sundry advances of a shy but friendly nature
toward him. Then he looked at the boy, and noted Dick's hero-effort to
choke back the onrush of babyish sobs. And then, with a roughly
tolerant gesture, he silenced the two raucous women, who were
beginning the tale over again for the third time.
"I see," he said. "I see. I see how it is. Needn't din it at me any more,
folks. And I see Dicky's side of it, too. Yes, and I see the pup's side of it.
I know a lot about dogs. That pup isn't vicious. She knows she belongs
to Dick. You lammed into him, and she took up and defended him.
That's all there is to the 'mad- dog' part of it."
"But Ed--" sputtered his wife.
"Now, you let ME do the talking, Sade!" he insisted, half- grinning, yet

more than half grimly. "I'm the boss here. If I'm not, then it's safe to
listen to me till the boss gets here. And we're goin' to do whatever I say
we are--without any back-talk or sulks, either. It's this way: Your
brother gave the boy a birthday check. We promised he could spend it
any way he had a mind to. He said he wanted a dog, didn't he? And I
said, 'Go to it!' didn't I ? Well, he got the dog. Just because it happens
to be a she, that's no reason why he oughtn't to be allowed to keep it.
And he can. That goes."
"Oh, Dad!" squealed Dick in grateful heroworship. "You're a brick! I'm
not ever going to forget this, so long as I live. Say, watch her shake
hands, Dad! I've taught her, already, to--"
"Ed Hazen!" loudly protested his wife. "Of all the softies! You haven't
backbone enough for a prune. And if my orders to my own son are
going to be--"
"That'll be all, Sade!" interposed the man stiffly--adding: "By the way,
I got a queer piece of news to tell you. Come into the kitchen a
minute."
Grumbling, rebellious, scowling,--yet unable to resist the lure of a
"queer piece of news," Mrs. Hazen followed her husband indoors,
leaving Dick and his pet to gambol deliriously around the
clothes-festooned yard in celebration of their victory.
"Listen here, old girl!" began Hazen the moment the kitchen door was
shut behind them. "Use some sense, can't you? I gave you the wink,
and you wouldn't catch on. So I had to make the grandstand play. I'm
no more stuck on having a measly she-dog around here than you are.
And we're not going to have her, either. But--"
"Then why did you say you were going to? Why did you make a fool of
me before Irene and everything?" she demanded, wrathful yet
bewildered.
"It's the boy's birthday, isn't it?" urged