Part 3

“Aw, it was nothin’,” Leroy replied with admirable nonchalance. “Jist a dog ran up an’ bit me. I mean, I was runnin’, an’ I guess I stepped on his paw an’ he bit me.”

“Did you tell your mother you stepped on the dog?”

“I dunno what all I told her,” Leroy admitted. “Anyway, what’s it matter? Had to do somethin’ to keep her quiet.”

Anderson considered that it was not his place to rebuke this child, and he let the disrespect pass.

“Where did it happen?”

“Long ways from here, all right!” said the boy, triumphantly.

He spoke no more than the truth. It was a very long way. They went on and on, down long, quiet suburban streets, lined with dripping trees and houses with no signs of life. They went on and on.

At first Leroy was talkative and cheerful, and found great satisfaction in splashing in puddles, but as time went on he grew silent, and tramped through the puddles more as a matter of principle than through enjoyment.

“What was the name of the street?” asked Anderson.

“Well, I don’t know,” the boy answered, “but I guess I’d know it if I saw it. Somewheres around here, it was. Might be around the next corner.”

They went round the corner, and there was a candy store.

“That’s it!” Leroy announced. “It’s open, too.”

Mr. Anderson said nothing, but walked steadily forward, and Leroy trotted by his side.

“They sure did have good lollypops in there,” observed Leroy. “Best I ever tasted.”

Still no response from the adult, possessor of all power and wealth. Leroy sighed. And Anderson turned to look at him, and discovered a wet and not very clean face upturned to his, with brown eyes very like Sandy’s. Poor little kid, tramping along so bravely in his oilskins! He looked tired, too.

“All right!” said Anderson. “We’d better go back and get a few lollypops.”

After that Leroy went on, much encouraged in spirit.

“Here’s the street!” he cried at last. “The lil dog ran out o’ one of those houses—I don’t know which one.”

Mr. Anderson rang the bell of the first house. The occupants owned no dog, never had, and never intended so to do. In the second house he was confronted by a very disagreeable old lady. She admitted that she had a dog, and she said, with unction, that her dog could and would bite any persons unlawfully trespassing on her property, as was any dog’s right.

“I dare say Rover did bite the boy,” she suggested, “if he came in here trampling and stampling all over my flower beds. And serve him right, I say!”

“I did not!” said Leroy, indignantly. “And that’s not the dog, Mr. Anderson. I can see him out the window. He’s a police dog, and my dog was a little one.”

They proceeded to the next house. Nobody came to the door at all. There was only one more house left on the street.

“Well, I hope the right dog’s in there,” said Leroy, “but—” He paused, then he laid his hand on Anderson’s sleeve. “Most any lil dog would _do_,” he said, very low, “for _her_.”

Mr. Anderson was about to protest sternly against such a dishonest and immoral suggestion, but somehow he didn’t. The child’s hand looked so very small, and his manner was so trusting. He said nothing at all, simply walked up the path to this last house.

He rang the bell, and the door was opened with startling suddenness by a little man with spectacles and a neatly pointed white beard. He looked like a professor, and he was a professor—of Romance Languages—and because of his scholarly unworldliness, he had been cheated and swindled so many times that he had become fiercely suspicious. He glared.

“This boy has been bitten by a dog,” Mr. Anderson explained. “And we want to find the dog, to see—”

“Ha!” said the little man. “And what has this to do with me, pray?”

“I thought perhaps you had a dog here—”

The professor folded his arms.

“Very well!” said he. “I have. And what of it?”

“If you’ll let us see the dog—”

“Aha!” said the professor. “I see! A blackmailing scheme! You wish to see my dog. You will then cause this child to identify the dog as the one which bit him, in order that you may collect damages. A ve-ry pret-ty little scheme, I must admit!”

Anderson had had a singularly trying day, and he was very weary of this quest, anyhow.

“Nothing of the sort!” he said curtly. “If you’ll be good enough to let us see your dog—or if you’ll give me your assurance that the animal is perfectly healthy—”

“Don’t you give him a penny, Joseph!” cried a quavering female voice from the dark depths of the hall.

The professor laughed ironically.

“Ve-ry pret-ty!” he repeated. “But you may as well understand, once and for all, that I absolutely refuse to allow you to see my dog, or to give you any assurance of any kind whatsoever.”

And nothing could move him. Mr. Anderson argued with him with as much tact and politeness as he could manage just at that time, but in vain.

“See here!” he said at last. “Let me see the dog, and if it’s the right one, I’ll _buy_ it. Now will you believe—”

But the professor would not believe until Anderson had signed a document which he drew up, solemnly promising that, if the dog were identified by Leroy as the dog which had bitten him, he, Winchell Anderson, would purchase the said dog for the sum of twenty-five dollars.

Then, and then only, was the dog brought into the room. And Leroy instantly, loudly and fervently asserted that it was _the_ dog. By this time Mr. Anderson was perfectly willing to believe him. He paid the money and stooped to pick up the dog, a small animal, of what might be called the spaniel type.

It snapped at him. He could not pick it up, because on the next attempt his hand was bitten. At last, upon his paying in advance for the telephone call, the professor summoned a taxi. Mr. Anderson could not get the dog into the taxi, but Leroy had no trouble at all with it. It seemed to like Leroy.

They rode home in silence, because every time Anderson uttered a word the animal growled and struggled in the boy’s arms.

They reached Mrs. Granger’s house, and while Leroy ran ahead with the dog in his arms, Anderson delayed a minute to pay the taxi with the last bill remaining in his pockets. Then he followed. It had been a costly and a wearisome quest, but Mrs. Granger’s relief and gratitude would be sufficient reward.

In the doorway of the sitting room he paused a moment, smiling to himself at the scene before him. Leroy was down on his knees, playing with this quite unexpected and delightful new dog, and Mrs. Granger knelt beside him, one arm about her son’s neck.

Captain MacGregor was there, but in a corner, so that one need not consider him in the picture—the peaceful lamp-lit room, the gentle mother and her child.

“I’m very glad—” he began, when, at the sound of his voice, the dog sprang up and rushed at him, and was caught by Leroy just in the nick of time. He growled threateningly.

“I guess I’d better tie him up,” said Leroy. “He doesn’t like Mr. Anderson.”

“Why, how very strange!” Mrs. Granger exclaimed.

Leroy did tie him up to the leg of a table.

“But why doesn’t the poor little doggie like Mr. Anderson?” pursued Mrs. Granger, and there was something in her voice that dismayed the young man.

“I don’t know,” he replied, briefly.

“It’s very strange,” she remarked. “Very! But sit down, Mr. Anderson. Perhaps you were just a little bit rough in handling him—without meaning to be.”

“No, he wasn’t!” Leroy asserted, indignantly. “He—”

At this point the dog broke loose, flew at Anderson, and would have bitten him if Anderson had not prevented him—with his foot.

“Oh!” cried Mrs. Granger. “Oh, Mr. Anderson, how could you! You kicked the poor little doggie!”

“I—I simply pushed him—with my foot,” said Anderson. “He’s a bad-tempered little brute.”

“Dogs are never bad-tempered unless they’re badly treated,” Mrs. Granger declared, with severity. “They always know a friend from a foe.”

“All right!” the young man agreed. “Then I’m afraid I’m a foe.” He turned toward the door. “If you’ll excuse me,” he said, “I’ll be getting along. I’m—I’m tired. Good evening!”

“Good evening!” said Mrs. Granger and Captain MacGregor in unison.

She let him go! He opened the front door and stepped out into the rain again, and never in his life had he felt so bitter, so disappointed, so cruelly, intolerably depressed. After all he had done, she let him go like this! Not even a word of thanks. Poor little doggie, eh?

Halfway down the path he heard a shout; it was Leroy, rushing after him bareheaded through the rain.

“Say!” he shouted. “You’re—”

Words failed him, and he stretched out his hand, a rough, warm little hand, wet from the rain, sticky from lollypops. Yet Anderson was very glad to clasp it tight.

“Good-by, old fellow!” he said.

“Good-by, old fellow, yourself!” answered Leroy.

And he sat on the gatepost, watching, and waving his hand as Anderson went down the road in the rainy dusk.

IX

Mr. Anderson had finished with women forever. And this resolve gave to his face a new and not unbecoming sternness; the old ladies noticed it directly he entered the dining room that evening. Miss Selby noticed it, too, but pretended not to; she smiled that same chilly, polite smile, and said never a word—neither did he.

Supper was set before them, and they began to eat, still silent. And then she spoke suddenly.

“What’s the matter with your hand, Mr. Anderson?” she asked.

“Oh, nothing; thanks!” he answered.

Again a silence. But she could not keep her eyes off that clumsily-tied bandage on his hand.

“I wish you’d tell me!” she said.

It was an entirely different tone, but he was no longer to be trifled with like that. He smiled, coldly.

“No doubt you’ll be very much amused,” he remarked, “to learn that I’ve been bitten by a dog!”

He waited.

“Why don’t you laugh, Miss Selby?” he inquired. “It’s funny enough, isn’t it? After I said that dogs always know. It’s what you might call ‘biting irony,’ isn’t it?”

“I—don’t want to laugh,” said she. “I’m—just sorry.”

He looked at her.

“Miss Selby!” he cried.

“I took your flowers upstairs,” she said. “I think—they’re the prettiest—the prettiest flowers—I—ever saw.”

“Miss Selby!” he exclaimed again. “See here! Please! When I thought you were ill—”

“I only had a little cold.”

“I wrote a note,” he said. “I tore it up. I—I wish I hadn’t.”

Miss Selby was looking down at her plate.

“I wish you hadn’t, too,” she agreed.

The old ladies had all finished their suppers, but not one of them left the room. They were watching Miss Selby and Mr. Anderson. Surely not a remarkable spectacle, simply a nice looking young man and a pretty young girl, sitting, quite speechless, now, at a little table.

Yet one old lady actually wiped tears from her eyes, and every one of them felt an odd and tender little stir at the heart, as if the perfume of very old memories had blown in at the opened window.

“Let’s go out on the veranda,” said Mr. Anderson to Miss Selby, and they did.

The rain was coming down steadily, and the wind sighed in the pines. But it was a June night, a summer night, a young night.

Not an old lady set foot on the veranda that evening, not another human being heard what Miss Selby from Boston, and Mr. Anderson from New York had to say to each other.

Only Mrs. Brown, opening the door for a breath of fresh air, did happen to hear him saying something about the “best sort of paper for wedding announcements.”

[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the March 1926 issue of Munsey’s Magazine.]