CHAPTER XXII

A TALKING DOG

Our Mary, on account of her lameness, has a little bedroom downstairs, just back of the dining room. Her mother does not worry about her being down there alone, for Billie always sleeps beside her bed in a box, and if any strange step is heard in the hall, or outside the open window, she gives her queer half bark, half scream, and rouses the family.

Our Mary used to have a young dog of her own to sleep beside her, a mongrel spaniel, but to her great grief some one stole the dog a year ago, and she has never known what became of it.

One day when I was talking to Billie about sleeping downstairs she told me that she would far rather be upstairs with Mrs. Martin, but at the same time she is very glad to do something to oblige our Mary, whom everybody loves.

“If any stranger dares to come near her room at night,” said Billie, “I’ll scream my head off. I hate night prowlers. They’re after no good. The Italians always locked up at nine o’clock and said that any one not in bed then was a thief.”

“But, Billie,” I said, “that is rather severe. Many nice persons are out after nine.”

“Well, I’ll bark at them,” she said stubbornly, “and if they’re honest it won’t hurt them, and if they’re rogues they’ll be caught.”

Poor Billie—on the night our Mary had her adventure with what she thought was a prowler she was in a dogs’ hospital. They had been having lobster à la Newburg at the boarding house, and the remains in the trash can were too attractive for Billie, and she had to go away to be dosed. How she reproached herself afterward, and vowed she would never go near a trash can again!

It had been a very dark afternoon, and was a very black night. A thunderstorm was brooding over the city, and our Mary, though not at all nervous, for she is a very brave girl, had said to please her mother that she would sleep upstairs.

“I will undress down in my own room, though,” she said, “then put on my dressing-gown and come up.”

About ten o’clock she was just going to turn out the electric light when she heard something moving softly on the veranda outside her window. Turning out the light, she picked up a good-sized bell she kept on the table at the head of her bed and approached the window.

“Are you a tramp?” she said cautiously.

There was a kind of groan in reply to this, but no one spoke.

“I want you to go away,” she said sternly, “or I shall ring this bell and my father will come down and turn you away pretty quickly. Do you hear?”

The thing groaned again, and she heard a beseeching murmur, “Jus’ a crumb—jus’ a crumb.”

“A crumb!” she said indignantly. “I suppose you have been drinking too much. Go away, you scamp.”

The thing gave a kind of flop and she saw two red eyes gleaming at her. Dropping the bell, she fled from the room, calling wildly, “Daddy! Daddy!”

Mr. Martin, who was just undressing, came leaping down the stairs like a boy. “What is it—where is it?” he cried.

“Out on the veranda—right in the corner by the table. Oh, Daddy, it has such a dreadful voice!”

Mr. Martin snatched a big walking stick from the hat-stand in the hall and rushed into the bedroom. There was nothing there, so he jumped through the window to the veranda. Nothing there, either, but at this moment there was such a heavy peal of thunder that he sprang in again and locked the window behind him.

“We are going to have a deluge,” he said. “The tramp must have taken himself off. I see nothing of him.”

“He couldn’t have got into the house, could he?” said Mrs. Martin, who by this time had appeared and had her arm round Mary.

“No, no—Mary stood in the hall till I came. He could not have passed her, and he is not in the room.”

He looked about him as he spoke. The room was in perfect order except the bed, which was tumbled and tossed.

Our Mary suddenly gave a scream. “The bed—I never touched it! He is in it—there’s a lump there. Father, take care.”

“Go to the hall,” said Mr. Martin, “you two—leave me to deal with him.”

Mrs. Martin drew back her arm from Mary and pushed her out into the hall, then she went to stand by her husband. She would not leave him alone.

I heard every detail of this adventure a few minutes later, in the sitting room, and I was quite thrilled at this part where Mrs. Martin stood pushing her child out into the hall with one hand and extending the other to her husband.

He was afraid she would get hurt and, hurrying to her, was about to urge her to go upstairs when more thunder and lightning came.

The crashing and flashing were so dreadful that they made Daisy nestle anxiously against me in our cage. We had been awake for some time, listening to the unusual and strange sounds below.

All at once we heard Mr. Martin cry out, “Mary—run—he’s coming!”

Every light in the house had gone out. The lightning had struck the power house downtown, but we could hear our Mary tearing upstairs faster than she had ever come before. The lameness was not in her feet, which were quite well shaped and pretty, but in her hips. The doctor said afterward that the sudden fright was bad for her nerves but an excellent thing for her hips, for her lameness has been ever so much better since. Well, Daisy and I heard her rushing upstairs, darting into the sitting room and flinging herself on a sofa there.

She knew just where everything was, though the room was pitch dark. “Oh, mother,” she cried, “oh, father—what a coward I am! Why didn’t I stay?”

Then we heard her mother’s clear voice, “Mary, Mary, my child—are you all right?”

“Yes, yes, Mummy dear,” she cried; “but, oh, do come up! Where is Daddy?”

“Down in the cellar after the tramp. He flew by us to the kitchen. Hester had forgotten and left the cellar door open. Shut and lock the door of the room you are in. I will be right up.”

Our poor Mary did as she was bid, and as we heard afterward, Mrs. Martin followed her husband to the cellar. As the tramp had not shown fight, they were not afraid of him, and they said afterward they knew he must be a slight, frail creature, perhaps only a boy, for he dashed by so quickly and smoothly, and bent over as if he were on all fours.

Well, by the time they got a lantern and went down into their big, old-fashioned cellar, Mr. Tramp was nowhere to be seen. There is a great deal of stuff in our cellar. I went down there one day on our Mary’s shoulder. There are trunks and boxes, and plants and barrels, and old furniture, and shelves of china, and a storeroom and coal rooms, and a furnace room, and a lot of other things—a very paradise of hiding places.

No lights would go on yet, so the two Martins poked about with their lantern, passing several times a heap of bearskin rugs that the furnace man had thrown in a corner to shake in the morning.

“Could he be there?” said Mrs. Martin, at last.

“There’s no other place,” said Mr. Martin, and he prodded the rugs with his stick. “Come out, you—we won’t hurt you.”

They heard a touching groan, then “Jus’ a crumb—jus’ a crumb,” in a voice that Mrs. Martin said afterward was hoarse and broken like that of an old man who has been drinking too much all his life.

“Get up, you beggar,” said Mr. Martin, for he was pretty tired and excited by this time. “If you don’t come out, you’ll get a walloping.”

At this and his persistent prodding there crawled from under the rugs, not a battered old man nor a slender boy, but a good-sized mongrel spaniel dog.

Mrs. Martin says that she and her husband literally staggered against the wall. Dog-lovers as they were, they had never heard of such a thing as a dog talking.

Then, when they got over their surprise there was such a shouting. By this time, Hester and Anna were aroused and were running round the top of the house calling out to know what was the matter.

Our Mary unlocked the sitting room door and cried out to them to come down to her, and then Mr. and Mrs. Martin appeared leading between them this big black spaniel.

He was terribly cowed and frightened, but when they held up the lantern and he saw our Mary, he gave a leap at her and buried his head in her lap.

“Why, it’s my Niger,” she screamed, “my darling Niger that was stolen when he was a puppy! Oh, oh, Niger, Niger!”

I never saw anything more affecting. Our Mary was so unstrung that she cried, and her parents stood looking at her with glistening eyes.

“And he’s been in good hands,” she said at last, when she got calm. “See how glossy his hair is, mother dear, and he smells of some exquisite perfume. My darling doggie, where have you been?”

I touched Daisy with my beak. All this would have been hard on Billie if she had been here, for she is of a very jealous nature.

Niger was fagged out. He lay panting and rolling his bright eyes from one to another of the little group. He had evidently run far to get home.

“This is one of the most interesting dog cases I have ever heard of,” said Mrs. Martin. “Just examine that collar under his black curls, and see if there is a name on it.”

Mr. Martin held the lantern up so our Mary could see. “The collar is very handsome,” she said, “studded with some red stones—‘Mrs. Ringworth, Hillcrest,’ is on it.”

“Good gracious!” exclaimed Mrs. Martin. “Third Cousin Annie!”

Everybody laughed at her comical tone. “Now we’ll have some fun getting the dog away from her,” said Mrs. Martin. “Annie never was known to give up anything that ever belonged to her.”

“And the amazing thing about his talking would appeal to her,” said Mr. Martin gloomily; “she does love to be singular.”

“Why, I remember having her tell me about this dog,” our Missie went on. “Just a year ago I met her downtown and she told me she had just bought a young dog from a man in the street and she had become so fond of him that she was going to take him to California with her—and I told her we had just had a puppy stolen from us. Fancy Niger being both dogs,” and she began to laugh so heartily that her husband and daughter and the maids joined her, and Niger, feeling that he ought to do something, rumbled out, “Jus’ a crumb, jus’ a crumb—crumb—crumb!”

“Bless him, he’s hungry,” said Mr. Martin, and he turned to his wife. “Couldn’t Hester make us some of her nice coffee—I declare I’m thirsty and hungry myself, after all that prancing about our dusty cellar.”

Mrs. Martin pretended to be vexed, and drew herself up proudly. “My cellar is as clean as any housekeeper’s in this neighborhood.”

“Yes, yes, my dear,” laughed Mr. Martin; “I wasn’t censuring. Where there is a furnace there is dust. But the coffee—”

Hester and Anna had already disappeared, and soon they came back with the coffee and some lovely fresh doughnuts and bread and butter. Daisy and I had just a tiny scrap of doughnut, but Niger ate half a dozen.

“Mother,” said Mary, “I want to go down and sleep in my little bed with Niger in his box beside me, as he used to do. It will seem like old times.”

“Very well, my child,” said our Missie, and she went downstairs herself, tucked her daughter in bed, and hovered over her like a great bird, for Niger, who at once became friends with us, told us all about it in the morning.

“Would, oh, would Third Cousin Annie leave Niger with us?” was the question, and “What, oh, what would Billie say to him when she came home?”