Part 6

The next two minutes were of interest. Shunk unslung his rope as he advanced. Five feet away from the politely waiting collie he paused and flung the noose. He threw with practised skill. The wide noose encircled the dog. But before Shunk could tighten it, Chum had sprung lightly out of the contracting circle and, at a move of Link’s finger, had backed a few feet farther onto Ferris’s own property.

Chagrined at his miss and spurred on by the triple chuckle of his audience, the man coiled his rope and flung it a second time. Temper and haste spoiled his aim. He missed the dog clean. Baby Olive laughed aloud. Chum fairly radiated contempt at such poor marksmanship. Coiling his rope as, at another signal, Chum backed a little farther away, Shunk shouted:

“I’ll git ye, yet! An’ when I do, I’ll tie you to a post in my yard an’ muzzle you. Then I’ll take a club to you, till there ain’t a whole bone left in yer carcass. If Ferris buys you free, there won’t be more’n sassage-meat fer him to tote home.”

Olive gasped. The grin left Link’s face. Dorcas looked up appealingly at her husband. Shunk flung his noose a third time. Chum, well understanding now what was expected of him, bounded far backward.

“Get off of my land!” called Ferris, in a queerly gentle and almost humble voice.

“When I take this cur off’n it with me!” snarled the catcher, too hot on the quest to be wholly sane.

He coiled his rope once more. At a gesture from Link, the dog lay down.

“In the presence of a competent witness I’ve ordered you off my land,” repeated Ferris, in that same meek voice. “You’ve refused. The law allows me to use force in such a case. It—”

Deceived by the humility of the tone and lured by the dog’s new passivity, Shunk made one final cast of the noose. This time its folds settled round the collie’s massive throat ruff. In the same fraction of a second, Ferris yelled:

“Take him, Chum! Take him!”

The dog heard and most gleefully he obeyed. As the triumphant Shunk drew tight the noose about his victim’s neck and sought to bring the landing net into play, Chum launched himself, like a furry catapult, full at the man’s throat.

And now there was no hint of fun or of mischief in the collie’s deep-set dark eyes. They flamed into swirling fury. He had received the word to attack. And he obeyed with a fiery zest. So may Joffre’s grim legions have felt, in 1914, when, at the Marne, they were told they need no longer keep up the hated retreat, but might turn upon their German foes and pay the bill for the past months’ humiliations.

As the furious collie sprang, Shunk instinctively sought to clap the landing net’s thick meshes over Chum’s head. But the dog was too swift for him. The wooden side of the net smote, almost unfelt, against the fur-protected skull. The impact sent it flying out of its wielder’s grasp.

The blow checked the collie’s charge by the barest instant. And in that instant, Shunk wheeled and fled. Just behind him was a shellbark tree, with a low limb jutting out above the lane. Shunk dropped his coat and leaped for this overhanging limb as Chum made a second dash for him.

The man’s fingers closed round the branch and he sought to draw himself up, screaming loudly for help. The scream redoubled in volume and scaled half an octave in pitch as the pursuing collie’s teeth met in Shunk’s calf.

His flabby muscles galvanised by pain and by terror, the man made shift to drag his weight upward and to fling a leg over the branch. But as the right leg hooked itself across the bough, the dangling left leg felt a second embrace from the searing white teeth, in a slashing bite that clove through trouser and sock and skin and flesh and grated against the bone itself.

Screeching and mouthing, Shunk wriggled himself up onto the branch and lay hugging it with both arms and both punctured legs. Below him danced and snarled Chum, launching himself high in air, again and again, in a mad effort to get at his escaped prey. Then the dog turned to the approaching Ferris in stark appeal for help in dislodging the intruder from his precarious perch.

“That’s enough, Chummie!” drawled Link. “Leave him be!”

He petted the dog’s head and smiled amusedly at Chum’s visible reluctance in abandoning the delightful game of man treeing. At a motion of Ferris’s hand, the collie walked reluctantly away and lay down beside Dorcas.

Chum could never understand why humans had such a habit of calling him off—just when fun was at its height. It was like this when he ran stray cattle off the farm or chased predatory tramps. Still, Link was his god; obedience was Chum’s creed. Wherefore, so far as he was concerned, Eben Shunk ceased to exist.

The dog catcher noted the cessation of attack. And he ceased his own howls. He drew himself to a painful sitting posture on the tree limb and began to nurse one of his torn legs.

“You’ll go to jail for this!” he whined down at Ferris.

“I’ll swear out a warr’nt agin ye, the minute I git back to Hampton. Yes, an’ I’ll git the judge to order your dog shot as a men’ce to public safety an’—”

“I guess not!” Ferris cut him short as Shunk’s whine swelled to a howl. “I guess not, Mister Meanest Man. In fact, you’ll be lucky if you keep out of the hoosgow, on my charge of trespass. You came onto my land against my wish. You couldn’t help seein’ my No Trespassing sign yonder. I ordered you off. You refused to go. I gave you fair warnin’. You wouldn’t mind it. I did all that before I sicked the dog on you. My wife is a reli’ble witness. And she can swear to it in any court. If I sick my dog onto a trespasser who refuses to clear out when he’s told to, there’s no law in North Jersey that will touch either me or Chum. And you know it as well as I do. Now I tell you once more to clear off of my farm. If you’ll go quick I’ll see the dog don’t bother you. If you put up any more talk I’ll station him under this tree and leave you and him to companion each other here all day. Now git!”

As though to impress his presence once more on Mr. Shunk, Chum slowly got up from the ground at Dorcas’ feet and slouched lazily toward the tree again. Link, wondering at the dog’s apparent disobedience of his command to leave the prisoner alone, looked on with a frown of perplexity. But at once his face cleared.

For Chum was not honouring the tree dweller by so much as a single upward glance. Instead, he was picking his way to where Shunk’s discarded coat lay on the ground near the tree foot. The dog stood over this unlovely garment, looking down at its greasily worn surface with sniffling disapproval. Then, with much cold deliberation, Chum knelt down and thrust one of his great furry shoulders against the rumpled surface of the coat and shoved the shoulder along the unkempt expanse of cloth. After which he repeated the same performance with his other shoulder, ending the demonstration by rolling solemnly and luxuriously upon the rumpled, mishandled coat.

Link burst into a bellow of Homeric laughter. Shunk, peering down, went purple with utter and speechless indignation. Both men understood dogs. Therefore, to both of them, Chum’s purpose was as clear as day. But Baby Olive looked on in crass perplexity. She wondered why Link found it so funny.

“What’s he doing, Link?” she demanded. “What’s Chummie rolling on that nassy ol’ coat for? It’ll get him all dirty.”

“Listen, Baby,” exhorted Link, when he could speak. “A dog never digs his shoulders into anything, that way, and then rolls in it—except carrion! He—”

“Link!” cried Dorcas, scandalised.

“That’s so, old girl,” replied her husband. “It’s a busy day and we won’t have time to waste in giving the dog a bath. Come away, Chum!”

The dog came back to his place in front of Dorcas. Ferris, wearying of the scene, nodded imperatively to Shunk.

“Come down!” he decreed. “It’s safe. So long as you get out of here, now!”

Mouthing, gobbling like some distressed turkey, Eben Shunk proceeded to let his bulk down from the limb. He groaned in active misery as his bitten legs were called upon to bear his weight again. He stood for a moment glowering from Link to the disgruntedly passive collie. Chum returned the look with compound interest, then glanced at Ferris in wistful appeal, dumbly begging leave to renew the chase.

Shunk still fought for coherent utterance and weighed in his bemused brain the fact that he had overstepped the law. Before he could speak, a pleasant diversion was caused by Olive Chatham.

The little girl had been a happily interested spectator of the bout between her adored Chum and this pig-eyed fat man. But the coat-rolling episode had been beyond her comprehension. She had trotted away, after Link’s explanation of it, and her mind had cast about for some new excitement. She had found it.

The bony yellow horse had been left untied; in Shunk’s haste to annex a dog-catching dollar. Therefore the horse, after the manner of his kind, had begun to crop the wayside grass. But this grass was close cut and was hard for his decaying teeth to nibble. A little farther on, just within the limits of the lane, the herbage grew lusher and higher. So the horse had strayed thither, trundling his disreputable wagon after him.

Olive’s questing glance had fallen upon horse and cart, not ten feet away from her, and several yards inside of the farm’s boundary line. She heard also that pitiful sound of whimpering from within the canvas-covered body of the wagon. And she remembered what Link had said about the dogs imprisoned there.

She hurried up to the vehicle and circumnavigated it until she came to the grating at the back.

Clambering up on the rear step, she looked in. At once several pathetically sniffing little noses were thrust through the bars for a caress or a kind word in that abode of loneliness and fear.

This was too much for the child’s warm heart. She resolved then and there upon the rôle of deliverer. Reaching up to the grated door, she pushed back its simple bolt.

Instantly she was half-buried under a canine avalanche. No fewer than seven dogs—all small and all badly scared—bounded through the open doorway toward freedom. In their dash for safety they almost knocked the baby to the ground. Then with joyous barks and yelps they galloped off in every direction.

This was the spectacle which smote upon the horrified senses of Eben Shunk as he fought for words under the tree that had been his abode of refuge.

Shunk had had an unusually profitable morning. Not often did a single day’s work net him seven dollars. But this was circus day at Paterson and many Hampton people had gone thither. They had left their dogs at home. One or two of these dogs had wandered onto the street, where they had fallen easy victims to the dog catcher. Others he had snatched, protesting, from the porches and dooryards of their absent owners. Seven of the lot had not chanced to wear license tags, and these Shunk had corralled in his wagon. Now his best day’s work in months threatened to become a total loss.

With a wild wrench he drove his arms into the sleeves of the coat he had just rescued. In the same series of motions—and bawling an assortment of expletives, which Link hoped Dorcas and Olive might not understand—the dog catcher made a wild rush for his escaped captives, picking up and brandishing the landing net as he ran.

“Chum!” whispered Ferris tensely.

As he spoke he pointed to the bony yellow horse.

“Easy!” he added, observing the steed’s feebleness and age.

The yellow horse was roused from his first square meal in weeks by a gentle nip at his heel. He threw up his head with a snort and made a clumsy bound forward.

But, instantly, Chum was in front of him, herding him as often he had herded recalcitrant cows of Link’s, steering him for the highroad. As the wagon creaked and bumped out onto the turnpike, Chum imparted a farewell nip to one of the charger’s hocks.

With a really creditable burst of speed the horse set off down the road at a hand gallop. The rattle and squeaking of the disreputable wagon reached Shunk’s ears just as Eben had almost cornered one of the seven escaping dogs.

Shunk turned round. Down the road his horse was running. A sharp turn was barely quarter of a mile beyond. On the stone of this turn the brute might well shatter the wagon and perhaps injure himself. There was but one thing for his distracted owner to do. Horse and wagon were worth more than seven dollars—even if not very much more. Eben Shunk was a thrifty man. And he knew he must forgo the capture of the seven rescued dogs if he intended to save his equipage.

He broke into a run, giving chase to his faithless steed. As he passed the thunderously guffawing Ferris, Shunk wasted enough precious breath and time to yell:

“I’ll git that dog of yourn yet! Next time he sets foot in Hampton Borough I’ll—”

The rest of his threat was lost in distance.

“H’m!” mused Ferris, the laugh dying on his lips. “He’ll do it too! He’ll be layin’ in wait for Chum, if it takes a year. In the borough limits dogs and folks is bound by borough laws. That means we can’t take Chum to Hampton again. Unless—Lord, but folks can stir up more ructions over a decent innocent dog than over all the politics that ever happened! If—”

His maundering voice trailed away. Just before him, at the spot where Shunk had jettisoned his defiled and much-rolled-on coat, was a scrap of paper. It was dirty and it was greasy and it had been folded in a half sheet. His hard-learned lessons in neatness impelled Link to stoop and pick up this bit of litter which marred the clean surface of the sward. The doubled half sheet opened in his hand as he glanced carelessly at it. The first of several sentences scrawled thereon leaped forth to meet the man’s gaze.

Ferris stuck the paper in his shirt pocket and stared down the road after the receding Shunk with a smoulder in his eye that might have stirred that village functionary to some slight alarm had he seen it.

Olive’s visit to her big sister ended a week later. Link and Dorcas escorted her back to the Chathams’ Hampton home. Old Man Chatham ran the village’s general store and post office and had the further distinction of being a local justice of the peace.

Olive did not at all care for the idea of changing her outdoor life at the Ferris farm for a return to the metropolitan roar and jostle of a village with nine hundred inhabitants. And she showed her disapproval by sitting in solemn and semi-tearful silence on the slippery back seat of Link’s ancient carryall all the short way into town. Only as the carryall was drawing up in front of the store, which occupied the southerly half of her ancestral home, did she break silence. Then she said aggrievedly:

“This is just like when I get punished. And poor Chummie got punished, too, for something. Why did Chummie get punished, Link?”

“Old Chum never got punished in his life,” answered Link. “Whatever gave you that notion, Baby?”

“When I looked for him, to say by-by,” explained Olive, “he wasn’t anywheres at all. So I called at him. And he barked. And I went to where the bark was. And there was poor old Chummie all tied up to a chain in the barn. He was being punished. So I—”

"He wasn’t being punished, dear," said Dorcas, lifting the child to the ground. “Link tied him up so he wouldn’t follow us to town. There are so many autos on the roads Saturday afternoons. Besides, Eben Shunk—”

“Oh,” queried Olive. “Was that why? I thought he was punished. So I unpunished him. I let him loose. Not outdoors. Because maybe you’d see him and tie him again. I let him loose and I shut the barn door, so he could stay in there and play and not be tied.”

"It’d take Chum just about ten minutes to worry the barn door open!" grinned Link. “He’ll get our scent and come pirootin’ straight after us.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Dorcas. “Hadn’t you better turn back and—”

But the hurrying of the child’s father and mother from the house to welcome the newcomers drove the thought out of her mind. Link had but grinned the wider at her troubled suggestion. Greeting his parents-in-law, Ferris hitched his horse and followed Dorcas and her mother to the veranda.

There they sat talking until suddenly a volley of heart-broken screams broke in upon them. Up the path from the street rushed little Olive, her eyes streaming, her baby mouth in a wide circle, from which issued a series of panic cries.

Both men sprang to their feet and hurried down the path to meet her. Her mother and sister rushed from the house at the same moment and ran to succour the screaming child. But Olive thrust them back, squealing frantically to Link:

“That awful man’s got Chummie! He tooked him from me and he says he’ll beat him till he’s dead. I pulled Chummie away and the man slapped me over and he’s running off with Chummie!”

Old Man Chatham was an elder in the church at Hampton. Yet on hearing of the blow administered to his worshipped child and at the sight of an ugly red mark athwart her plump baby face, an expletive crackled luridly from between his pious lips—an expletive which should have brought him before the consistory of his church for rigid discipline.

Then, by the time Olive had sobbed out her pitiful tidings, both he and Link Ferris had set off down the street at a dead run. Instinctively they were heading for an alley which bisected the street a furlong below—an alley wherein abode Eben Shunk and where his backyard pound was maintained.

Truly, Chum had let himself and others in for an abundance of trouble when he scratched and nosed at the recalcitrant barn door until he pried it wide enough open to let him slip out. He had caught the scent, as Link predicted, and he had turned into the main street of Hampton a bare five minutes behind the carryall.

As he was on his orderly journey toward the Chatham home, Olive spied him from the dooryard and ran out to greet him.

And Eben Shunk, seeing them, waited only long enough to snatch up his rope and landing net, and gave chase. Coming upon the unsuspecting pair from behind, he was able to jam the net over Chum’s head before the placidly pacing collie was aware of his presence.

Chum, catching belated sight and scent of his enemy, sought right valiantly to free himself and give battle. But the tough meshes of the net had been drawn as tightly over his head and jaws as any glove, holding him helpless. And Shunk was fastening the rope about the wildly struggling neck. It was then that Olive sprang to her canine comrade’s aid, only to be slapped out of the way by the irate and overoccupied man. Whereat, she had fled for reinforcements.

A dog has but a single set of weapons, namely, his mighty jaws. The net held Chum’s mouth fast shut. The noose was cutting off his wind. And bit by bit strangulation and confusion weakened the collie’s struggles. With a final wrench of the noose, Shunk got under way. Heading down street toward his own alley, he dragged the fiercely unwilling prisoner behind him. A crowd accompanied him, as did their highly uncomplimentary remarks.

As Shunk reached the mouth of the alley and prepared to turn toward his own yard, two newcomers were added to the volunteer escort. But these two men were not content to look on in passive disgust. The elder of them hurled himself bodily at Shunk.

Link intervened as his enraged father-in-law was about to seize the dog catcher by the throat.

“Don’t!” he warned, thrusting Chatham back. “There’s the cop! You’re a judge. You sure know a better way to get Shunk than to punch him. If you hit the man you give him a chance to sue. Do the suing, yourself!”

While he talked, Link was using his hastily drawn farm knife in scientific fashion. One slash severed the noose from about Chum’s furry throat. A second cut parted the drawstring of the net. A dexterous tug at the meshes tore the net off the dog’s head, setting free the terrible imprisoned jaws.

Meanwhile, choking back his craving to assail Shunk, Old Man Chatham strode up to the dumfounded constable.

“Officer,” Chatham commanded in his very best bench manner, albeit still sputtering with rage and loss of breath, “you’ll arrest that man—that Shunk person, there—and you’ll convey him to the court room over my store. There I’ll commit him to the calaboose to await a hearing in the morning.”

Shunk gobbled in wordless and indignant dismay. The constable hesitated, confused.

“I accuse him,” went on the grimly judicious accents, “of striking and knocking down my six-year-old daughter, Olive. He struck her, here, in the public thoroughfare, causing possible ‘abrasions and contusions and mental and physical anguish,’ as the statoot books describe it. The penalty for striking a minor, as you know, is severe. I shall press the charge, when the case comes before one of my feller magistrates, to-morrow. I shall also bring civil action for—”

“Hold on, there!” bleated Shunk as the constable, overawed by the array of legal terms, took a truculent step toward him. “Hold on, there! The brat—she beat at me with both her fists, she did, an’—”

“And in self-preservation against a six-year-old child you were obliged, to knock her down?” put in Link. “That’s a plea that’ll sure clear you. ’Specially if there’s any of the jury that’s got little girls of their own.”

"I didn’t knock nobody down!" fumed Shunk, wincing under the constable’s grip on his shoulder. “She was a-pummellin’ me an’ tryin’ to git the dog away from me. I just slapped her, light like, to make her quit. She slipped an’ tumbled down. It didn’t hurt her none. She was up an’ off in a—”

"You’ll all bear witness," observed Link, “that he confesses to hittin’ the child and that she fell down when he hit her. We hadn’t anything but her word to go on till now. And children are apt to get confused in court. Shunk, you’ve just saved us a heap of trouble by ownin’ up.”

"Ownin’ up?" shrilled the dog catcher, stung to the belated fury which is supposed to obsess a cornered rat. “Ownin’ up? Not much! Chatham, I’m a-goin’ to bring soot agin you, as your child’s legal gardeen, for her ‘interferin’ with an off’cer in pursoot of his dooty’! I’m a sworn off’cer of this borough. I was doin’ my dooty in catchin’ that unlicensed cur yonder. She interfered with me an’ tried to git him away from me. I know enough law to—”

He checked himself, then pointed to Link and demanded:

“Constable Todd, I want you should arrest Lincoln Ferris! I charge him with assaultin’ me, just now, in the presence of ev’ry one here an’ interferin’ with me in the pursoot of my dooty, an’ for takin’ away from me, with a drawn knife, an unlicensed dog I had caught as the law orders I should catch such dogs on the streets of this borough. Take him along unless you want to lose your shield for neglect of dooty. If I’ve got to stand trial, there’s a couple of men who’ll stand it too.”

“Gee!” groaned Old Man Chatham, his legal lore revealing to him the mess wherein Shunk could so easily involve Ferris and himself. “You were dead right, Link. One dog can cause more mixups in a c’munity than—”

“Than Eben Shunk?” asked Ferris. “No, you’re wrong, sir. Shunk can stir up more bother than a poundful of dogs. Listen here, Shunk,” he went on. “You claim that Olive and I both interfered with you in the pursuit of your duty. How did we?”

“By tryin’ to take away from me a dog that the law c’mpelled me to catch, of course,” snapped Eben, adding: “An’ I charge you with ’sault and batt’ry too. You hit me in the stummick an’ knocked me clean off’n the sidewalk.”

“I was at work over my dog with one hand and I was holding back Mr. Chatham with the other,” denied Link. “How could I have hit you? Did any one here see me strike this man?” he challenged the crowd.

“Aw, you didn’t hit him!” answered one of the boys who had picked up stones. “He slipped on the curb. I saw him do it. Nobody hit him.”

“That’s right,” agreed the constable. “I was here. And I didn’t witness any assault.”