Puslapio vaizdai
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took off his boots and socks, and rolled up his trousers. While doing this he told his wife what the ferryman had demanded. The cost of their mishap sobered her.

"That's an awful price, but I reckon ye could n't do anything but pay it."

"Yonder he comes now, as hard as he can pole."

"Look here, pap, if ye 're goin' to unload all them things, I want to be out there to see about 'em. I'll climb one of the mules."

"Don't believe I 'd take a mule out there to stand, ma. He might git stuck. Then we'd be plumb ruined. I'm goin' to wade out. Why not let me tote ye?"

The woman agreed. Her husband threw his hat on the sand, and stooped till she could put her arms about him. Then, grasping his burden resolutely, he lifted her

up and waded away. The little dog plunged in after them.

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Reckon there 's any danger of you boggin' down, pap, me bein' so heavy on ye?"

"Not a bit, ma. This bottom's all right if ye keep steppin'. When ye first set foot on it, it feels hard; but before ye can step off it 's crawlin' out from under ye."

By this time little was visible of the wagon except the canvas cover and the tops of the hind wheels. As Alf poled the flatboat, he saw the old couple coming through the water, the little dog swimming near them. The woman's coarsely shod feet stuck out stiffly, and her wrinkled face rested against her old husband's tousled gray head. The young man smiled at the odd picture.

After bringing the end of the flatboat up against the wagon, Alf slipped off his boots, stepped overboard, and made the boat fast to the wheels with ropes. By this time the old man had deposited his wife on the boat, and he and the little dog had climbed

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on.

After removing the sheet and bows, Alf began to pull things up out of the water and set them on the boat. The man and his wife carried them farther back. The wagon-bed was full to the top of the side boards, and some of the furniture stood higher. The cooking-stove was the last and heaviest object taken out.

"No wonder the wagon got fast," Alf remarked. "You had a good, solid load."

The wagon-bed was now floating. They

Drawn by Martin Justice. Half-tone plate engraved by R. C. Collins "THIS BOTTOM 'S ALL RIGHT IF YE KEEP STEPPIN'"

lifted it upon the boat. Then the two, using the boat-poles as handspikes, went to work on a fore wheel, "prizing" it up and forcing the reluctant sands to relinquish their grasp. When the wheel was high enough, the nut was removed and the wheel slipped off the axle. In this way, a piece at a time, the whole wagon was extricated.

"Now climb aboard, Mr. Smoot!"

The old man obeyed, and dropped wearily into a chair among his wet household goods and the pieces of his dismembered wagon. Alf threw a rope over his shoulder and waded southward, towing the flatboat.

When everything had been unloaded on the sand near the feather bed, Alf helped put the wagon together.

"There! That 's all we can do for a few hours-till your things dry. Fellow waiting up yonder now, but I'll come back and help you load up when you 're ready. Sit down here in the shade of this wagon and rest till noon. You look tired out, both of you. I'm going to take you up to dinner. Mother will be glad to see you; and maybe she 'll have some milk and vegetables for you, besides."

"Thanky," said the woman. "We'll be the gladdest kind to git 'em."

The young ferryman started, but came back with his hand in his pocket.

"Mr. Smoot," he said, "here's six dollars and a half. Guess I 'm entitled to a dollar or two by good rights, but I only charge you the usual fifty cents. I don't mind giving a neighbor a lift. Made you pay seven dollars just to show you how mean I had a chance to be if I felt like it; and I hand this back to prove that I don't feel like it."

"Well, now, we 're a thousand times obleeged-" Mr. Smoot began in stammering surprise.

"That's all right," Alf called back from the boat. "I may get stuck in a sand-bog myself some day, or some other tight place. And, if I do, I don't want any thief to come along and rob me, just because I can't help myself. See you later!" He pushed off and poled away.

"Pap, if the Texas people 's all like him, I don't know as I 'm so bad put out because we've come. He's the cleverest, 'commodatin'est young feller I've seen in a' age. What was you thinkin' about when ye called 'im bigoty?"

"Ma," answered the old man, humbly, "I al'ays was too spunky. And, on top of that, reckon I must be gittin' old and childish."

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CHUMS

BY EDWIN L. SABIN

WITH PICTURES BY FREDERIC DORR STEELE

ON'T you remember when, your mother laughingly dissenting, your father said that you might have him, and with rapture in your heart and a broad smile on your face you went dancing through the town to get him?

There was quite a family of them-the old mother dog and her four children. Of the puppies it was hard to tell which was the best; that is, hard for the disinterested observer. As for yourself, in the very incipiency of your hesitation something about one of the doggies appealed to you. Your eyes and hands wandered to the others, but invariably came back to him.

With the mother anxiously yet proudly looking on, you picked him up in your glad young arms, and he cuddled and squirmed and licked your face; and in an instant the subtle bonds of chumship were sealed forever. You had chosen.

"I guess I'll take this one," you said to the owner.

And without again putting him down you carried him off, and home.

How unhappy he appeared to be, during his first day in his new place! He whined and whimpered in his plaintive little tremolo, and al

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though you thrust a pannikin of milk under his ridiculous nose, and playmates from far and near hastened over to inspect him and pay him tribute, he refused to be appeased. He simply squatted on his uncertain, wabbly haunches, and cried for "mama."

You fixed him an ideal nest in the barn; but it rather made your heart ache-with that vague ache of boyhood-to leave him there alone for the night, and you went back many times to induce him to feel better. Finally, you were withheld by your father's: "Oh, I would n't keep running out there so much, if I were you. Let him be, and pretty soon he 'll curl up and go to sleep."

Sure enough, his high utterances ceased, and nothing more emanated from him. Whereupon your respect for your father's varied store of knowledge greatly increased.

In the morning you hastened out before breakfast to assure yourself that your

charge had survived the night; and you found that he had. He was all there, every ounce of him. What a wriggly, rolly, awkward lump of a pup he was, anyway! How enormous were his feet, how flapping his ears, how whip-like his tail, how unreliable his body, how erratic his legs! Yet he was pretty. He was positively beautiful.

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Your mother could not resist him. Can a woman resist anything that is young and helpless and soft and warm? With pictures in her mind of ruined flowers and

chewed-up household furnishings, she gingerly stooped down to pet him; and at the touch of his silky coat she was captive.

"Nice doggy!" she cooed.

Upon which he ecstatically endeavored to swallow her finger, and smeared her slippers with his dripping mouth, and peace was established. Thereafter mother was his stoutest champion.

The christening proved a matter requiring considerable discussion. When it comes right down to it, a name for a dog is a difficult proposition. It may be easy to name other persons' dogs, but your own dog is different.

Your father and mother, and even the hired girl, proposed names, all of which you rejected with scorn, until, suddenly, into existence popped a name which came like an old friend. You seized it, attached it to the pup, and it just fitted. No longer was he to be referred to as "it," or "he," or "the puppy." He possessed a personality.

The hired girl-and in those days there were more "hired girls" than "domestics"

- was the last to yield to his sway. She did not like dogs or cats about the house; dogs caused extra work, and cats got under foot.

But upon about the third morning after his arrival you caught her surreptitiously throwing him a crust from among the table leavings that she was bearing to the alley; and you knew that he had won her. Aye, he had won her. You also found out that he much preferred a crust thus flung to him from the garbage to any carefully prepared mess of more wholesome food.

Probably this subtle flattery pleased the girl, for although her grimness never vanished, once in a while you descried her smiling through it, in the

course of a trip to the back fence while the puppy faithfully gamboled at her skirts in tumultuous expectation of another fall of manna.

He grew visibly-like the seed planted by the Indian fakir. Enormous quantities of bread and milk he gobbled, always appearing in fear lest the supply should sink through the floor before he had eaten his fill. Between meals his body waned to ordinary size; but, mercy! what a transformation as he ate! At these times it swelled and swelled, until, the pan empty, the stomach full, its diameter far exceeded its length.

However, there was a more permanent growth than this, as you discovered when

you awoke to the fact that his collar was too tight for him. So you removed it, and in the interval between removing the old and getting the new properly engraved, his neck expanded fully an inch. The old collar would not meet around it when, as a test, you experimented.

So good-by to the collar of puppyhood, and let a real dog's collar dangle about his neck. The step marked the change from dresses to trousers.

Not only bread and milk and other

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mushy, non-stimulating stuff did he eat, but he ate, or tried to eat, everything else within his reach. Piecemeal, he ate most of the door-mat. He ate sticks of wood, both hard and soft, seemingly preferring a barrel-stave. He ate leaves, and stones, and lumps of dirt, and the heads off the double petunias and the geraniums. He ate a straw hat and a slipper. He attempted the broom and the clothes-line, the latter having upon it the week's wash, thus adding to the completeness of the menu.

In his fondness for using his uneasy teeth, new and sharp, he would have eaten you, did you not repeatedly wrest your anatomy from his tireless jaws.

As it was, you bore over all your person, and particularly upon your hands and calves, the prints of his ravaging, omnivorous mouth.

Your mother patiently darned your torn clothing, and submitted to having her own imperiled and her ankles nipped; while your father time and again gathered the

scattered fragments of his evening paper, and from a patchwork strove to decipher the day's news.

And "Look at him, will you!" cried the hired girl, delighted, indicating him as he was industriously dragging her mop to

cover.

WELL, like the storied peach, he "grew, and grew." Speedily he was too large for you to hold in your arms, and although he

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He fell ill. Ah, those days of his distemper were anxious days! He would n't eat, and he would n't play, and he would n't do anything except lie and feebly wag his tail, and by his dumbness place upon you the terrible burden of imagining his condition inside.

Here came to the rescue the old gardener, - Uncle Pete, black as the ace of spades,-who gave you the prescription of a nauseous yet simple remedy which you were compelled lovingly and apologetically to administer three times a day; and behold, the patient was cured.

You did n't blame him any for rising from his bed; and you would n't have blamed him any for cherishing against you a strong antipathy, in memory of what you forced down his throat. But he loved you just as much as ever.

Now he developed roaming propensities, which took the form of foraging expeditions. Once he brought back a five-pound roast of beef, his head high in the air, and buried it in the garden. Diligent inquiry exposed the fact that the beef had been intended by a neighbor for a dinner for a family of six, and for subsequent relays of hash, etc. Your mother, with profuse apologies, promptly despatched a substitute roast, the original being badly disfigured.

Upon another occasion he conveyed into the midst of a group consisting of your mother and father,

and the minister, guest of honor, sitting on the front porch, a headless chicken, still quivering. You were commanded to return the fowl, if you could; and

after making a canvass of the neighborhood you found a man who, having decapitated a choice pullet, and having turned for an instant to secure a pan of hot water, was mystified, upon again approaching the block, to see, in all his level

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