BLOOD WILL TELL (As told by the dog)
I am a middle-sized dog, with spots on me here and there, and several different colours of hair mixed in even where there aren't any spots, and my ears are frazzled a little on the ends where they have been chewed in fights.
At first glance you might not pick me for an aristocrat. But I am one. I was considerably surprised when I discovered it, as nothing in my inmost feelings up to that time, nor in the treatment which I had received from dogs, humans or boys, had led me to suspect it.
I can well remember the afternoon on which the discovery was made. A lot of us dogs were lying in the grass, up by the swimming hole, just lazying around, and the boys were doing the same. All the boys were naked and comfortable, and no humans were about, the only thing near being a cow or two and some horses, and although large they are scarcely more human than boys. Everybody had got tired of swimming, and it was too hot to drown out gophers or fight bumblebees, and the boys were smoking grapevine cigarettes and talking.
Us dogs was listening to the boys talk. A Stray Boy, which I mean one not claimed or looked out for or owned by any dog, says to Freckles Watson, who is my boy:
“What breed would you call that dog of yours, Freck?”
I pricked up my ears at that. I cannot say that I had ever set great store by breeds up to the time that I found out I was an aristocrat myself, believing, as Bill Patterson, a human and the town drunkard, used to say when intoxicated, that often an honest heart beats beneath the outcast's ragged coat.
“Spot ain't any one particular breed,” says Freckles. “He's considerably mixed.”
“He's a mongrel,” says Squint Thompson, who is Jack Thompson's boy.
“He ain't,” says Freckles, so huffy that I saw a mongrel must be some sort of a disgrace. “You're a link, link liar, and so's your Aunt Mariar,” says Freckles.
I thought there might be a fight then, but it was too hot for any enjoyment in a fight, I guess, for Squint let it pass, only saying, “I ain't got any Aunt Mariar, and you're another.”
“A dog,” chips in the Stray Boy, “has either got to be a thoroughbred or a mongrel. He's either an aristocrat or else he's a common dog.”
“Spot ain't any common dog,” says Freckles, sticking up for me. “He can lick any dog in town within five pounds of his weight.”
“He's got some spaniel in him,” says the Stray Boy.
“His nose is pointed like a hound's nose,” says Squint Thompson.
“Well,” says Freckles, “neither one of them kind of dogs is a common dog.”
“Spot has got some bulldog blood in him, too,” says Tom Mulligan, an Irish boy owned by a dog by the name of Mutt Mulligan. “Did you ever notice how Spot will hang on so you can't pry him loose, when he gets into a fight?”
“That proves he is an aristocratic kind of dog,” says Freckles.
“There's some bird dog blood in Spot,” says the Stray Boy, sizing me up careful.
“He's got some collie in him, too,” says Squint Thompson. “His voice sounds just like a collie's when he barks.”
“But his tail is more like a coach dog's tail,” says Tom Mulligan.
“His hair ain't, though,” says the Stray Boy. “Some of his hair is like a setter's.”
“His teeth are like a mastiff's,” says Mutt Mulligan's boy Tom. And they went on like that; I never knew before there were so many different kinds of thoroughbred dog. Finally Freckles says:
“Yes, he's got all them different kinds of thoroughbred blood in him, and he's got other kinds you ain't mentioned and that you ain't slick enough to see. You may think you're running him down, but what you say just proves he ain't a common dog.”
I was glad to hear that. It was beginning to look to me that they had a pretty good case for me being a mongrel.
“How does it prove it?” asked the Stray Boy.
“Well,” says Freckles, “you know who the King of Spain is, don't you?”
They said they'd heard of him from time to time.
“Well,” says Freckles, “if you were a relation of the King of Spain you'd be a member of the Spanish royal family. You fellows may not know that, but you would. You'd be a swell, a regular high-mucky-muck.”
They said they guessed they would.
“Now, then,” says Freckles, “if you were a relation to the King of Switzerland, too, you'd be just twice as swell, wouldn't you, as if you were only related to one royal family? Plenty of people are related to just one royal family.”
Tom Mulligan butts in and says that way back, in the early days, his folks was the Kings of Ireland; but no one pays any attention.
“Suppose, then, you're a cousin of the Queen of England into the bargain and your grand-dad was King of Scotland, and the Prince of Wales and the Emperor of France and the Sultan of Russia and the rest of those royalties were relations of yours, wouldn't all that royal blood make you twenty times as much of a high-mucky-muck as if you had just one measly little old king for a relation?”
The boys had to admit that it would.
“You wouldn't call a fellow with all that royal blood in him a mongrel, would you?” says Freckles. “You bet your sweet life you wouldn't! A fellow like that is darned near on the level with a congressman or a vicepresident. Whenever he travels around in the old country they turn out the brass band; and the firemen and the Knights of Pythias and the Modern Woodmen parade, and the mayor makes a speech, and there's a picnic and firecrackers, and he gets blamed near anything he wants. People kow-tow to him, just like they do to a swell left-handed pitcher or a champion prizefighter. If you went over to the old country and called a fellow like that a mongrel, and it got out oh you, you would be sent to jail for it.”
Tom Mulligan says yes, that is so; his grand-dad came to this country through getting into some kind of trouble about the King of England, and the King of England ain't anywhere near as swell as the fellow Freckles described, nor near so royal, neither.
“Well, then,” says Freckles, “it's the same way with my dog, Spot, here. Any dog can be full of just one kind of thoroughbred blood. That's nothing! But Spot here has got more different kinds of thoroughbred blood in him than any dog you ever saw. By your own say-so he has. He's got all kinds of thoroughbred blood in him. If there's any kind he ain't got, you just name it, will you?”
“He ain't got any Great Dane in him,” yells the Stray Boy, hating to knuckle under.
“You're a liar, he has, too,” says Freckles.
The Stray Boy backed it, and there was a fight. All us dogs and boys gathered around in a ring to watch it, and I was more anxious than anybody else. For the way that fight went, it was easy to see, would decide what I was.
Well, Freckles licked that Stray Boy, and rubbed his nose in the mud, and that's how I come to be an aristocrat.
Being an aristocrat may sound easy. And it may look easy to outsiders. And it may really be easy for them that are used to it. But it wasn't easy for me. It came on me suddenly, the knowledge that I was one, and without warning. I didn't have any time to practise up being one. One minute I wasn't one, and the next minute I was; and while, of course, I felt important over it, there were spells when I would get kind of discouraged, too, and wish I could go back to being a common dog again. I kept expecting my tastes and habits to change. I watched and waited for them to. But they didn't. No change at all set in on me. But I had to pretend I was changed. Then I would get tired of pretending, and be down-hearted about the whole thing, and say to myself: “There has been a mistake. I am not an aristocrat after all.”
I might have gone along like that for a long time, partly in joy over my noble birth, and partly in doubt, without ever being certain, if it had not been for a happening which showed, as Freckles said, that blood will tell.
It happened the day Wilson's World's Greatest One Ring Circus and Menagerie came to our town. Freckles and me, and all the other dogs and boys, and a good many humans, too, followed the street parade around through town and back to the circus lot. Many went in, and the ones that didn't have any money hung around outside a while and explained to each other they were going at night, because a circus is more fun at night anyhow. Freckles didn't have any money, but his dad was going to take him that night, so when the parade was over, him and me went back to his dad's drug store on Main Street, and I crawled under the soda-water counter to take a nap.
Freckles's dad, that everyone calls Doc Watson, is a pretty good fellow for a human, and he doesn't mind you hanging around the store if you don't drag bones in or scratch too many fleas off. So I'm there considerable in right hot weather. Under the soda water counter is the coolest place for a dog in the whole town. There's a zinc tub under there always full of water, where Doc washes the soda-water glasses, and there's always considerable water slopped on to the floor. It's damp and dark there always. Outdoors it may be so hot in the sun that your tongue hangs out of you so far you tangle your feet in it, but in under there you can lie comfortable and snooze, and when you wake up and want a drink there's the tub with the glasses in it. And flies don't bother you because they stay on top of the counter where soda water has been spilled.
Circus day was a hot one, and I must have drowsed off pretty quick after lying down. I don't know how long I slept, but when I waked up it was with a start, for something important was going on outside in Main Street. I could hear people screaming and swearing and running along the wooden sidewalk, and horses whinnying, and dogs barking, and old Si Emery, the city marshal, was yelling out that he was an officer of the law, and the steam whistle on the flour mill was blowing. And it all seemed to be right in front of our store. I was thinking I'd better go out and see about it, when the screen doors crashed like a runaway horse had come through them, and the next minute a big yellow dog was back of the counter, trying to scrouch down and scrooge under it like he was scared and was hiding. He backed me into the corner without seeing me or knowing I was there, and like to have squashed me.
No dog—and it never struck me that maybe this wasn't a dog—no dog can just calmly sit down on me like that when I'm waking up from a nap, and get away with it, no matter how big he is, and in spite of the darkness under there I could see and feel that this was the biggest dog in the world. I had been dreaming I was in a fight, anyhow, when he crowded in there with his hindquarters on top of me, and I bit him on the hind leg.
When I bit him he let out a noise like a thrashing machine starting up. It wasn't a bark. Nothing but the end of the world coming could bark like that. It was a noise more like I heard one time when the boys dared Freckles to lie down between the cattle guards on the railroad track and let a train run over him about a foot above his head, and I laid down there with him and it nearly deefened both of us. When he let out that noise I says to myself, “Great guns! What kind of a dog have I bit?”
And as he made that noise he jumped, and over went the counter, marble top and all, with a smash, and jam into the show window he went, with his tail swinging, and me right after him, practically on top of him. It wasn't that I exactly intended to chase him, you understand, but I was rattled on account of that awful noise he had let out, and I wanted to get away from there, and I went the same way he did. So when he bulged through the window glass on to the street I bulged right after him, and as he hit the sidewalk I bit him again. The first time I bit him because I was sore, but the second time I bit him because I was so nervous I didn't know what I was doing, hardly. And at the second bite, without even looking behind him, he jumped clean over the hitch rack and a team of horses in front of the store and landed right in the middle of the road with his tail between his legs.
And then I realized for the first time he wasn't a dog at all. He was the circus lion.
Mind you, I'm not saying that I would have bit him at all if I'd a-known at the start he was a lion.
And I ain't saying I wouldn't 'a' bit him, either.
But actions speak louder than words, and records are records, and you can't go back on them, and the fact is I did bite him. I bit him twice.
And that second bite, when we came bulging through the window together, the whole town saw. It was getting up telephone poles, and looking out of second-story windows, and crawling under sidewalks and into cellars, and trying to hide behind the town pump; but no matter where it was trying to get to, it had one eye on that lion, and it saw me chasing him out of that store. I don't say I would have chased him if he hadn't been just ahead of me, anyhow, and I don't say I wouldn't have chased him, but the facts are I did chase him.
The lion was just as scared as the town—and the town was so scared it didn't know the lion was scared at all—and when his trainer got hold of him in the road he was tickled to death to be led back to his cage, and he lay down in the far corner of it, away from the people, and trembled till he shook the wagon it was on.
But if there was any further doubts in any quarter about me being an aristocrat, the way I bit and chased that lion settled 'em forever. That night Freckles and Doc went to the circus, and I marched in along with them. And every kid in town, as they saw Freckles and me marching in, says:
“There goes the dog that licked the lion!”
And Freckles, every time any one congratulated him on being the boy that belonged to that kind of a dog, would say:
“Blood will tell! Spot's an aristocrat, he is.”
And him and me and Doc Watson, his dad, stopped in front of the lion's cage that night and took a good long look at him. He was a kind of an old moth-eaten lion, but he was a lion all right, and he looked mighty big in there. He looked so big that all my doubts come back on me, and I says to myself: “Honest, now, if I'd a-known he was a lion, and that big a lion, when I bit him, would I have bit him or would I not?”
But just then Freckles reached down and patted me on the head and said: “You wasn't afraid of him, was you, old Spot! Yes, sir, blood will tell!”