“Yes,” he said presently, stroking the puppy’s head as it rested against his knee, “we’ve a tough row to hoe, you and I, Buff. Just as I told you. Since you’re so different from two-footed curs, that you’re willing to associate with a jail-bird, perhaps it’d amuse you to hear how I came to be one. Eh, Buff?”
At each repetition of his name, Buff wagged his tail in delight at hearing at least one word whose meaning he knew.
“Not to take up too much of your time, Buff,” proceeded Trent, trying to negotiate a rutted bit of road with one hand while with the other he sought to ease the bumping of the car for the dog, “here’s the main idea: I’d just got that farm of mine on a paying basis, and changed it from a liability to something like an asset, when the smash-up came. Just because I chose to play the fool. It was down at the Boone Lake store one night. I had walked into town for the mail. It was being sorted. And on the mail stage had come two biggish boxes of goods for Corney Fales. He’s the storekeeper and postmaster there, Buff.”
Again, at his name, Buff wagged his tail and thrust his cold nose into Trent’s free hand.
“The boxes were left on the store porch while Fales sorted the mail,” went on Trent. “It struck me it would be a corking joke to carry them out behind a clump of lilacs to one side of the store, where it was black dark that night. I hid them there for the fun of hearing old Fales swear when he found them gone. Well, he swore, good and plenty. And by the time he’d sworn himself out, I’d had about enough of the joke. And I was just going to tell him about it and help him carry the boxes back to the store, when a couple of chaps—that I’d ordered off my land the week before—stepped up and told him they’d seen me lug the boxes away in the dark. So I went out to the lilac clump to get the stuff and carry it back to Fales.
“And, Buff, the boxes weren’t there. They’d been stolen in dead earnest while I had been standing in the store laughing at Fales’s red-hot language. It had been a silly joke, at best, for a grown man to play, Buff.
“And, anyhow, nobody but a born fool ever plays practical jokes. Always remember that, Buff. But you know how a fellow will limber up sometimes after a lonely day’s work, and how he’ll do silly things. Well, that’s how it happened, Buff.
“Of course I owned up, and offered to pay the sixty dollars Fales said the goods were worth. But he wouldn’t have it that way. It seemed he’d been missing things for quite a while. And his pig-headed brain got full of the idea I had taken them all, and that I’d pretended it was a joke when I was caught at last. So he prosecuted. And the county attorney was looking for a record. And he got it, Buff. He sure got it.
“I was sent up for eighteen months. Just for being a fool. And perhaps I’m a fool to go back now and pick up life again in a place where everyone thinks I’m a thief. But that’s what I’m going to do, Buff. I’m going to win through. It’ll take a heap of time and a heap more nerve to do it. But—well, we’re headed for Boone Lake. The sooner we begin the fight the sooner we’ll win it.”
He paused, half ashamed of his babbling, yet half relieved at being able to speak out at last to some listener who did not greet the tale with a grin of incredulity. Buff snuggled the closer to him, and licked his clenched hand as the pain underlying the light speech struck upon the collie’s sensitive perceptions.