It was twilight before his search of the region was ended. This was its end: Stammeringly he asked a passing patrolman whether he had seen two little dogs—one black, one light grey—trotting anywhere along the beat. And the policeman made curt answer:
“Nope. I didn’t see ’em. But the dog-catchers was roundin’ up a bunch of mutts in this ward, ’s aft’noon. Better ask at the pound. It’s down at the foot of Water Street.”
“Down at the foot of Water Street” was two miles away. Arnon Flint made the trip in eighteen minutes—only to find the pound-pier was closed for the night.
At grey dawn next morning after ten hours of sleeplessness, Arnon was at the pier again, waiting for its landward gate to swing open for the day. After an endless delay, one of the poundmaster’s men arrived. Arnon followed him along the pier to the enormous grated pen and the adjoining office at the far end of the dock. In the cage were more dogs than Arnon had ever before seen together in all his life.
“Mongrel, puppy, whelp and hound, and curs of low degree.”
They were crowded into the big barred inclosure—a pitiful assemblage. Some dogs were howling, some were barking, some were fox-trotting feverishly back and forth, from corner to corner, pressing close against the bars. Others, mystically aware of their coming fate, lay, trembling convulsively from time to time; heads between forepaws, eyes abrim with dumb grief.
At the pier’s outer edge, just beyond the barred pen, an iron cage swung over the river. It hung from a derrick. Daily, this cage was filled with the dogs that had been longest at the pound. Then it was dipped under water for five minutes, in full sight of the doomed survivors in the pen.
A dog-pound is not pleasant to look upon. It is little pleasanter to think upon. It is one of the needful evils of every large town—an evil that is needful to public health and to public safety, so say the city fathers. It is also needful because—though people talk much about birth-control among humans (where it cannot be enforced)—no one bothers about birth-control among dogs—where it can very easily be enforced.
Litters of dogs are allowed to grow up. The dogs are portioned among people who grow tired of them or who move away. The erstwhile pets are turned out to run the streets and to starve or to pick up a scavenger living. The grim dog-pound does the rest.
The luckless waifs are done to death by water or by gas or in the legalised hell of vivisection. May the all-pitying God of the Little People have mercy upon them! For, most assuredly, mankind will not.