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?”