Having found a screw to his liking he held it between his teeth while he scraped the hole with a bit of wire.
“Italian woman and her daughter—they been livin’ on our top floor near thirty year—is the onliest ones Buster will let cross that door-sill whilst I’m out. The postman—” He chuckled, as he fitted the screw in the hole. “Buster hears ’is whistle and meets ’im at the door and takes the letters. Julie, my wife, says he knows when there’s a letter from Jack.”
Having fitted the screw to the grinning face he began the work of fastening it to the lower part of the fire-dog.
“Jack’s our grandson. He’s somewhere in France.” Unconsciously he heaved a sigh that sounded almost like a sob. “Soon as Buster gives a letter from him to Julie, without her tellin’ ’m nothin’ he trots down here for me. He knows I wants the news quick as the letter comes. Buster knows.”
Coming in contact with so many dogs, day after day, winding back and forth in and out of the dirty halls and crooked stairways of the tenements, memories of Buster and the lame tinker were rubbed from my mind. Among the bunch of complaints handed me one morning at the office was a pencil scrawl about a dog that was terrorizing the neighbors around an address on Avenue A.
When the door of the flat was opened to me I found myself confronted by the lame tinker, with Buster at his heels. Behind them in the duskiness of the room I made out the helpless figure of the wife, propped up in bed and combing her hair.
“This can’t possibly refer to Buster,” I told them, as I handed the scrawl to the old man.
“Crooks,” he assured me, and having read the letter he passed it on to his wife.
“This is the only house in this block that hasn’t been broke in,” she piped, her voice thinned by weakness and much suffering. “It’s Buster. Crooks can’t git by my dog.”
“It’s a wonder they don’t poison him,” I told them, recalling the number of dogs whose deaths their owners attributed to poison.