"Oh, no. Zero does not want us to go out because he believes there's some danger on the road."
"O-o-oh! Do you really mean it?"
"Honest Injun."
"Then he's not a bad dog at all, and I told him he was. Come here, Zero." He patted the dog's head. "You're a good dog really. My mistake. Sorry. What are you laughing at, mother? That's what Tom always says. Now let's go and see the danger on the road."
"Well, it wouldn't be quite fair to Zero, after all the trouble he's taken. Besides, I want to see the rabbits at their games. They ought to be out just now."
"All right," said Dick. "You follow me, and I'll show you them. But you mustn't make the least sound. You must be very Red-Indian."
Dick's mother followed him obediently, and was very Red-Indian. The rabbits lived in a high bank just beyond the far end of the garden, and what the gardener had said about them before the wire-netting came could not be printed. Jane watched the rabbits, and conversed about them in the hoarse whisper enjoined by her son, but she was thinking principally about Zero.
Then Dick went to bed, and his father came back from the city. He went up at least one day a week, and came back full of aggressive virtue and likely to refer to himself as a man who earned his own living, thank Heaven.
At dinner Richard said: "By the way, I'd been meaning to speak of it—what's the matter with Zero?"
"Why?"