John raised his big, rough hand and smoothed his wife’s hair. The clumsy strokes were given the wrong way, and each one pulled harder and tangled worse, until her brown locks were full of what the children would have called “rats’ nests.” But the awkward caress was sweet to her, as precious as it was rare. Then he said slowly: “Never do it again, Betsey! No! no! I don’t mean that! I mean never worry all alone again. If you are anxious and troubled about the farm, money, or anything else, for God’s sake, tell me all about it, and let me share the worry!” and he kissed her, and then looking down on “Watch,” he said, gently: “Thank you, old man.”
And then I think he did a curious thing, for you must remember “Watch” was simply a farm dog who had never been taught one single trick in all his life. Yet now, when he thanked him, John Tyler offered him his hand. “Watch,” embarrassed and confused, lifted and lowered his good ear rapidly, glanced at the hand, then at his master’s face, half-lifted his left foot, dropped it again, and suddenly raising his right, laid the black paw firmly in the extended hand, and gravely, unsmilingly, John Tyler held it a moment and repeated: “Thank you, old man.”
Ten minutes later the wooden bar was across the door, the candle was extinguished, and darkness, silence and peace descended upon the little, back-wood home.
When I, the writer was a little girl, a very, very old lady used on bright, fair days to lead me down the country road, past many white houses amid their orchards, and point out a great, old hickory tree, and tell me that was the spot where she had, in her madness, left her baby, “who is now Mrs. B——,” she would say.
But I always had to hear over again about “Watch,” whom, the old lady said, “had scratched and fit, and killed ’chucks and snakes, and taken the children to and from school for eight years after that! And then, one night, he had got up from his mat and come into the bed-room and stood by the bed, and had licked the hand of his master, and had gone back to his mat, and in the morning he was quite dead. Just as if Death knew he could only get him away from us by taking him in his sleep!”
And I would lean against the kind, old lady, and say gravely: “What a pity he had to die before I was born—I would have loved ‘Watch’!”
And I love his memory to-day—brave, old, black “Watch”!
Dinah