By some chance there had sprung up, at the very foot of the garden, a large weed, a most uncommon growth amid such surroundings; a great, big, coarse-leafed, pinkish-topped thing, a sort of pretty tramp from the woods or fields; I think it’s called milk-weed, though to Dinah it was usually an orange orchard, while only occasionally it became a pine forest in which we lost ourselves and endured great hardships.
I remember it was an orange orchard that day, and after a long play, when Marie was called to dress for dinner, she advised Dinah to remain where she was, saying, “When dinner is over I’ll bring you some dessert.”
So I gave Dinah a book to read, and we left her. We both looked back, Marie many times, and always kissing her hand. And so I most often see her in my memory, the “peshous one,” I mean, sitting stiffly against the trunk of her orange tree, one foot bandaged (without the formality of first removing her boot), an open almanac on her lap, whose piteous, gray, old jokes were to entertain her during our absence, her water-waves trim and neat, her round eye mild and pleasant, her smile almost meeting behind—so I saw her that last day.
The dinner was over; it had not been what you might call an hilarious affair. There seems to be something in the blood of wives at enmity with uninvited guests, and Mrs. Tyler was cold as ice and as bitter as a black frost.
When dinner was nearly ready, Bolivar sneaked out to the kitchen, where the cook had given him a large, square meal, feeding him from her own hand, as she told me afterward in confidence, until “he was that full his eyes bulged, Miss!” And in that dreadful state he waddled back to the dining-room, and when dinner was over, sat on end by his master and laid beseeching, hypocritical paws on his knee, and was fed again, after which he was in a condition bordering on apoplexy, and quite unfit to play “soldier,” or “dead-dog,” or do anything in fact, save retire to the flyless shadows under the piano and there sleep, audibly. Marie was so interested in Bolivar and so busy flirting with his master (she was a coquette at one year), that she actually forgot Dinah, who still sat in the orange orchard.
The bare idea of a dog sleeping in her house filled Mrs. Tyler with such indignation that other arrangements had to be hastily made for Bolivar’s accommodation.
Some former tenants had left a kennel behind them. It was brought from the wood-house, a bit of old carpet put into it, and the sleepy Bolivar was hitched to it with a piece of cord. After two or three strangling efforts to follow his master, kennel and all, into the house, he finally settled himself, and we all separated for the night.
We were all asleep—and then we were all awake again! No, it was not the “crack of doom” we heard, but if you were to break one boiler factory into a foundling asylum and beat them together, you might get an idea of the kind of noise that aroused us. I murmured “Cats,” and tried to slip back into the sweet land of “Nod,” but there came a new noise. It had a wooden sound. What was it? My mother said “Is the wood-pile falling down?” But it sounded to me as though the shed was jumping up and down. Suddenly we gasped, “The dog! The kennel!”
Next instant the cord broke and with an ear piercing “ky—i, ky—i!” Bolivar set out to build up another record. It was fearful! The carnage was great, but the noise was maddening. Our nearest neighbor came to his window and made very, very personal remarks about people who would keep a dog where they knew cats came. This gentleman’s head was like a large, china egg, for baldness, and I think the extreme hairiness of Bolivar added bitterness to his words.
Had Bolivar been satisfied to kill his cats once only, his record would have been bigger, but he had a habit of killing his victims several times, going back to them and shaking and tossing them and crunching their spines with his front teeth, and while this habit had the advantage of making his cats and rats very dead indeed, it lost him a good deal of time.