“Send him a wireless,” says Binney.
“Or—” Mark began, but he never finished what he was going to say, for the biggest sort of a barking and snarling and yelping started up in the woods not farther off than you could throw a stone, and all of a sudden something flashed out of the underbrush and came scurrying toward the hotel. We all jumped to our feet.
Then something else burst out of the trees and tore after the first thing that came. By that time we had sort of collected our senses and could tell what was going on. It was a big, black dog chasing some littler animal that seemed to bump and waddle and roll along, but made a pretty fast gait at that. The dog was barking as hard as he could bark.
About fifty feet from us he caught up with the little animal and made a jump for it. Well, sir, you never saw anything so funny in your life. The dog no sooner touched the little animal than he sat right back on his haunches like he was too astonished to live, and let out the dismalest howl you ever heard. Yip-yip-yi! he yelled. The little animal didn’t run any more, but kind of curled up and waited. We went running over to see the fight.
“What is it?” says Binney.
“Porcupine,” says Mark.
He was, and a fat old whopper, too, with enough quills on him to satisfy a dozen dogs. But this dog wasn’t satisfied. After he got over his surprise he seemed to get mad, and in he tore again. I expect he figured the porcupine had hurt him by mistake. But he found out different. Mr. Porcupine sort of humped up his back and you could hear his quills rustle. Mr. Dog shoved his nose into them—and then pulled it out quick.
He was one disgusted dog, and I’m telling you that something besides his feelings were hurt. He looked as if he were trying to grow some funny sort of mustache. At first he didn’t know what to make of it; then he sat back and began to paw at his muzzle. He pawed and pawed, and when he found out pawing didn’t do any good he took to rolling, and while he rolled he yipped and yelled. All of a sudden he remembered his dignity and stood up. For a minute he looked at Mr. Porcupine, and all his mad came back. It got the better of his good sense. He didn’t seem to realize that the time had come to arbitrate, so he took another lick at the porcupine, who was just beginning to move off as if it figured its day’s work was done.
This time the dog stuck to it as long as he could, but that wasn’t very long, and when he backed off he did it with his whole heart. He backed off so hard that he sat right up on his tail for a minute and then rolled over backward. If he could have seen himself he’d have been so ashamed he wouldn’t have shown his face for a week, like proud dogs do when something makes them look ridiculous.
He started running around on three legs and pawing at his nose with the leg that was left. Then he stuck his muzzle against the ground and began to spin around it in a circle like he was trying to scour the quills out. But anybody could see he was having hard luck at it. Mr. Porcupine looked over his shoulder like he wasn’t so very much interested, and for all the world he looked like he was grinning. Then he started to move off slow. This time the dog jumped right on him with all four feet—and from that time on you never heard such squawling in all your born days. We were sorry for him. Anybody would have been, but he was so funny, and, while he thrashed around so there wasn’t a thing we could do. So we just stood there and laughed.