Billy Whiskers in France

by Frances Trego Montgomery

“S-s-sh-h-h-h! Keep still and listen!” commanded the other.

“I hope it is not that French colonel who has been on our track for days,” answered the other.

Button never moved, and in fact he held his breath until the men began talking again.

“It was probably a rat you heard in the hay,” said the man who had spoken last. “Don’t you think it is about dark enough for us to get to our work and blow up this Red Cross hospital, so we can get back to our line before daylight?”

“So-ho!” thought Button. “You two think because this hospital has a big red cross on a white ground painted on its roof that it is a regular hospital for wounded soldiers instead of just one for dogs. And you have been sent to blow it up! Well, I’ll fix you! I’ll scratch your eyes out so you can’t see to blow it up.”

Then and there Button began to act as if he had a fit. He flew out of the hole he had been hiding in and right for the men, whom he could see plainly with his cat eyes in the dark mow. Before they knew what was happening, he ran up one’s back, reached around his neck as he sat on his shoulder and scratched both his eyes out.

“How do you like the feeling? That is for scratching out the eyes of little Belgian children!”

The man cried out from pain, but what cared Button? He jumped from this fellow’s shoulders straight into the other’s face and out went his eyes.

“Now you two can sit here and repent of your sins and think how the little children suffered whose eyes you dug out! And the Germans are planning to blow up this hospital, are they? Such being the case, I must get Stubby away from here at the earliest possible moment. I know what I can do. I can carry him on my back, he is such a little fellow, and he is so thin now that I can easily do it. Then when we reach Billy, he can carry him and in this way, by taking turns, we can get him far away from here before the Germans raid the hospital.”

And this is just what Button did. The very next day when Stubby’s nurse carried him out of the hospital and placed him on a cushion under a tree, with the splints off his leg, Button came along and told him what he had done the night before and that he feared the Germans would blow up or set fire to the hospital that very night. By first coaxing, then scolding, he at last persuaded Stubby to consent to ride on his back and let him take him where Billy was waiting for them on the outskirts of the town seven miles away. They bade all the dogs good-by and the Red Cross dog insisted that as he was larger and stronger than Button he should carry Stubby on his back part of the journey. “Besides,” he said, “I have a cloth bandage around my body with the Red Cross sewed on the front. Now this bandage will be an excellent thing for Stubby to stick his claws in to help him hold on. It will be much easier trying to do that than trying to stick them into your short hair, more especially as he has only three legs he can use.”