The Escape.
AN hour after the bull-fight was over, Billy and Stubby could have been seen running first down one street, then down another, then through an alley, and lastly through the suburbs, leaving a cloud of dust behind them. They were running away from their master and his men who were trying to drive them back to the farm, but Billy and Stubby decided they did not want to return since all their friends, the bulls, but Little Duke whose life Billy had saved, had been killed.
They kept running until they were sure they could not be overtaken and then they stopped for breath and to decide where they wanted to go next. While nibbling the leaves from a bush, Billy, chancing to look up, saw straight ahead of him, looming up above trees and housetops, a high mountain out of which a column of smoke was curling like a black plume against the clear, blue sky.
“Look! Stubby, see what a big bon-fire there is on that mountain.”
“That isn’t a bon-fire,” said Stubby. “That is a volcano and its name is Popocatapetl. It sounds as if they were saying, poke-a-cat-with-a-paddle. I expect someone at sometime poked a cat with a paddle on that mountain and that is how it got its name, something after the manner of the Indians who give their children the name of the first thing the mother sees after they are born. I suppose the chiefs Blackhawk and Whitehorse got theirs in that way, as for Mud-in-the-face, some one must have thrown mud in the mother’s face at the critical moment.”
“Oh Stubby! You are too funny for anything. Where did you learn so much?”
“Oh! from listening to what the people were saying round me when I was out with my master.”
“You are a very observing dog and it would be a good thing if more people followed your example, then they would learn a great deal even if they never went to school.”