"You been bothered with headaches lately?"
"Off and on—nasty sort of twinges. If I trusted myself with a carpenter, I'd let you give me a check-up. Well, let's cut this short. What I was going to say ... let's see ... oh, since Timmy seldom pays any attention to the dog, why does the dog stick to him like a shadow?"
Clancey grunted.
"That dog's no fool, stupid as he is. Clumsy, homely, and half-witted enough to sit on a tack for five minutes before he howled—I've seen him do just about that—he knows when he needs a protector. If it weren't for Timmy, the hound would have been destroyed long ago as an act of mercy. Helen and Jerry are resigned to him, of course, for Timmy's sake, but have you noticed that the dog reacts much the same as Timmy if they get separated? Casts about at once for a way to rejoin him, and the longer he's delayed the more he panics. Maybe it's a two-way switch—maybe Timmy and his dog are indispensable symbols to each other!"
"You dream up any more lulus like that, you keep them to yourself. Psychopathic dogs I draw the line at. Clancey, there is only one conclusion to be drawn from these here solemn deliberations. Throw out the textbooks and roll with the punches."
"Amen."
V
"There should be no deaths!"
Phil turned that one over in his mind, cautiously. A good deal of his attention was needed for the task of nursing his old car along the ruts of the dirt road, but the murmured exclamation impelled him to steal a glance at the boy sitting beside him. This was the spring of Timmy's tenth year—the sixth year of his friendship with "Uncle" Phil—and those years had taught Phil more than he realized, if less than he had hoped. He knew, for example, that the peculiar vacancy of Timmy's expression at the moment implied deep thought rather than the complete absence of thought that it suggested. That was a curious characteristic that always made the man a little uneasy. Timmy's face was sometimes radiantly, spontaneously expressive, the most sensitive of mirrors, and sometimes it was rather mechanically expressive, but it was only expressive in a positive sense. In moments of abstraction or daydreaming there was no faraway look, no frown of concentration. Only blankness.
"The world would get a trifle crowded, you know."