This seemed true. It was annoying, however, that I was not to have the benefit of Jack's help in my last dig. As I told Jack, I had particularly wished him to have half the work of digging.
"And half the fun of being worried by Ginger!" added Jack; "thanks awfully, Peter. It will be rather fun to stand outside and hear you 'Good-dogging' Ginger, and presently your squalls when he lays hold of you!"
"Ginger's all right," laughed Steggins. "He's almost as old as his master, and hasn't a tooth in his head; besides, he's the friendliest of animals, and wouldn't injure a baby."
"His voice doesn't sound like it," I said. "Jack grew quite pale when he heard it." Jack shinned me under the table for this, I am sorry to say. He is a vindictive and un-Christian-like person, is Jack, when his pride is touched.
"Ginger's voice is his fortune," said Steggins; "it always has been; he's the finest dog for the other side of a wall that ever I saw."
I may say that presently, when Steggins had taken me down and introduced me to Baines and Ginger as the bonâ fide heir-at-law, I found that Ginger was quite as benevolent a being as Steggins had described him. He was a St. Bernard, of enormous size and the very mildest of manners, and his voice was a complete fraud, for whereas it threatened gore and thunder, its real purport and intent were nothing more shocking than small beer or milk and water. For all he knew, I might have been a murderous desperado, but he took to me at sight, like David to Jonathan.
Old Baines, too, was polite enough on his own side of the wall, and showed me over the house and garden. He was surprised when I asked for spades, but produced one nevertheless; however, when he had watched me turn over the first few sods of turf, he retired muttering into the house, and I could see plainly enough that the new proprietor was, in his opinion, about to prove a disappointing master, inasmuch as he was harmlessly but hopelessly mad.
The garden measured sixty-three yards by forty-eight, and on that first morning of my solitary digging I ardently wished, with all my heart, that it had been one-quarter the size. For to dig up a garden of this area, and dig it deeply too, as the latest instructions suggested, and all by oneself, was a task involving more trouble than is agreeable, or ever has been, to the present scribe, who is no lover of monotonous drudgery.
There were a few trees here and there, but not a flower-bed in the place; the whole area was roughly covered with turf upon which coarse grass had been allowed to grow throughout the summer, which grass I was obliged to mow down with a scythe before I could proceed in any comfort with my digging.
Jack did not desert me, though he might not assist me on my own side of the wall. He remained at the hotel, where I lunched and dined with him daily; and during these meals we consulted upon my labours and the direction these should take; and sometimes Jack would come and carry on a conversation from the top of the wall, upon which he climbed when none were by to see. Ginger used to look up and wag his tail affectionately upon the stranger appearing in that unorthodox fashion within the domains he was kept to watch over. If Jack had been a burglar, Ginger could not have looked up more lovingly at him as he sat on the wall and gave the dog bits of biscuit.