CHINA-CHING[1]
The racket was terrific. The yelping, the shrill prolonged whines, the quick incessant barking; and running in growling under-current, the throaty, infuriated snarling.
The woman stood at the window gazing out into the gathering twilight. Before her eyes stretched the drab, flat fields; here and there a shadowy mass of trees reached their feathery tips that were etched in darkly against the graying skies. Directly before her, beyond the unkept waste that might at one time have been a garden, reared the high, wire walls of the kennels. She could just make out the dim, undefined forms of the dogs running to and fro within the narrow, confining space.
The swift, persistent movement of them fascinated her. The ghostly shapes of them pattering sinuously and silently along the ground; the dull scratching thud of the claws and bodies that hurled themselves again and again into the strong wire netting. The impossibility of their escape throttled her. Their futile attempts at freedom caused a powerful nausea to creep over her. And there in the center of the run she could distinguish, chained to the dog-house,—a pale blur in the fading light,—the motionless yellow mass of the chow, China-Ching.
The shrill, prolonged whines, the quick, incessant barking:—
"Oh, my Gawd;" she muttered involuntarily. "Oh, my Gawd!"
The man sitting in the middle of the room pulled his pipe out of his mouth.
"What's that you say?"
She stood at the window, her eyes fixed steadfastly on that one dumb dog among all those yelping, snarling other dogs.