The Scarecrow, and Other Stories

by G. Ranger Wormser

He went to the table and took the lamp up in one hand. He went over to the door and closed it with a loud bang. Then he started toward the stairs.

"If you ain't able to bring yourself to leave me," the words came to her over his shoulder, "you can come on up to bed."

Mechanically she followed him up the steps. Mechanically she went through the process of undressing and washing. Long after he had fallen asleep she lay there wide awake watching the moonlight trickle in quivering, golden spots across the floor; lay wide awake listening to the eerie baying of the dogs.

She had had her chance of freedom and at the last moment her courage had failed her. What she had told him had been the absolute truth. She had never realized what had happened to her, what a stifled, smothered thing she had become, until that day when he had brought the chow-dog home to the kennels.

She had married James when she was very young. Their fathers' farms adjoined. It had been the expected thing and she had gone through with it quite as a matter of course. In those days he had been somewhat ambitious. The country-folk around admitted grudgingly that James Conover was a born farmer. Then the old people, both their fathers and his mother, had grown a bit older, and one by one they had died. There had been nothing violent in their deaths. Silent, narrow-minded, like most country persons they had grown a trifle more silent, a trifle more bigoted, and then they were dead. It had seemed to her that way at any rate. She had become conscious all of a sudden that she was alone with James. Strange that the consciousness should have come to her after she had been alone with him for three years; and then that she should only realize she was alone in the world with him the first time he came home drunk. After that he took to drinking more and more, and finally he gave up farming. It had been quite by accident that he took to boarding dogs; now and then buying one for a quick turn. He liked the job. As far as she could see it gave him more time to spend in the village saloon.

One thing she had never been able to understand. In her heart she was certain that James was terrified of the animals. She had seen him shoot a dog at the slightest provocation. But until she had seen the chow she had never bothered with the beasts. She had cooked their meals but she had not been allowed to feed them. She had watched them from the outside of the kennels but she had never gone in to them. She had tolerated their racket because she had never fully understood what lay in back of it all. And then the chow came.

James had brought China-Ching home in the old runabout; brought him to the kennels tied down in a great basket. She had not paid much attention to either man or dog. The first sight that she had of the chow had been because of James. She had heard his cursing and the crack of his huge whip. She had gone out on the porch then and had seen the man beating the dog with all his strength; the man swearing loudly and furiously and the chow silent. She had never gotten over that spectacle. It was the first time she had ever seen a dog maintain silence.

And then day after day she had watched China-Ching, chained there and so strangely silent. Among all those yapping, yipping dogs he alone had remained quiet. And the other animals had paid scant attention to him after the first short while. Even in their wild racing about the enclosure they had given him a wide berth. There was something magnificent, something almost majestic in the chow's aloofness. If it had not been for the dog's eyes she would have thought him dumb;—a fool. But the eyes haunted her. Great liquid brown eyes, that met hers with unutterable sadness; eyes that clutched and held on to her with the depths of their sorrow.

She made up her mind after the first month that she must free the dog; that she must get him out of the kennels somehow or other. She had never thought of a direct appeal to James. If it had not been for the way he had goaded her this evening she would never have spoken as she did. Only she had always known that it would not be in her power to let the dog escape from the kennels without his finding who had done it; without bearing the brunt of his inevitable rage.

And after the first month she began almost unconsciously to associate herself with the chow, to put herself in his place. As she commenced to understand what his desires for freedom must be so she first realized that those same desires were hers. Only, as she phrased it to herself, she could stand it a lot better than the chow. Dogs could not reason. She could go on existing this way till the end of her days; but she felt that if China-Ching could not be freed that he would die. She could not bear the thought of that. Whatever happened to the dog would happen to that part of her which had come into being when the dog had come.