But Chammy gathered himself slowly up and crawled away, one leg at a time, to look for a fly.
Chapter Fifteen.
“When the Fur begins to Fly.”
Nobody had ever been heard to call Cracker a pretty dog or a bonnie dog. He was sturdy and strong, and nearly, if not quite, as large as a Collie. His legs were as straight as darts, and as strong as the sapling pine tree. Then his coat—ah! well, there is no way of describing that with pen and ink or in print either. It was rough though not shaggy, and every hair was as hard apparently as pin-wire.
In the matter of coats, in fact, Nature had, while dressing Cracker, adhered to the useful rather than the ornamental. He had apparently come in the afternoon for his coat, and nearly all the other dogs had been before him. Collie had been fitted with his flowing toga, the Poodle with his cords and tassels, the Yorkshire terrier with his doublet of silk, and many others with coats as soft and smooth as that of a carriage horse, and poor Cracker, the Airedale terrier, had almost been forgotten.
“Your coat, Cracker?” Nature had said. “Oh, certainly. I’m really afraid, however, that you have come rather late in the day to be dressed with anything like elegance.”
“Oh!” Cracker had put in, “I ain’t a bit particular. Anything’ll do for Cracker, so as it is thick enough to keep out a shower with a shake.”
So Nature had simply gathered up the sweepings of the shop, the cabbage and clippings, so to speak, and mixed them all up into a kind of shoddy, and dabbed Cracker all over with that, going in, however, for a few finishing touches of gold about the muzzle, the chest, and legs.