“I wonder how mother’ll manage now?”
“Why, where’s your mother?” someone asked gently; we had never dreamt that Malachi might have someone to love him and be proud of him.
“In Bathurst,” he answered wearily—“she’ll take on awful, I ’spect, she was awful fond of me—we’ve been pulling together this last ten years—mother and me—we wanted to make it all right for my little brother Jim—poor Jim!”
“What’s wrong with Jim?” someone asked.
“Oh, he’s blind,” said Malachi “always was—we wanted to make it all right for him agin time he grows up—I—I managed to send home about—about forty pounds a year—we bought a bit of ground, and—and—I think—I’m going now. Tell ’em, Harry—tell ’em how it was—”
I had to go outside then. I couldn’t stand it any more. There was a lump in my throat and I’d have given anything to wipe out my share in the practical jokes, but it was too late now.
Malachi was dead when I went in again, and that night the hat went round with the squatter’s cheque in the bottom of it and we made it “all right” for Malachi’s blind brother Jim.
TWO DOGS AND A FENCE
“Nothing makes a dog madder,” said Mitchell, “than to have another dog come outside his fence and sniff and bark at him through the cracks when he can’t get out. The other dog might be an entire stranger; he might be an old chum, and he mightn’t bark—only sniff—but it makes no difference to the inside dog. The inside dog generally starts it, and the outside dog only loses his temper and gets wild because the inside dog has lost his and got mad and made such a stinking fuss about nothing at all; and then the outside dog barks back and makes matters a thousand times worse, and the inside dog foams at the mouth and dashes the foam about, and goes at it like a million steel traps.
“I can’t tell why the inside dog gets so wild about it in the first place, except, perhaps, because he thinks the outside dog has taken him at a disadvantage and is ‘poking it at him;’ anyway, he gets madder the longer it lasts, and at last he gets savage enough to snap off his own tail and tear it to bits, because he can’t get out and chew up that other dog; and, if he did get out, he’d kill the other dog, or try to, even if it was his own brother.