That would have been Ruddy's thought if he could have spoken.
How he did want a home!
And how Rick, sleeping in his little white bed, did want a dog!
CHAPTER III
RICK AND RUDDY
Washed overboard from the deck of the vessel, not long after he had been roughly tossed into a box by the man who wanted a lucky "mascot," Ruddy had swam ashore. The food given him by the coast guard had dulled, just a little, the gnawing pangs of hunger, and now, as Ruddy crouched among the sand hills, trying to find shelter from the storm, he felt the first gleam of hope that had come to him in many a day.
"Maybe I'll find a home after all," he thought to himself, for I believe that dogs can talk and think—not as we do, of course; perhaps sometimes not as well, and again, perhaps, better. But they do think. And so Ruddy, which was to be his name, as it was now his color, thought and hoped.
The man had driven him away—so Ruddy believed, but in this he was wrong. Very well. It was not the first time he had been driven away. He would have to look for someone else who would feed him, or at least give him the chance to feed himself. He would have to look for someone else whom he might love as only a dog can love—with all his heart and being.
"I'll stay here until morning," reasoned Ruddy, dog-fashion. "It's too dark now to see where to go, and it's raining too hard. I'll stay here in the sand until morning, then I can see better."
Dogs do not have very good eyesight—not nearly as good as cats. In fact a dog can not see far enough to tell his master from among a group of other boys, if his master is more than a few hundred feet away. But if the wind is blowing toward the dog, and he once catches a whiff of the scent, or smell, of the boy he knows so well, he does not need eyes to tell him what he wants to know. An eagle could not dart with any more sureness toward an object than can a dog, once he catches the smell of his master.
And Ruddy, like all dogs, poor of sight even in daytime, and hardly able to see at all in the dark, knew it was useless to try to look for a home in that blackness and storm. A cat might have found her way to where she wanted to go, but Ruddy did not even know where to look for a home. He was a wanderer—an outcast.