Rick and Ruddy: The Story of a Boy and His Dog

by Howard Roger Garis

Then had come sad days, when he was sold and taken away from the tumbling, weak-legged brothers and sisters, and the mother dog, against whose warm flanks Ruddy loved to cuddle.

At first these changed days had not been unhappy, for Ruddy was given a home in another barn, where there was only one horse, instead of many, and where a man came to feed him every morning. But a tramp had stolen Ruddy away, and then had left him behind in the woods, too lazy to take the little dog with him.

After that Ruddy had taken part in many adventures, coming at last to live in the slums of a city, where a man claimed him as his own. And the man had taken Ruddy with him on the ship, and then had come a terrible time in the storm, when the red-brown puppy was washed overboard.

All these thoughts and remembrances fleetingly came to Ruddy as he was curled up in the sedge grass, sheltered as much as he could be sheltered from the rain and salty spume-scattering wind.

The longest night must have an end, and so to Ruddy daylight finally came, and, with it, the breaking of the storm. It was cold, though it was early September, but September was being crowded off the calendar by October, and the rays of the early sun, as the big, golden ball seemed to rise from the heaving ocean, had little warmth in them. It was as if the sun's rays came from a looking glass.

Cold, shivery and hungry, Ruddy crept from his nest in the grass, even as his jungle ancestors might have crept from theirs. But there was no warmth to greet him, and he did not know where to get any food.

"I'm certainly hungry!" said Ruddy to himself. "I wonder where I can get something to eat?"

Down a little way from the sand dunes stretched the beach, with the surf pounding on it. Here and there a stray fish was cast up, and, had Ruddy known it, this might have provided a breakfast for him. But Ruddy was not a cat. He was not specially fond of fish, and he was afraid of the ocean—at any rate for a time. He had nearly been drowned in it, and he did not want to go near the big waves again; at least right away. So he turned from the beach and, heading inland, sniffed the air, with head held as high as he could raise it.

Ruddy remembered that his mother, among the lessons she had taught him, had told him how much depended on his nose.

"You can't tell so much about a thing by looking at it as you can by smelling of it," she had said. That is why Ruddy, as all dogs do, always smelled of anything before he ate it. His eyesight could not be depended on, but his nose could. And now Ruddy was sniffing the air.