Next morning, when he got up, part of the bodily soreness had disappeared, but his indignation was, if anything, greater.
“Just let him wait and see!” he kept muttering to himself as, carrying his morning newspapers, he waited in a little grocer’s shop while Kyr Themistocli’s coffee was being weighed. “Just let him wait! The next time I find his dog straying—and that will be to-morrow or the day after, unless he turns Anneza away—I will take it and give it to someone else, to someone who lives very far away, where he will never find it again. May they never call me Aleko again if I do not!” As he was leaving the shop with the bag of coffee in his hand, he found outside the door an empty petroleum tin which he kicked viciously right out into the middle of the square. It fell bounding and rebounding with tremendous clatter against the curbstone, and the noise did him good.
However, he was not to wait even until to-morrow for his revenge, though it did not happen exactly as he had planned it.
Before the clang of the falling tin had ceased, he saw at the end of the square, just where the street car tracks come into it, a little flash of something white tearing along at full speed. In hot pursuit, but very far behind, came Anneza, with a packet of macaroni in one hand and two cucumbers in the other. At first Aleko could not understand why she seemed in such terrible haste, but in another second he had understood.
From behind the corner of a chemist’s shop a man darted out, a man armed with an open bag of thin knotted rope mounted on a long stick, something which looked like a monstrous butterfly net; and this net came down with a dexterous swoop, born of long practice, and rose again into the air, carrying with it the little white, squealing, wriggling bundle which was Solon.
Anneza, in the distance, gave a loud shriek, and one of her cucumbers fell unheeded to the ground. On she rushed, her apron strings flying behind her; but the man was quicker.
The iron cage on wheels, with its load of barking, snarling prisoners, stood behind him; with one hand, he lifted up the little spring door at the top of it, and with a twist of the other he emptied poor Solon on top of the other dogs. Then he dropped the lid and whipped up the horse.
“Stop!” panted Anneza, waving her arms wildly, “stop I tell you!”
She was close to the cart by this time; but just at that moment, the street car which was going up towards the Maraslion met the one which was coming down, at the corner, and for a moment there was a block. Anneza, trying to squeeze herself between the two, was pushed here and there by mounting and descending passengers, and by the time she got clear the man with the iron cage was out of sight.
But Aleko had been quicker. He had wheeled round as soon as he saw the dog caught, and running down a short cut had met the cart as it came out on the street below. He stood right in its way and signaled to the man.