Ladies and Gentlemen

by Irvin S. Cobb

Now, of course, the simplest and the quickest and the easiest way would have been for Good Sam to toll the pup outdoors and bore him with Boots’ old rifle. But no, that wouldn’t do. As he explained to them, he was sort of tender himself when it came to taking life, but I judge the real underlying reason was that he liked to go to all sorts of pains and complicate the machinery when he was working at being a philanthropist. Soon as supper was over he reared back to figure on a plan and all at once his eye lit on a box of dynamite setting over in a corner. During the closed season on fur those two played at being miners.

“I’ve got it now,” he told them. “I’ll take a stick of that stuff there with me and I’ll lead this cussed dog along with me and take him half a mile up the bottoms and fasten him to a tree with a piece of line. Then I’ll hitch a time-fuse onto the dynamite and tie the dynamite around his neck with another piece of rope and leave him there. Pretty soon the fuse will burn down and the dynamite will go off—kerblooie!—and thus without pain or previous misgivings that unsuspecting canine will be totally abolished. But the most beautiful part of it is that nobody—you nor me neither—will be a witness to his last moments.”

So they complimented him on being so smart and so humane at the same time and said they ought to have thought up the idea themselves only they didn’t have the intellect for it—they admitted that, too—and after he’d sopped up their praise for a while and felt all warm and satisfied, they turned in, and peace and quiet reigned in that cabin until daylight, except for some far-and-wide snoring and the dog having a severe nightmare under the stove about two-thirty A. M.

Up to a certain point the scheme worked lovely. Having established the proper connections between the dog and the tree, the fuse and the dynamite, Good Sam is gamboling along through the slush on his way back and whistling a merry tune, when all of a sudden his guiding spirit makes him look back behind him—and here comes that pup! He’s either pulled loose from the rope or else he’s eaten it up—it would be more like him to eat it. But the stick of dynamite is dangling from his neck and the fuse is spitting little sparks.

Good Sam swings around and yells at the animal to go away and he grabs up a chunk of wood and heaves it at him. But the dog thinks that’s only play and he keeps right on coming, with his tail wagging in innocent amusement and his tongue hanging out like a pink plush necktie and his eyes shining with gratefulness for the kind gentleman who’s gone to all the trouble of thinking up this new kind of game especially on his account. So then Good Sam lights out, running for the cabin, and the dog, still entering heartily into the sport, takes after him and begins gaining at every jump. It’s a close race and getting closer all the time and no matter which one of ’em finishes first it looks like a mortal cinch that neither winner nor loser is going to be here to enjoy his little triumph afterwards.

Inside the cabin Boots and Babe hear the contestants drawing nearer. Mixed in with much happy frolicsome barking is a large volume of praying and yelling and calls for help, and along with all this a noise like a steam snow-plow being driven at a high rate of speed. Boots jumps for the door but before he can jerk it open, Good Sam busts in with his little playmate streaking along not ten feet behind him, and at that instant the blast goes off and the pup loses second money, as you might say, by about two lengths.

It’s a few minutes after that when Boots and Babe reach the unanimous conclusion that they’ve been pretty near ruined by too much benevolence. Boots is propping up the front side of the cabin, the explosion having jarred it loose, and Babe is still laying where he landed against the back wall and nursing his game leg. The visiting humanitarian has gone down the ridge to get his nerves ca’mmed.

“Babe,” says Boots, “you know what it looks like to me?”

“What it looks like to us two, you mean,” says Babe.

“Sure,” says Boots; “well, it looks like to both of us that we’ve been dern near killed with kindness.”