After a brief spell as Kathy’s assistant with the Coombs Company, Jessie came back to try country life again. She married Will Hall, her step-father’s son. One time when Myrtle and I were visiting the Halls they took us to a Masonic program and supper in Powhattan. I was sitting with Mr. Hall when a friend of his from Hiawatha asked, “Who is that pretty girl in red over there with your son?” Mr. Hall said, drolly—he was a slow talker when he wanted to be impressive—”Well, she is my wife’s daughter; and my son’s wife.” The friend looked puzzled for a few seconds, then said, “I get it.”
I shall now have to drop back once more. At this time Myrtle Mercer was working in my printing office, and she and Jessie were living in the home place down by the creek. My brother Theodore and his wife Mattie, living on my Bancroft farm, had given Myrtle a Great Dane puppy. It grew into a very large dog. With Vic as protector, the girls felt secure in their rather isolated home between the timber and the tracks. Hoboes were numerous along the railroad in those days. The girls were not bothered by tramps, with Vic around.
Historically noted, the pup’s mother, aided by a visiting male dog of like breed from over near Hiawatha, had got herself in bad repute by taking down a stray cow that had come into the front yard where the tender spring grass made better pickings than were obtainable on the roadside. After being poorly wintered, roadside pickings were the cow’s only chance for sustenance. The cow was the property of a roving family consisting of father, mother, and five kids, that had wintered in the Jake Brian farm house a half mile away. The cow was trespassing, of course—but there were the kids to be considered. My brother paid the man for the cow. He already had possession of her. She was still down in his front yard. But in time, she got up—and was driven with other stock six miles to Uncle Bill Porter’s pasture for a summer’s outing. She never got back.
When the pup was brought to town, the record of the old dogs followed—and as he grew to be a monstrous dog he was feared by some people who knew him only by his breeding. Then the town got a mad-dog scare. Vic was reportedly seen fighting with the suspected mad-dog down in the lower part of town—on “Smoky Row.” The informer recanted later—but that did not help matters after Vic had been killed by order of the City Marshal. I think the dog’s overly-advertised ancestry had marked him for annihilation. Thus, “the sins of the parents were visited upon the son” to the extent of needless distrust.
Vic was a good dog.
Myrtle said she couldn’t believe her dog was seen fighting with another dog on the town-side of the tracks, as he was never known to leave the home alone. But she felt that it was best to be on the safe side. And then too an order was an order. She wished that it had come a week earlier, so as to have saved her the dollar tax she had paid the City Marshal for the privilege of keeping Vic another year. It was a tragedy that the girls’ watchdog was to be killed because of that false alarm.
Here I will put in a word on my own hook. I knew Ed Lazelere had stuck the pup headfirst into a rubber boot and given him a treatment designed to keep the dog at home. It really worked. In his mature years Vic was never known to leave the premises alone, and seldom with either of the girls. His one mistake in his puppy days was when he followed Myrtle, unbidden, to the Lazelere home.
Frosty Shuemaker was detailed to do the shooting. I went along to help get the dog away from the house. Vic was in the back yard in the shade of an apple tree. He wouldn’t budge for us. Myrtle came to the back door, and said she would have Jessie lead him over to the creek bank west of the house. Frosty and I went around to the front of the house, and then west on the outside of the yard fence to where there was an opening in the enclosure.
Jessie and the dog came running. Vic stopped broadside opposite the opening, and was knocked down with a single charge from Frosty’s double-barreled shotgun—when Jessie was halfway back to the house. She did not look back. She held in until the booming report of the shotgun — then let out a terrific squawk. We dragged the dead dog outside the yard fence and left it in a weed patch. Vic was now the City’s dog. The Marshal would get a dollar for burying him.
Back at the house Myrtle, red-eyed and sorrowful, asked me what had become of Jessie? I found the kid in a patch of marijuana over by the east line of the grounds, lying face down—crying her heart out. And I think I dropped a few tears, too. You know, there are times when you can’t fight them back.