There was one trick I had that nobody taught me. It just came to me naturally. I had a way of lifting my lips when I was pleased and drawing them back so that I showed all my teeth. Mr. O’Grady called it grinning. Everybody seemed to think that the funniest trick of any that I did.
As it turned out later, that was the best trick of all. Things would have been very different with me if I hadn’t had that trick of grinning.
When I was big enough Mr. O’Grady began to take me to the factory with him. The factory was the place where he went to work.
He would tie me in the factory yard and leave me there until the noon hour when he and the other men stopped working to eat their dinners. Then he would come for me and take me in where they were. The men used to throw me scraps from their dinner pails. I liked that, but after they had finished eating they would begin to tease me. They thought it was funny, but I used to get so mad at them I felt like tearing them to pieces; but I was only a puppy and couldn’t really hurt them, so they thought that was funny too.
One day—it was a cold day in winter—it seemed to me they teased me worse than ever before. I just yelped at them, I got so mad.
When the whistles blew for the men to go back to work Mr. O’Grady took me out in the yard again and tied me to the post. “There! You stay there and cool off your temper,” he said. Then he went back into the factory again.
But I wasn’t going to stay there. I made up my mind to run away and go to live with someone else, where I wouldn’t be teased.
I took the piece of twine he had tied me with between my teeth and gnawed and gnawed, and presently, in a very little while, I gnawed it in two.
I ran over to the fence and squeezed through a hole, and then I was out in the open street.
I ran on gaily down the street, sometimes on three legs and sometimes on four. I didn’t know exactly where I was going, but it was fun to run along all by myself, and not have to follow at the heels of anyone.