At first the doctor said that she should have had patience and given the medicine a longer chance to work. But later, that she had done well in stopping useless pain, for the sickness was typhoid distemper, and nothing could have saved old Ben.
“I suppose that you are laughing to yourself, and thinking what an old fool I am to care so,” said Miss Jule, leaning wearily against the door post, a wild object with straws sticking in her hair, red-eyed and dishevelled in the dawning light.
“I laugh at grief for a dog?” answered the doctor. “Possibly once but not now, or ever again. Look at this,” and opening his watch he showed her the miniature of a dog painted on the inside cover. It was the head of a finely bred bull terrier with soft brown and white markings, and a broad browed face, for the technical term muzzle could not be applied to one having all the thoughtful intelligence of a human being.
“That is Jim,” said the doctor, speaking slowly, and fixing his eyes upon the picture.
“Oh, yes, I remember him,” said Miss Jule; “he was rather small for his breed, and lame in his left hind leg, but compact and alert. He always used to ride about with you, and when you went indoors would sit and wait with an expression of patience in his eyes that seemed to say that he knew just what you were about, and that of course he expected you to take your time, do your work thoroughly, and not hurry; but you’ve not brought him this season, have you?”
The doctor shook his head, still keeping his eyes upon the miniature and continued: “I reared Jim from a pup, and it seems as if there never was a time that he was so young but what he understood what I said almost before I spoke the words; he travelled everywhere with me, and was a companion for work as well as play. If I went to a hotel, in a day he knew at which floor our room was, and where the elevator should stop. He knew my telephone call, and would bark at me when the bell rang it. If I was at the office, he at home, I could call him to come to me if some one lowered the receiver to his range. He could carry numbers in his head, too, that is, as far as four; above that he was uncertain.
Jim (Seeley photo).
“One day, three years or so ago, while I was waiting at a railway station not far from Boston, in some strange way a train struck Jim and hurled him upon a bank above. It may be that he refused the train right of way; however it was, the crowd that gathered said he was done for, and should be put out of misery. But bruised, his leg broken at the hip, and maimed though he was when I picked him up, Jim looked at me and I at him, and we agreed to make a fight for it. I took him into Boston to the hospital. We won; his leg was set, and for a time it did well, and we went about in company once more; but the fracture join was brittle, it soon broke again, and was united with silver wire. For a couple of years he went about, a cheerful cripple,—but at that, worth all the other dogs in Christendom to me, and seeming to grow keener witted as his body was more dependent.