From the front windows we now saw a crowd of men and boys, tramping down the middle of the highway, firing confusedly and flinging stones at a great yellow dog trotting ahead of them, and snapping right and left as he ran. Before my father reached the gate, the dog had turned sharply to the right down a cross-street skirting our lower grounds. A low fence and a ditch divided the meadow from the thoroughfare. My father kept on our side of the fence, raising his gun to cover the brute, which, as we could now see, was slavering and growling hoarsely. A cry arose from the crowd, and my mother groaned, as the dog, espying the man across the ditch, rushed down one side of it and up the other, to attack the new foe. My father held his hand until the dog was within a few feet of him, then fired with steady aim. The brute rolled over to the bottom of the ditch—dead.
That evening we were allowed to walk down the field to see the slaughtered monster. That was what I named him to myself, and forthwith began a story in several chapters, with my father as the hero, and an astonishing number of beasts of prey as dramatis personæ, that lasted me for many a night thereafter.
The title I had chosen was none too large for the dog as he lay, stark and still, his big head straight with his back, his teeth showing savagely in the open jaws. A trickle of water was dammed into a pool by his huge bulk.
I held my father’s hand and laid my cheek to it in reverence I had not words to express, when my mother said:
“You ran a terrible risk, love! What if your gun had missed fire, or you had not hit him?”
“I had settled all that in my mind. I should have stood my ground and tried to brain him with the butt.”
“As your forefathers did to the British at Bunker Hill!” exulted I, inwardly.
Be sure the sentence was not uttered. The recollection of the inner life, in which I was wont to think out such sayings, has made me more tolerant with so-called priggish children than most of their elders are prone to be.
One paragraph of our next letter has a distinctly modern flavor. By substituting millions for thousands in the estimate of the defalcation, we might date it in this year of our Lord.