“My! what a smash it made,” cried Yeggie. “Yeggie jumped, and then the smell—wow!” and he twisted his muzzle all up in a knot.
“Brave dogs,” I exclaimed, “especially brave, since you so hate a bottle, but weren’t you afraid Thomas would catch you?”
“Yeggie watched,” cried the little dog. “If Yeggie barked once, it meant some one was coming, and the Frenchmen must drop on the hay, and be dead dogs. Two barks from Yeggie meant that they had time to skip down the ladder. But no one came.”
I congratulated the two poodles on their cleverness, and asked whether the men had found the bottle.
“No. We found out after we’d had the trouble of watching for them, that they’d fed the stock for the night, and had gone to the city on a half holiday. The chauffeur is to shut the barn doors in an hour.”
“Master Carty will be out before then to call on the bottle,” I said.
“He’s coming, boys, he’s coming,” said Weary Winnie suddenly. She had been staring out the barn door in the direction of the house. We dogs all scattered, except Yeggie who crept behind a grain measure.
Later on Yeggie, with wicked glee, related Master Carty’s disappointment and anger on not finding the bottle. He climbed to the mow, groped about in the hay, came down, smelt his lost treasure, raged at the men who he thought had stolen it, and flung himself back to the house in a passion, telling what he was going to do to be revenged on the thieves.
That was not the last of the bottle. The next scene in its history came the next morning. A terrible thunderstorm coming on at dinner time this same day, prevented my master and mistress from taking the baby home. They often stayed all night at the Bonstones’, who had plenty of guest rooms.
Everybody was late for breakfast the next morning. The dear human beings had sat up late talking the night before, over the library fire that Mrs. Bonstone had had lighted to make things look cheerful.