I was terribly unhappy, of course, but not despairing. No one had been able to keep me in a place that I wanted to get out of. I came to myself fully after a bit, and lay still and watched events.
These fellows were pretending to be electric light or telephone men. Quite often, when other automobiles were passing, they got out, and tapped poles in a knowing way. They wore big leather belts, and they dragged about ropes and coils of wire. I could look out of a crack in the box, and I heard sounds that I pieced together.
I did not know by which road we were going toward the city, but something told me after the lapse of an hour or two, that we were in the Mount Vernon or Pelham Manor district.
I lay low, and went on saying nothing; and after a time I felt the car stop, and my box was taken up and carried into some kind of a shed, a door was banged together, the box was opened, and four young men faces confronted me.
Two of them were the ones I had noticed at the dog-show. They had paid, or were going to pay, the others for stealing me. I was ordered to get out, and in a way that was not too feeble, nor too lively, I crawled out on the earth floor.
They had stolen me to sell. I knew that, and I knew also this was not the time to see about escaping. I was really exhausted, for mental worry is as fatiguing to animals as to human beings, and I just dropped down on a heap of straw.
“Ain’t much to look at,” said one of the men who had stolen me.
“It’s points,” said one of the white-faced youths. “I don’t understand the gab about it, but he’s worth seven thousand all right.”
Their talk was dreadful—all tarnished with oaths and strange slang that of course I shall translate, for it is not fit to repeat.
Poor fools—poor young fools, I thought as I looked at them. If master could only get at you—but you belong to the class he dreads, that pale-faced, anemic lot without morals, and with absolutely nothing to work on. It seems as if ill-health, and crowding and poverty, make a criminal class that is the most desperate, for you can’t do much with it. These two poor wretches should have been locked up and carefully watched. All the time I was with them I did not hear one decent word uttered by them, I did not see one decent action performed. They were rotten through and through.