Never was anything said more plainly in dog talk, saving the pitiful response of Gripper: “Here I lie; kill me if you will. I am an old, old man with worn-down teeth and a broken heart!”
Blondy stopped snarling and trembling. He came a bit nearer, and with his own touched the cold nose of Gripper. The old dog opened one eye.
“Get up,” said Blondy very plainly. “But if you dare to come near my buried bone again, I’ll murder you, you old rip!”
And he lay down above that hidden treasure, wrinkling his eyes and lolling out his tongue, which, as all dogs know, is a sign that a little gambol and play will not be amiss.
“Dad!” cried Oliver Zinn. “He won’t touch old Gripper. Is he sick?”
“Come here!” thundered Zinn, and when Blondy came he kicked the dog across the kitchen and sent him crashing into the wall. “You yaller-hearted cur!” snarled Peter Zinn and strode out of the house to go to work.
His fury did not abate until he had delivered a shower of blows with a fourteen-pound sledge upon a bar of cold iron on his anvil, wielding the ponderous hammer with one capacious hand. After that he was able to try to think it out. It was very mysterious. For his own part, when he was enraged it mattered not what crossed his path—old and young, weak and strong, they were grist for the mill of his hands and he ground them small indeed. But Blondy, apparently, followed a different philosophy and would not harm those who were helpless.
Then Peter Zinn looked down to the foot which had kicked Blondy across the room. He was tremendously unhappy. Just why, he could not tell, but he fumbled at the mystery all that day and the next. Every time he faced Blondy the terrier seemed to have forgotten that brutal attack, but Peter Zinn was stabbed to the heart by a brand-new emotion—shame! And when he met Blondy at the gate on the second evening, something made him stoop and stroke the scarred head. It was the first caress. He looked up with a hasty pang of guilt and turned a dark red when he saw his wife watching from the window of the front bedroom. Yet when he went to sleep that night he felt that Blondy and he had been drawn closer together.
The very next day the crisis came. He was finishing his lunch when guns began to bark and rattle—reports with a metallic and clanging overtone which meant that rifles were in play; then a distant shouting rolled confusedly upon them. Peter Zinn called Blondy to his heels and went out to investigate.
The first surmise that jumped into his mind had been correct. Jeff and Lew Minster had broken from jail, been headed off in their flight, and had taken refuge in the post office. There they held the crowd at bay, Jeff taking the front of the building and Lew the rear. Vacant lots surrounded the old frame shack since the general merchandise store burned down three years before, and the rifles of two expert shots commanded this no-man’s-land. It would be night before they could close on the building, but when night came the Minster boys would have an excellent chance of breaking away with darkness to cover them.