“Oh, Miss Amanda! Are you pos’tive?”
“Positive! I know Joseph Stagg. He was never yet cruel to any dumb creature. Go ask him yourself, Carolyn May. Whatever else he may be, he is not a hater of helpless and dumb animals.”
“Miss Amanda,” cried Carolyn May, with clasped hands, “you—you are just lifting an awful big lump off my heart! I’ll run and ask him right away.”
She put up her lips for Miss Amanda to kiss, but she could not wait to walk properly with her new friend to the corner. Instead, she raced with the barking Prince back to the Stagg premises. Mr. Stagg had just finished filling in with the stones the trench Prince had dug under the garden fence.
“There,” he grunted. “That dratted dog won’t dig this hole any bigger, I reckon. What’s the matter with you, Car’lyn?”
“Are—are you going to drownd Princey, Uncle Joe? If—if you do, it just seems to me, I—I shall die!”
He looked up at her searchingly.
“Humph! is that mongrel so all-important to your happiness that you want to die if he does?” demanded the man.
“Yes, Uncle Joe.”
“Humph!” ejaculated the hardware dealer again. “I believe you think more of that dog than you do of me.”