And he was gettin' wise, all right. He knew to the minute when mealtime came around, and if he wasn't let out on the kitchen porch where his chow was served he thought nothing of scratchin' the paint off a door or tryin' to chew the knob. Took only two tries to teach him to stand up on his hind legs and walk for his meals, as straight as a drum major. Also he'd shake hands for a bit of candy, and retrieve a rubber ball. But chiefly he delighted to get a stick of soft wood and go prancin' through the house with it, rappin' the furniture or your shins as he went, and end up by chewin' it to bits on the fireplace hearth rug. Or it might be a smelly old bone that he'd smuggled in from outside. You could guess that would get Vee registerin' a protest and I'd have to talk to Buddy.
"Hey!" I'd remark, grabbin' him by the collar. "Whaddye think this is, a soap fact'ry? Leggo that shin-bone."
"Gr-r-r-r!" he'd remark back, real hostile, and roll his eyes menacin'.
At which Vee would snicker and observe: "Now isn't he the dearest thing to do that, Torchy? Do let him have his booful bone there. I'll spread a newspaper under it."
Her theory was good, only Buddy didn't care to gnaw his bone on an evening edition. He liked eatin' it on the Turkish rug better. And that's where he did eat it. That was about the way his trainin' worked out in other things. We had some perfectly good ideas about what he should do; he'd have others, quite different; and we'd compromise. That is, we'd agree that Buddy was right. Seemed to me about the only thing to do, unless you had all day or all night to argue with him and show him where he was wrong. I could keep it up for an hour or two. Then I either got hoarse or lost my disposition.
You remember there was some talk of keepin' him in the garage at first. Anyway, it was mentioned. And he was kept there the first night, until somewhere around 2 A. M. Then I trailed out in a bathrobe and slippers and lugged him in. He'd howled for three hours on a stretch and seemed to be out for the long-distance championship. Not havin' looked up the past performances in non-stop howlin' I couldn't say whether he'd hung up a new record or not. I was willin' to concede the point. Besides, I wanted a little sleep, even if he didn't. I expect we was lucky that he picks out a berth behind the kitchen stove as the proper place for him to snooze. He might have fancied the middle of our bed. If he had, we'd camped on the floor, I suppose.
Another good break for us was the fact that he was willin' to be tethered out daytimes on a wire traveler that Dominick fixed up for him. Course, he did dig up a lot of Vee's favorite dahlia bulbs, and he almost undermined a corner of the kitchen wing when he set out to put a choice bone in cold storage, but he was so comical when he tamped the bone down with his nose that Vee didn't complain.
"We can have the hole filled in and sodded over next spring," says Vee.
"Huh!" I says. "By next spring he'll be big enough to tunnel clear under the house."
Looked like he would. At five months Buddy weighed 34 pounds and to judge by his actions most of him was watchspring steel geared in high speed. He was as hard as nails all over and as quick-motioned as a cat. I'd got into the habit of turnin' him loose when I came home and indulgin' in a half hour's rough house play with him. Buddy liked that. He seemed to need it in his business of growin' up. If I happened to forget, he wasn't backward in remindin' me of the oversight. He'd developed a bark that was sort of a cross between an automobile shrieker and throwin' a brick through a plate glass window, and when he put his whole soul into expressin' his feelin's that way everybody within a mile needed cotton in their ears. So I'd drape myself in an old raincoat, put on a pair of heavy drivin' gauntlets, and frisk around with him.