Stubby's mother was washing. She looked up from her tubs on the back porch to say, “Wish you'd take that bucket—” then seeing what was slinking behind her son, straightway assumed the role of destiny with, “Git out o' here!”
Stubby snapped his fingers behind his back as much as to say, “Wait a minute.”
“A woman gave him to me,” he said to his mother.
“Gave him to you?” she scoffed. “I sh' think she would!”
Then something happened that had not happened many times in Stubby's short lifetime. He acknowledged his feelings.
“I'd like to keep him. I'd like to have a dog.”
His mother shook her hands and the flying suds seemed expressing her scorn. “Huh! That ugly good-for-nothing thing?”
The dog had edged in between Stubby's feet and crouched there. “He could go with me on my route,” said Stubby. “He'd kind of be company for me.”
And when he had said that he knew all at once just how lonesome he had been sometimes on his route, how he had wanted something to “kind of be company” for him.
His face twitched as he stooped down to pat the dog. Mrs. Lynch looked at her son—youngest of her five. Not the hardness of her heart but the hardness of her life had made her unpractised in moments of tenderness. Something in the way Stubby was patting the dog suggested to her that Stubby was a “queer one.” He was kind of little to be carrying papers all by himself.