A Dog with a Bad Name

by Talbot Baines Reed

Percy, as he walks up the stairs, ruminating on his good luck, feels considerably more self-respect when he looks at the two half-crowns than when looking at the half-sovereign.

At the top of the stairs he shouts down to Walker:—

“I say, wake me at six, will you? and leave my waterproof and top-boots on the hall table; and, I say, tell Mason to cut me a dozen strong ash sticks about a yard long; and, I say, leave a hammer and some tacks on the hall table too; and tell Appleby to go by the early coach to Overstone and get me a pound of cork, and some whalebone, and some tar. Here’s five shillings to pay for them. Don’t forget. Tell him to leave them at the lodge before twelve, and I’ll fetch them. Oh, and tell Raby if she wants to see what I was telling her about, she had better hang about the lodge till I come. I’m sure to be there somewhere between twelve and four.”

With which the young lord of creation retires to his cubicle, leaving Walker scratching his head, and regarding the five shillings in his hand in anything but a joyful mood.

“He ought to be put on the treadmill a week or two; that’s what would do him good,” observed the sage retainer to himself; “one thing at a time, and plenty of it. A dozen ash sticks before six o’clock in the morning! What does he want with ash sticks? Now his schoolmaster, if he’d got one, would find them particular handy.”

With which little joke Walker goes off to agitate Appleby and Mason with the news of their early morning duties, and to put the servants’ hall in a flutter by announcing for the fiftieth time that summer that either he or the young master would have to leave Wildtree Towers, because, positively—well, they would understand—a man’s respect for himself demanded that he should draw the line somewhere, and that was just what Master Percy would not allow him to do.

We have changed the scene once already in this chapter. Just before we finish let us change it once more, and leaving beautiful Wildtree and its happy family, let us fly to a sorry, tumbledown, desolate shed five miles away, on the hill-side. It may have once belonged to a farm, or served as a shelter for sheep on the mountain-slopes. But it now scarcely possesses a roof, and no sign of a habitation is anywhere visible.

The night has come on rainy and dark, and a weary tramp with his dog has been thankful to crawl into its poor shelter and rest his limbs. The wind has risen and howls dismally round the shed, breaking every now and then through the loose planks, and stirring up the straw which carpets the place. But the traveller is too weary to heed it or the rain which intrudes along with it, and crouching with his dog in the darkest corner, curls himself up in true tramp fashion, and settles down to sleep.

He has lain there two hours or more, and the mountain storm begins to abate. The dog has been uneasy for some time, and now in the midst of a peal of thunder awakens his master with a gruff yap. The sleeper sits up in an instant. It is not the thunder that has disturbed the dog, nor is it thunder that the tramp now listens to close at hand. It is the sound of voices, either inside the shed or just outside it.

Not a strange thing, perhaps, in a storm like this, for two wayfarers like himself to seek shelter—and yet the tramp seems startled by the sound, and signals to the dog to lie down and hold his peace.