“I’ll tell it as it happened,” sighed Henrietta. “I don’t believe I could make anything up to save my neck.”
She was small and sad-eyed, with a timid manner, and sat on a wolf-skin, leaning one elbow on its head, which had green eyes of sinister slant, and bristling ears.
“You know who Artaxerxes was?”
“Artaxerxes,” they recited, “was your old wolf-hound who was really benevolent, but everybody was afraid of him, and when he wagged his tail it waved like a cat’s, sinuously, instead of swinging in a clubby, careless way, as a dog’s should.”
“He was white with gray spots,” mused Henrietta; “I suppose his family in Siberia looked like that to match the snow when they went out hunting, and he was shaggy and soft.
“We chained him the night the circus came to town. He heard a lion roar as the train went by at three o’clock, and, at first, I thought we had another lion in the barn. Gracious! If he hadn’t been chained he would have been over the wall and chased that lion to the station.
“I went down to soothe him and see if his chain had given in any of its links. I never saw him so out of temper. Finally he consented to lie down, though he grumbled about it, and the tip of his tail kept twitching, not wagging. He hardly ever wagged it.
“He worried all that day. ‘Don’t you know there are bears and lions and tigers and wolves out there?’ he’d say—‘Isn’t it my business to protect you from such things? Do let me go and kill a few. I’ll come right back!’
“We supposed he would stop worrying when the circus went, but instead, he got worse. He explained how it was his business to find out what had become of all those animals. In the evenings, as soon as he was unchained, he would march up and down inside the wall, holding his nose to the wind and every now and then making a low impatient sound in his throat, as if he were worried about something and making plans.
“One morning Farmer Grosman came to our house, very fierce: ‘Your dog’s been killing my sheep.’ We explained that he never got over the six-foot wall, but nothing would do. If he hadn’t done it, who had? If we did not shoot him, he would, and so on.