“Papa was very polite. He said he regretted that he could allow no shooting on the place except what he did himself. ‘You are certainly entitled to shoot any dog or dogs which you may discover molesting your sheep, and I shall exercise the same prerogative in protecting my dog.’
“He said it with that deprecating smile of his—I believe he smiled deprecatingly when he got cut off from his men at Antietam, and fought his way out of a lot of rebels who tried to make him prisoner. He hated Grosman, who was the meanest man in town and starved his horses.
“The man went off growling, and said he’d see the Mayor. We chained Artie up that night. In the morning we found his cat, dead, with a half-eaten piece of poisoned meat beside it. Artie thought everything of that cat. He had carried it around in his mouth ever since it was a little kitten. He always had to have his cat, the way a child has to have a doll. Any other cat he’d have sighted half a mile away and chased. But that one was his own, and anything it did was all right. It’s all in being acquainted. Papa sat up all the next night with a shotgun. We heard that the people from the French quarter of the village insisted that Artie got over the wall at night and roamed around and got into mischief. They said they heard him howling up on Mount Phelim, and talked a great deal about what they were going to do to him and us. Those Canucks would have it that he was a man-wolf, and could change about from one thing to another. You can’t argue with them, when they get a notion like that.
“One morning Pete Lancto, who mows the lawn, said he had seen the devil, and that he was like a shaggy dog.
“‘Probably it was a dog!’ I said. But he told a lot of lies about smelling brimstone and flames coming out of its eyes.
“I said: ‘I guess you were tenet’ (that’s their word for ‘tight’).
“But he hadn’t touched a drop, and had only been to get a new salt codfish at the store.
“‘Well, anyway, if it smelt of brimstone, it wasn’t Artie.’
“But that idiot said: ‘The devil, he can smell brimstone when he wants to—je pense que oui!’