The Dogs of Boytown

by Walter A. Dyer

"Why," cried Jack, "it's Romulus. See, he must have broken away."

"He came all the way home alone in the dark," said Ernest. "How do you s'pose he ever found his way?"

Romulus seemed to understand that it was not the time to make a noise, for though he kept leaping on the boys in an access of delight and making little sounds in his throat that were almost human, he refrained from the loud, joyous barking that he would have indulged in if it had been daytime. Remus had heard him, however, and was making a considerable commotion in Rome. So the boys took Romulus quietly out to his brother, who greeted him with paw and tongue and voice, and bidding both dogs goodnight, they went back to the house.

So it was decided that if Romulus so much desired his own home, he should be deprived of it no longer. Sam came down in a day or two to find out about it.

"I thought he'd probably run home," said he, "but I wanted to make sure. I guess we'd better leave him here now. I'm pretty near through with him for this fall, anyway. You just bring him up once in awhile so I can take him out and not let him forget what I've learned him."

Meanwhile the affairs of Boytown were going on much as usual. Autumn passed in golden glory, with nutting expeditions in October in which sometimes as many as a dozen boys and a dozen dogs joined forces. As they started out through the town streets, Mr. Fellowes, the news dealer and stationer, said it looked as though a circus had come to town.

Such things, however, were of common and regular occurrence. Only two episodes of that season deserve to be specially recorded. One was a dog fight which for a time brought the dog-owning fraternity of Boytown into ill repute.

For some time several of the boys had been bragging, as boys will, about the prowess in battle of their particular dogs, and this narrowed down at length to an unsettled controversy between Monty Hubbard and Harry Barton. Monty maintained that the Irish terrier was the greatest dare-devil and fighter in the canine world, and he quoted books and individuals to prove it. Harry, on the other hand, insisted that the bulldog's grit and tenacity were proverbial, and loudly asserted that if Mike once got a grip on Mr. O'Brien's throat, it would be good-by, Mr. O'Brien.

It is only fair to the boys to state that it was the Irish terrier that started the fracas on his own initiative. He was a scrappy terrier, always ready to start something, and it usually required considerable vigilance to keep him out of trouble. But it must be confessed that on this particular occasion his master did not exert the usual restraint.

It happened out on the road that Ernest and Jack so often took when they visited Sam Bumpus or Trapper's Cave. Mr. O'Brien had been annoying the other dogs for some little time, rushing and barking at them and inviting a friendly encounter. He was not vicious, but he loved a tussle. Finally Mike the bulldog, usually so long-suffering, lost patience and turned on Mr. O'Brien with a menacing snarl that seemed to mean business. For a moment the Irishman stood still in surprise, while Mike, his head held low, waited with a stubborn look in his eyes.