“Well,” says I, judicious, “I donno’s I’m what-you-might-say cross. Not systematic. But—I might be a little crispy.”
“I ain’t afraid o’ you,” says he, real flattering. “But don’t leave him hear anybody—well, snap anybody up.”
“All right,” says I, “I won’t. I like,” I says, “to get out o’ the way of that myself.”
“Well, and then,” he says, “I guess you’ll think I’m real particular. But—would you promise not to leave him go outside the yard?”
“Sure,” says I, “only when I’m with him.”
“I guess you’ll think I’m real particular,” he says again, in his kind of gentle voice without any sizin’ to it, “but I mean not even then. Days when you’re goin’ out, I’ll take him with me.”
“Sure,” says I, wondering all over me, but not letting on all I wondered, like you can’t in society. And I actually looked forward to having the little thing around the house with me, me that has always been down on mice, moths, bats and boys.
The next thing was, Would he stay with me? And looking to this end I contrived, some skillful, to be baking cookies the first morning his pa went off. Mis’ Puppy had happened in early to get some blueing, and she was sitting at one end of my cook table when Donnie came trotting out with his father, that always preferred the back door. (“It feels more like I lived here,” says he, wishful, “if you let me come in the back door.” And I was the last one to deny him that. Once when I went visiting, I got so homesick to go in the back door that it was half my reason for leaving ’em.)
“Now then,” I says to the little fellow that morning, “you just set here with us and see me make cookies. I’ll cut you out a soldier cooky,” says I.
“Wiv buttins?” he asks, and climbed up on his knees on a chair by the table and let his father go off without him, nice as the nicest. “I likes ’em wiv buttins,” he says—and Mis’ Puppy sort of kindled up in her throat, like a laugh that wants to love somebody.