I had a dreadful time after that accident with Mr. Martin\'s eye. He wrote a letter to father and said that "the conduct of that atrocious young ruffian was such," and that he hoped he would never have a son like me. As soon as father said, "My son I want to see you up-stairs bring me my new rattan cane," I knew what was going to happen. I will draw some veils over the terrible scene, and will only say that for the next week I did not feel able to hold a pen unless I stood up all the time.
Last week I got a beautiful dog. Father had gone away for a few days and I heard mother say that she wished she had a nice little dog to stay in the house and drive robbers away. The very next day a lovely dog that didn\'t belong to anybody came into our yard and I made a dog-house for him out of a barrel, and got some beefsteak out of the closet for him, and got a cat for him to chase, and made him comfortable. He is part bull-dog, and his ears and tail are gone and he hasn\'t but one eye and he\'s lame in one of his hind-legs and the hair has been scalded off part of him, and[Pg 36] he\'s just lovely. If you saw him after a cat you\'d say he was a perfect beauty. Mother won\'t let me bring him into the house, and says she never saw such a horrid brute, but women haven\'t any taste about dogs anyway.
His name is Sitting Bull, though most of the time when he isn\'t chasing cats he\'s lying down. He knows pretty near everything. Some dogs know more than folks. Mr. Travers had a dog once that knew Chinese. Every time that dog heard a man speak Chinese he would lie down and howl and then he would get up and bite the man. You might talk English or French or Latin or German to him and he wouldn\'t pay any attention to it, but just say three words in Chinese and he\'d take a piece out of you. Mr. Travers says that once when he was a puppy a Chinaman tried to catch him for a stew; so whenever he heard anybody speak Chinese he remembered that time and went and bit the man to let him know that he didn\'t approve of the way Chinamen treated puppies. The dog never made a mistake but once. A man came to the house who had lost his pilate and couldn\'t speak plain, and the dog thought he was speaking Chinese and so he had his regular fit and bit the man worse than he had ever bit anybody before.
Sitting Bull don\'t know Chinese, but Mr. Travers says he\'s a "specialist in cats," which means that he knows the whole science of cats. The very first night I let him loose[Pg 37] he chased a cat up the pear-tree and he sat under that tree and danced around it and howled all night. The neighbors next door threw most all their things at him but they couldn\'t discourage him. I had to tie him up after breakfast and let the cat get down and run away before I let him loose again, or he\'d have barked all summer.
The only trouble with him is that he can\'t see very well and keeps running against things. If he starts to run out of the gate he is just as likely to run head first into the fence, and when he chases a cat round a corner he will sometimes mistake a stick of wood, or the lawn-mower for the cat and try to shake it to death. This was the way he came to get me into trouble with Mr. Martin.
He hadn\'t been at our house for so long (Mr. Martin I mean) that we all thought he never would come again. Father sometimes said that his friend Martin had been driven out of the house because my conduct was such and he expected I would separate him from all his friends. Of course I was sorry that father felt bad about it, but if I was his age I would have friends that were made more substantial than Mr. Martin is.
Night before last I was out in the back yard with Sitting Bull looking for a stray cat that sometimes comes around the house after dark and steals the strawberries and takes the apples out of the cellar. At least I suppose it is this[Pg 38] particular cat that steals the apples, for the cook says a cat does it and we haven\'t any private cat of our own. After a while I saw the cat coming along by the side of the fence, looking wicked enough to steal anything and to tell stories about it afterwards. I was sitting on the ground holding Sitting Bull\'s head in my lap and telling him that I did wish he\'d take to rat-hunting like Tom McGinnis\'s terrier, but no sooner had I seen the cat and whispered to Sitting Bull that she was in sight than he jumped up and went for her.
He chased her along the fence into the front yard where she made a dive under the front piazza. Sitting Bull came round the corner of the house just flying, and I close after him. It happened that Mr. Martin was at that identicular moment going up the steps of the piazza, and Sitting Bull mistaking one of his legs for the cat jumped for it and had it in his teeth before I could say a word.
When that dog once gets hold of a thing there is no use in reasoning with him, for he won\'t listen to anything. Mr. Martin howled and said, "Take him off my gracious the dog\'s mad" and I said, "Come here sir. Good dog. Leave him alone" but Sitting Bull hung on to the leg as if he was deaf and Mr. Martin hung on to the railing of the piazza and made twice as much noise as the dog. I didn\'t know whether I\'d better run for the doctor or the[Pg 39] police, but after shaking the leg for about a minute Sitting Bull gave it an awful pull and pulled it off just at the knee joint. When I saw the dog rushing round the yard with the leg in his mouth I ran into the house and told Sue and begged her to cut a hole in the wall and hide me behind the plastering where the police couldn\'t find me. When she went down to help Mr. Martin she saw him just going out of the yard on a wheelbarrow with a man wheeling him on a broad grin.
If he ever comes to this house again I\'m going to run away. It turns out that his leg was made of cork and I suppose the rest of him is either cork or glass. Some day he\'ll drop apart on our piazza then the whole blame will be put on me.