That Pup

by Ellis Parker Butler

  Produced by David Widger

  THAT PUP

  By Ellis Parker Butler

  Author Of Pigs Is Pigs, Kilo, Etc.

  Illustrated

  New York The Mcclure Company, MCMVII

  I. THE EDUCATION OF FLUFF

  Murchison, who lives next door to me, wants to get rid of a dog, and ifyou know of anyone who wants a dog I wish you would let Murchison know.Murchison doesn't need it. He is tired of dogs, anyway. That is justlike Murchison. 'Way up in an enthusiasm one day and sick of it thenext.

  Brownlee--Brownlee lives on the other side of Murchison--remembers whenMurchison got the dog. It was the queerest thing, so Murchison says,you ever heard of. Here came the express wagon--Adams' Express Company'swagon--and delivered the dog. The name was all right--"C. P. Murchison,Gallatin, Iowa"--and the charges were paid. The charges were $2.80, andpaid, and the dog had been shipped from New York. Think of that! Twelvehundred miles in a box, with a can of condensed milk tied to the box and"Please feed" written on it.

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  When Murchison came home to dinner, there was the dog. At firstMurchison was pleased; then he was surprised; then he was worried. Hehadn't ordered a dog. The more he thought about it the more he worried.

  "If I could just _think_ who sent it," he said to Brownlee, "then Iwould know who sent it; but I can't think. It is evidently a valuabledog. I can see that. People don't send cheap, inferior dogs twelvehundred miles. But I can't _think_ who sent it."

  "What worries me," he said to Brownlee another time, "is who sent it.I can't _imagine_ who would send me a dog from New York. I know so manypeople, and, like as not, some influential friend of mine has meant tomake me a nice present, and now he is probably mad because I haven'tacknowledged it. I'd like to know what he thinks of me about now!"

  It almost worried him sick. Murchison never did care for dogs, but whena man is presented with a valuable dog, all the way from New York, with$2.80 charges paid, he simply _has_ to admire that dog. So Murchison gotinto the habit of admiring the dog, and so did Mrs. Murchison. From whatthey tell me, it was rather a nice dog in its infancy, for it was only apup then. Infant dogs have a habit of being pups.

  As near as I could gather from what Murchison and Mrs. Murchisontold me, it was a little, fluffy, yellow ball, with bright eyes andever-moving tail. It was the kind of a dog that bounces around like arubber ball, and eats the evening newspaper, and rolls down the porchsteps with short, little squawks of surprise, and lies down on its backwith its four legs in the air whenever a bigger dog comes near. In colorit was something like a camel, but a little redder where the hair waslong, and its hair was like beaver fur--soft and woolly inside, with afew long hairs that were not so soft. It was so little and fluffy thatMrs. Murchison called it Fluff. Pretty name for a soft, little dog isFluff.

  "If I only _knew_ who sent that dog," Murchison used to say to Brownlee,"I would like to make some return. I'd send him a barrel of my bestmelons, express paid, if it cost me five dollars!"

  Murchison was in the produce business, and he knew all about melons, butnot so much about dogs. Of course he could tell a dog from a cat, and afew things of that sort, but Brownlee was the real dog man. Brownlee hadtwo Irish pointers or setters--I forget which they were; the black dogswith the long, floppy ears. I don't know much about dogs myself. I hatedogs.

  Brownlee knows a great deal about dogs. He isn't one of the book-taughtsort; he knows dogs by instinct. As soon as he sees a dog he can makea guess at its breed, and out our way that is a pretty good test, forGallatin dogs are rather cosmopolitan. That is what makes good stock inmen--Scotch grandmother and German grandfather on one side and Englishgrandmother and Swedish grandfather on the other--and I don't see whythe same isn't true of dogs. There are numbers of dogs in Gallatin thatcan trace their ancestry through nearly every breed of dog that everlived, and Brownlee can look at any one of them and immediately guessat its formula--one part Spitz, three parts greyhound, two parts collie,and so on. I have heard him guess more kinds of dog than I ever knewexisted.

  As soon as he saw Murchison's dog he guessed it was a pure bred Shepherdwith a trace of Eskimo. Massett, who thinks he knows as much about dogsas Brownlee does, didn't believe it. The moment he saw the pup he saidit was a pedigree dog, half St. Bernard and half Spitz.

  Brownlee and Massett used to sit on Murchison's steps after supper andpoint out the proofs to each other. They would argue for hours.

  "All right, Massett," Brownlee would say, "but you can't fool _me_. ILook at that nose! If that isn't a Shepherd nose, I'll eat it. And seethat tail! Did you ever see a tail like that on a Spitz? That is anEskimo tail as sure as I am a foot high."

  "Tail fiddlesticks!" Massett would reply. "You can't tell anything bya pup's tail. Look at his ears! _There_ is St. Bernard for you! And seehis lower jaw. Isn't that Spitz? I'll leave it to Murchison. Isn't thatlower jaw Spitz, Murchison?"

  Then all three would tackle the puppy and open its mouth and feel itsjaw, and the pup would wriggle and squeak, and back away, opening andshutting its mouth to see if its works had been damaged.

  "All right!" Brownlee would say. "You wait a year or two and you'llsee!"

  About three months later the pup was as big as an ordinary full-growndog, and his coat looked like a compromise between a calfskin and one ofthese hairbrush door mats you use to wipe your feet on in muddy weather.He did not look like the same pup. He was long limbed and awkward anduseless, and homely as a shopworn fifty-cent yellow plush manicure set.Murchison began to feel that he didn't really need a dog, but Brownleewas as enthusiastic as ever. He would go over to Murchison's fairlyoozing dog knowledge.

  "I'll tell you what that dog is," he would say. "That dog is a crossbetween a Great Dane and an English Deerhound. You've got a veryvaluable dog there, Murchison, a very valuable dog. He comes of finestock on both sides, and it is a cross you don't often see. I never sawit, and I've seen all kinds of crossed dogs."

  Then Massett would drop in and walk around the dog admiringly for a fewminutes and absorb his beauties.

  "Murchison," he would say, "do you know what that dog is? That dog isa pure cross between a Siberian wolfhound and a Newfoundland. You treatthat dog right and you'll have a fortune in him. Why, a pure Siberianwolfhound is worth a thousand dollars, and a good--a really goodNewfoundland, mind you--is worth two thousand, and you've got both inone dog. That's three thousand dollars' worth of dog!"

  In the next six months Fluff grew. He broadened out and lengthened andheightened, and every day or two Brownlee or Massett would discover anew strain of dog in him. They pointed out to Murchison all the marksby which he could tell the different kinds of dog that were combinedin Fluff, and every time they discovered a new one they held a sort ofjubilee, and bragged and swelled their chests. They seemed to spend alltheir time thinking up odd and strange kinds of dog that Fluff had inhim. Brownlee discovered the traces of Cuban bloodhound, Kamtchatkahound, beagle, Brague de Bengale, and Thibet mastiff, but Massett firsttraced the stag-hound, Turkoman watchdog, Dachshund, and Harrier in him.

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  Murchison, not being a doggish man, never claimed to have noticed any ofthese family resemblances, and never said what he thought the dog reallywas until a month or two later, when he gave it as his opinion that thedog was a cross between a wolf, a Shetland pony, and hyena. It was aboutthat time that Fluff had to be chained. He had begun to eat other dogs,and children and chickens. The first night Murchison chained him to hiskennel Fluff walked half a mile, taking the kennel along, and then onlystopped because the kennel got tangled with a lamp-post. The man whobrought him home claimed that Fluff was nearly asphyxiated when he foundhim; said he gnawed half through the lamp-post, and that gas got in hislungs, but this was not true. Murchison learned af
terwards that it wasonly a gasoline lamp-post, and a wooden one.

  "If there were only some stags around this part of the country," saidMassett, "the stag-hound strain in that dog would be mighty valuable.You could rent him out to everybody who wanted to go stag hunting; andyou'd have a regular monopoly, because he's the only staghound in thispart of the country. And stag hunting would be popular, too, out here,because there are no game laws that interfere with stag hunting in thisState. There is no closed season. People could hunt stags all the yearround, and you'd have that dog busy every day of the year."

  "Yes!" sneered Brownlee, "only there are no stags. And he hasn't anystaghound blood in him. Pity there are no Dachs in this State, too,isn't