A Dead Dog

“Very likely this man made the stuff himself. Who’s ruining the young men of this town? You know who they are, who’s being ruined.” (Walking to the poor dumfounded mountain man)—“He doesn’t know whether moon whisky ruins people or not—he has always drunk it—he has been ruined himself a long time—he was born ruined.” John Wilkins, the cold, the iron-hearted one, points a shaking finger.

“There he is—the miscreant, the home-ruiner.”

“Stick it to him, gentlemen. Stick it to him.”

Tom said that John Wilkins got an almighty sight of convictions in his Tennessee county. He told about a lot of cases.

There was a little thin-cheeked girl, only sixteen. She had a half-crazy mother and her dad was the town drunkard.

She wanted some silk stockings, like other girls had, and a fur coat, bought on the instalment plan. That, Tom said, was why she did what she did do.

“Stick it to her, gentlemen. Don’t waver. She is a home-ruiner.”

Suppose, said Tom, there was a woman—this happened in that county in Tennessee—who being what she was, a widow with two or three kids living on a mean little hillside farm near town, so worn out with toil and worry trying to get along that Tom didn’t think she was accountable for anything she did—suppose such a woman, being in her cabin, killed a man.

She did kill one. He was a young man, a young mountain rough. He came to her cabin one winter afternoon, Tom said, with another young man. They just came along a mountain road and stopping at the house began to annoy the woman. They had been drinking.

“So you’re a widow. It’s a shame you aren’t prettier. If you was prettier I’d kiss you, that’s what I’d do.”

“Now you git out of here. You let me alone. You let me alone.”

The woman was getting worked up. Her kids were scared. One of them was crying.

So the young fellows, being full of moon whisky, being young mountain roughs, wouldn’t let her alone, and she picked up a stove poker—it was a heavy iron one turned at the end, and sat by a stone fireplace.

She ran at one of the young fellows and swung the poker, not intending to hit him, but the heavy sharp iron entered his head and he fell down dead. Tom Hunt acted that scene out for us too. First he was the little tired mountain woman and then he was the young rough. Tom was good. Everyone said he should have gone on the stage.

As the mountain woman he made his face look worn and haggard. Fred Sloper was in the room with us and Fred always carries a cane. Tom picked it up and rushed across the room. We all drew back, thinking he was going to hit someone but fortunately, just as we were all becoming alarmed, he shifted characters again. He became the young rough, threw his hands up to his head, groaned, and fell down dead. He did a very good fall.

That woman was up for trial on a murder charge.

“She killed him, didn’t she?”

“It may not be murder. It’s manslaughter though.”

“You got to stick it to her, gentlemen. You got to be firm.”

Tom said it made him sick.

“Stick it to ’em.”

“Stick it to ’em.”

He said that all around that county they called John Wilkins “old stick it to ’em.” The odd part was that every time he came up for re-election he went in again with a whoop. He got a smashing big majority every time. Even a lot of people, moonshiners and so forth, he had stuck for jail sentences or maybe a turn on the road, went to the polls and voted him in again.

Tom said he couldn’t figure it out in any way except that these mountain people said to themselves—“Well, he’s just a fellow trying to do his job. He does it pretty well.”

“I guess he don’t have no personal feelings. I guess he’s just a fellow, doing his job,” they said.

But to return to dogs. Tom explained that there was a lot of good bird hunting over in his home county, in Tennessee. He said that a good bird dog was something in that country. Once there was a case in the courts in that county. It was about a bird dog that had been shot by a farmer and the owner was suing for the value of the dog. They called another farmer, a young man, as a dog expert.

“What is a good bird dog worth?” a lawyer asked.

“Well, I don’t know,” he said. “It depends on the dog.”

“A good one,” he said, “a really good one is, I guess, worth more than anything else in this world.”

Tom told this story to illustrate, you understand, how they felt about bird dogs in that Tennessee county.

“It is like this,” Tom said. “You may be a good shot and maybe not. If you are going to hunt, it’s nice to be a good shot.”

“Because up the birds come and there you are. You are hunting with another fellow over a brace of dogs. They are in a stubble field near a fence.” Tom was acting the part of a hunter now. He had got ahold of Fred Sloper’s stick again.

“The dogs are stanch,” he said. “They are standing rigid.”

“You advance. ‘First or last bird?’ you say to your partner. That’s so you won’t both of you crack down on the same bird.”

“He’s a crack shot, let’s say. ‘First one,’ he says. He’ll take the first bird up and leave the last one to you.”

“Of course you’ll both do what you can in the mass of them.”

“The point being that, for the moment, you yourself are something nice. There you stand, not too rigid, not relaxed either. Up the birds go. You draw down on them. Bang. It’s something to drop them clean, one after the other.”

“Suppose they are at the edge of the fence in that stubble field and there is a hillside, covered with dense laurel, as so many of the hillsides are in Tennessee. You have got to work fast and accurately all right.”

Tom pointed out something else too.

“Suppose now,” he said, “you aren’t such a crack shot. You go out with two fellows that are.”

“There’s your covey. So you draw a little back. Perhaps you don’t shoot at all.”

“You take it out of you watching the dogs and the men.”

There is something fine, Tom pointed out, in seeing well-trained men and animals working perfectly together like that, the dogs doing their part, the men their part, everything just right between animal and man, each understanding the other, each depending on the other.

“If you can’t shoot much,” Tom said, “you can get almost as much satisfaction going along and just looking—more maybe.”

He spoke about men and horses.

“Go to the races,” he said. “You see a horse and his rider working beautifully together.”

“Then, say, the rider is thrown. There is the horse running alone. He runs about as well as he did before but it doesn’t mean anything to you.”

The particular dog that got killed, Tom said, was named in the national setter bird-dog book—it seems there is a record kept of all such thoroughbred dogs—“Windham’s Kentucky Lad,” but his owner didn’t commonly call him that. He called him “Bum.”

He belonged, said Tom, to a man named Sam Rierdon and Sam Rierdon was a sawmill man. Tom said he was a bushy, hairy kind of a man, rather stout and short, and that his wife was dead.

Then he had a daughter and she died.

So he had gone in for dogs, the English setter breed, and had three, all good ones, but this Bum was the best of the lot.

He had been trained right and was right, Tom said.

He was a tail-bleeder.

“You know,” Tom said, “a good one, not too thick-skinned, fast, with a fine nose—”

That kind, according to Tom, never do get fat. Some of them, the best of them, he said, were like the son of the Tsar of Russia that got shot up by the Bolshevists. They were easy bleeders, we gathered. If you pointed a finger at one of them he bled a little right at the place you were pointing at. He was that fine on the trigger, that sensitive, let’s say.

This Bum bled at the tail. The end of his swinging tail got blood red, that is to say, a place at the tail’s end, about as big as a shaving brush, got red like that when he had been working five minutes in the field.

The tail was threshing from side to side, sticking up in the gray-brown fall fields of Tennessee like that.

Tom said Bum could scent a covey of birds farther, in all kinds of weather, and go nearer without flushing and would stand stancher and would pick up and bring in dead birds faster than any dog he had ever seen work.

He said that when a covey had been broken up he seemed to know just where the singles had gone. He would pick them up and stand them, one after another, Tom said, like picking up apples on the ground under a tree.

What happened was that the man John Wilkins—the hard-boiled, cold-hearted prosecuting attorney—borrowed this Bum from his owner for a day’s hunting.

One day he saw this Sam Rierdon on the street.

“Sam,” he said, “I got a dog all right but I’ve been hearing about your Bum.”

“I’d like to shoot over him once,” he said.

“All right John,” said Sam. “Say when.”

“To-morrow,” said John.

“All right,” said Sam. “He’s in his kennel back of my house.”

“Won’t you come along?” says John.

“I can’t,” says Sam. “I got a car of lumber to get off to-morrow.”

John Wilkins went hunting alone, taking his own dog and Bum. He drove out to a place called Poorfolk Valley. Tom said it was a long narrow valley between high Tennessee hills and was about fifteen miles out from town.

There were some little flat fields along a creek in that valley. Sometimes the hills pitched right down to the creek’s edge and the road, and sometimes they opened out, making the fields.

They were old corn, wheat, and rye fields, and the farmers who owned them knew John. He had hunted that valley before but it hadn’t been hunted much that year.

Something had held John up in town and he didn’t get started until late afternoon. It was a cold windy day and snow threatened. It was a bad day, Tom said, for birds.

“It was the kind of a day,” he said, “when the birds are likely to be in the woods or in the thickets on the sides of the mountains where you can’t get at them much.”

“The birds felt a storm coming,” he explained, “and were getting ready for it.”

This is what happened after John Wilkins, that icy-eyed Tennessee attorney-general of Tom’s home county in Tennessee, got out into the Poorfolk Valley and had begun to hunt.

He got out there and got the dogs, Bum and one of his own, a bitch named Flora, out of the car. The road just there, where he happened to stop the car, ran up out of the valley and climbed the side of a steep bluff.

He went down the side of the bluff through dense laurels, crossed a creek, and got into some fields. He didn’t expect to do much. It wasn’t any kind of a hunting day.

He worked up through the fields and Bum and Flora worked well together, backing each other up just fine, and he got into two coveys and knocked down four birds.

The last covey he shot into was in a narrow little field at the edge of another bluff, where the laurel was pretty thick, and the birds, after he had shot into them, scattered and went up in there.

There wasn’t much chance to get at them again but he thought he might get a single or two.

So with his gun in his hand he crossed the creek and climbed the bluff. He had found a little footing and was going along, working his way up, when, said Tom, he kicked up a bird. Just where the dogs were he didn’t know. The bird went off fast, on up the side of the bluff.

Of course John cracked down on him. He always thought afterward that the dog Bum must have found another single farther up the hillside somewhere and was standing him there, hidden by the bushes, making his point.

John Wilkins missed his bird. It had gone whirling through the top of a young cedar tree some twenty yards away up the bluff. He heard a little sound when that happened, not much of a sound he said afterward, just a tiny little yelp, like the quick excited yelp of a pup.

John worked on up the hill—it was laborious climbing—keeping his eye out for the dogs and thinking maybe he might find them down on some of the birds. He didn’t fund anything, so he finally blew his whistle for the dogs to come in and his Flora came. Bum didn’t appear.

John had got up to the place where that first bird had disappeared into the tree, thinking he might have got him, after all. “You know how a good shot is,” Tom said, “he hates to think he ever misses one.”

There was a little ledge of rock just under the tree. He stood there and looked around and the bird flew out but he didn’t shoot. For, at just that moment, his eye caught something. It was Bum lying on another ledge of rock some twenty feet below where he stood. It had begun to snow now, light hard flurries of snow, and the wind was howling. Bum had been standing a bird and had been shot and knocked down the side of the bluff.

John Wilkins dropped his gun and leaped down. There Bum was. He didn’t seem to be bleeding. There were two little flecks of blood on his white sides but these might well have come from his bloody tail whipping around. The creek that ran through the valley was a hundred yards below, and John carried Bum in his arms, half falling and tumbling down through the brush to the creek’s bank. It was a wonder, Tom thought, he didn’t break his own neck.

Bum was still alive but couldn’t stand on his hind legs. He kept looking, as under such circumstances a dog will, into John Wilkins’s eyes. They were the same eyes, Tom reminded us, into which more than one poor man and woman in that county had looked, hoping to find a little mercy and, as Tom said, human sympathy there and finding none.

John Wilkins took off his hat and dipping up water in it poured it over the dog’s head.

That went on for some time but didn’t seem to do any good.

So he picked the dog up in his arms again, waded the stream, crossed a field and then, climbing through the laurels, got up the hillside to the road where the car was.

Bum was heavy of course. It was a steep climb. Every now and then John Wilkins had to put him down for a rest and to get his breath, and every time he did Bum looked up at him again, threshing the red shaving-brush end of his tail about and trying to get to his feet.

He couldn’t make it. Tom thought he must have been shot and had leaped into the air with a little yelp. Falling over the ledge he had broken his back.

Every time he tried to get to his feet like that John Wilkins gritted his teeth and a little sobbing sound came from between his lips. “Don’t Bum. For God’s sake don’t. Lie still. Don’t do it,” he pleaded.

He got him up to the road to where the car was. John’s own dog, the bitch Flora, was already there. “Well,” John said, “she was a female. She didn’t seem to mind much.” She was hopping around in the road wagging her tail and jumping on her master. She never paid any attention to Bum.

This John Wilkins, Tom said, was pretty sick by now. He felt weak and looked pale and done up. He put Bum on some dry grass beside the road and started towards a distant farmhouse. The road was muddy. Tom said he went a little way along the road and then came back. He had happened to think that poor Bum might try to get to his legs again while he was gone and he couldn’t bear the thought. How Tom knew all these details I can’t say. He was down there on a visit for the fall shooting when all this happened. I’m just telling it as he told it to us.

He said that John came back along the muddy road and, getting a piece of rope from the car, tied Bum so he couldn’t, he hoped, make that effort to get to his feet, Bum looking him in the eyes in that hurt-dog way all the time. Then he went and got the farmer. The farmer was a man he knew. He, the farmer, looked at the dog, felt of him and said he thought he would be all right. He lifted him up and put him in the front seat of the car. “I don’t believe his back’s broke,” he said—he was one of the optimistic kind of men who are always trying to cheer people up—“if you get him to a veterinarian in town I think he’ll be O.K., John,” he said.

John Wilkins started for town and the dog died on the seat beside him on the way in. My friend Tom Hunt, who, you must admit, is a good describer—while he was telling us about it in his room that day he acted everything out, even the part of Bum—described all this to us. He spoke at length about the drive home. He said Bum never whimpered. He said John Wilkins couldn’t help looking hopefully at him every now and then but that, every time he did, his eyes met that look in the dog’s eyes and he came near running the car off the road and into the ditch.

“It got dark,” Tom said, “and it snowed and at last John, with the dead Bum on the seat beside him, got to Sam Rierdon’s house.” Sam’s house was out at the edge of town. He lived alone but was pretty well heeled, Tom said, and had some n—— that waited on him, got his food, kept his house in order and all. We gathered, from what Tom said, that he was rather a lonesome man.

A man like that, who had lost his wife and his daughter and really had nothing but his dogs—

John Wilkins got there after dark and parked the car in the road in front of the house. He took the dead Bum in his arms and went and laid him on the front porch of the house, by the front door.

Then he took a turn in the yard, walking around in the dark in the snow trying to get a grip on himself. This John Wilkins, as you may well guess, being prosecuting attorney in a mountain county in Tennessee, had been up against things in his life. More than once there had been threats made to take his life, Tom said, but they hadn’t scared him none.

He was scared now though. Finally, bracing himself, he went and knocked on the door.

Sam Rierdon came out. “I shot your dog,” John Wilkins said. “Well, I shot Bum. I killed him. He’s dead. There he is.” Tom said that John Wilkins shot the words at Sam Rierdon. He spoke as though an injury had been done him and he was sore. “He had to,” Tom said.

He pointed at Bum lying there dead. The light from inside the house came out through the open door and lighted up the scene. Tom said that Sam Rierdon didn’t say a word and that John Wilkins didn’t say anything more.

The prosecuting attorney took one look at his friend the lumberman and then, still acting as though he was sore, went away. He went out to his car and getting in drove rapidly away. It was snowing pretty hard. He seemed to want to get away from the sight of his friend and his friend’s house.

That was all of it, Tom said, all of the story.

Except about John Wilkins’s icy-gray eyes, about his being so hard-boiled. Tom said quite a lot about that and about his looking at Sam Rierdon and Sam looking at him and what each saw in the other’s eyes, but I’ll leave all that out.

Tom also talked a lot about the inconsistencies in the character of John Wilkins. “It’s the inconsistency of the whole thing that makes the story, that’s what makes it interesting,” he said.

“A man like that, who could be so hard-boiled about people and be like that about a dog.”

Well, I respect Tom all right. I respect his story-telling ability and the way he acts out the parts when he is telling a story, but that day when he told several of us this story up in his room and after we left and were walking along a street I asked the rest of the crowd what they thought. They were all men with more or less experience of dogs and horses and men.

“Do you think he was inconsistent, this Wilkins?” I asked.

“Inconsistent?” they all said. “What are you talking about? I can’t see where the inconsistency lies.”