But they said his worst habit was his appetite. He was organized inside like a bottomless pit, so they said. If they took him along with them he'd scare all the game out of the country by chasing it but never caught any; and if they left him behind locked up in the cabin he'd eat a side of meat or a pack-saddle or something before they got back. A set of rawhide harness was just a light snack to him, they said--sort of an appetizer. And his idea of a pleasant evening was to sit on his haunches and howl two or three hours on a stretch with a mournful enthusiasm and after he did go to sleep he'd have bad dreams and howl some more without waking up, but they did. Altogether, it seemed he had more things about him that you wouldn't care for than a relative by marriage. They said, speaking in that overlapping way of theirs, that they'd prayed to get shut of him but didn't have any luck. So Good Sam asked them why somebody hadn't just up and killed him. And they hastened to state that they were both too tender-hearted for that. But if he felt called upon to take the job of being executioner off their hands, the hound being a stranger to him and he not a member of the family as was the case with them, why, they'd be most everlastingly grateful. And he said he would do that very little trick first thing in the morning. Now, of course, the simplest and the quickest and the easiest way would have been for Good Sam to toll the pup outdoors and bore him with Boots' old rifle. But no, that wouldn't do. As he explained to them, he was sort of tender himself when it came to taking life, but I judge the real underlying reason was that he liked to go to all sorts of pains and complicate the machinery when he was working at being a philanthropist. Soon as supper was over he reared back to figure on a plan and all at once his eye lit on a box of dynamite setting over in a corner. During the closed season on fur those two played at being miners. "I've got it now," he told them. "I'll take a stick of that stuff there with me and I'll lead this cussed dog along with me and take him half a mile up the bottoms and fasten him to a tree with a piece of line. Then I'll hitch a time-fuse onto the dynamite and tie the dynamite around his neck with another piece of rope and leave him there. Pretty soon the fuse will burn down and the dynamite will go off--_kerblooie!_--and thus without pain or previous misgivings that unsuspecting canine will be totally abolished. But the most beautiful part of it is that nobody--you nor me neither--will be a witness to his last moments."