Stubby's mother was washing. She looked up from her tubs on the back porch to say, “Wish you'd take that bucket--” then seeing what was slinking behind her son, straightway assumed the role of destiny with, “Git out o' here!” Stubby snapped his fingers behind his back as much as to say, “Wait a minute.” “A woman gave him to me,” he said to his mother. “_Gave_ him to you?” she scoffed. “I sh' think she would!” Then something happened that had not happened many times in Stubby's short lifetime. He acknowledged his feelings. “I'd like to keep him. I'd like to have a dog.” His mother shook her hands and the flying suds seemed expressing her scorn. “Huh! _That_ ugly good-for-nothing thing?” The dog had edged in between Stubby's feet and crouched there. “He could go with me on my route,” said Stubby. “He'd kind of be company for me.” And when he had said that he knew all at once just how lonesome he had been sometimes on his route, how he had wanted something to “kind of be company” for him. His face twitched as he stooped down to pat the dog. Mrs. Lynch looked at her son--youngest of her five. Not the hardness of her heart but the hardness of her life had made her unpractised in moments of tenderness. Something in the way Stubby was patting the dog suggested to her that Stubby was a “queer one.” He _was_ kind of little to be carrying papers all by himself. Stubby looked up. “He could eat what's thrown away.” That was an error in diplomacy. The woman's face hardened. “Mighty little'll be thrown away _this_ winter,” she muttered. But just then Mrs. Johnson appeared on the other side of the fence and began hanging up her clothes and with that Mrs. Lynch saw her way to justify herself in indulging her son. Mrs. Johnson and Mrs. Lynch had “had words.” “You just let him stay around, Stubby,” she called, and you would have supposed from her tone it was Stubby who was on the other side of the fence, “maybe he'll keep the neighbour's chickens out! Them that ain't got chickens o' their own don't want to be bothered with the neighbours'!” That was how it happened that he stayed; and no one but Stubby knew--and possibly Stubby didn't either--how it happened that he was named Hero. It would seem that Hero should be a noble St. Bernard, or a particularly mean-looking bulldog, not a stocky, shapeless, squint-eyed yellow dog with one ear bitten half off and one leg built on an entirely different plan from its fellow legs. Possibly Stubby's own spiritual experiences had suggested to him that you weren't necessarily the way you looked.