Adventure stories, American; American fiction -- 20th century; Short stories; Western stories
Three weeks later, one morning, Steve and I were standing on the
river-bank at Dawson. A small boat was just arriving from Lake Bennett.
I saw Steve give a start, and heard him say something that was not nice
and that was not under his breath. Then I looked; and there, in the bow
of the boat, with ears pricked up, sat Spot. Steve and I sneaked
immediately, like beaten curs, like cowards, like absconders from
justice. It was this last that the lieutenant of police thought when he
saw us sneaking. He surmised that there were law-officers in the boat
who were after us. He didn’t wait to find out, but kept us in sight, and
in the M. & M. saloon got us in a corner. We had a merry time
explaining, for we refused to go back to the boat and meet Spot; and
finally he held us under guard of another policeman while he went to the
boat. After we got clear of him, we started for the cabin, and when we
arrived, there was that Spot sitting on the stoop waiting for us. Now
how did he know we lived there? There were forty thousand people in
Dawson that summer, and how did he _savve_ our cabin out of all the
cabins? How did he know we were in Dawson, anyway? I leave it to you.
But don’t forget what I said about his intelligence and that immortal
something I have seen glimmering in his eyes.
There was no getting rid of him any more. There were too many people in
Dawson who had bought him up on Chilcoot, and the story got around. Half
a dozen times we put him on board steamboats going down the Yukon; but he
merely went ashore at the first landing and trotted back up the bank. We
couldn’t sell him, we couldn’t kill him (both Steve and I had tried), and
nobody else was able to kill him. He bore a charmed life. I’ve seen him
go down in a dogfight on the main street with fifty dogs on top of him,
and when they were separated, he’d appear on all his four legs, unharmed,
while two of the dogs that had been on top of him would be lying dead.
I saw him steal a chunk of moose-meat from Major Dinwiddie’s cache so
heavy that he could just keep one jump ahead of Mrs. Dinwiddie’s squaw
cook, who was after him with an axe. As he went up the hill, after the
squaw gave up, Major Dinwiddie himself came out and pumped his Winchester
into the landscape. He emptied his magazine twice, and never touched
that Spot. Then a policeman came along and arrested him for discharging
firearms inside the city limits. Major Dinwiddie paid his fine, and
Steve and I paid him for the moose-meat at the rate of a dollar a pound,
bones and all. That was what he paid for it. Meat was high that year.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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