He came back with his shotgun carefully hidden behind him, and then he
and I showed Fluff the two guns simultaneously. For one minute Fluff was
startled. Then he vanished. All we saw of him as he went was the dust he
left in his wake. Massett had come over when Brownlee brought over
his gun, and Murchison and I sat and smoked while Massett and Brownlee
fought out the periodicity of Fluff. Brownlee said that for two guns
Fluff would traverse the same distance as for one, but twice as quickly;
but Massett said Brownlee was foolish, and that anyone who knew anything
about dogs would know that no dog could go faster than Fluff had gone
at the sight of one gun. Massett said Fluff would travel at his regular
one-gun speed, but would travel a two-gun distance. He said Fluff would
not be back for ninety-six hours. Brownlee said he would be back in
forty-eight hours, but both agreed that he would travel twenty-eight
hundred and eighty miles. Then Murchison went home and got a map, and
showed Brownlee and Massett that if Fluff traveled fourteen hundred
miles in the direction he had started he would have to do the last two
hundred miles as a swim, because he would strike the Atlantic Ocean
at the twelve hundredth mile. But Brownlee just turned up his nose and
sneered. He said Fluff was no fool, and that when he reached the coast
he would veer to the north and travel along the beach for two hundred
miles or so. Then Massett said that he had been thinking about
Brownlee's theory, and he _knew_ no dog could do what Brownlee said
Fluff would do--sixty miles an hour. He said he agreed that a dog like
Fluff could do thirty miles an hour if he did not stop to howl, because
his howl represented about sixty horse power, but that no dog could ever
do sixty miles an hour. Then Brownlee got mad and said Massett was a
born idiot, and that Fluff not only _could_ do sixty miles, but he
could keep on increasing his speed at the rate of thirty miles per gun
indefinitely. Then they went home mad, but they agreed to be on hand
when Fluff returned. But they were not. Fluff came home in twenty-four
hours, almost to the minute.
When I went over and told Brownlee, he wouldn't believe it at first, but
when I showed him Fluff, he cheered up and clapped me on the back.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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