A Yellow Dog
I never knew why in the Western States of America a yellow dog
should be proverbially considered the acme of canine degradation
and incompetency, nor why the possession of one should seriously
affect the social standing of its possessor. But the fact being
established, I think we accepted it at Rattlers Ridge without
question. The matter of ownership was more difficult to settle;
and although the dog I have in my mind at the present writing
attached himself impartially and equally to everyone in camp, no
one ventured to exclusively claim him; while, after the
perpetration of any canine atrocity, everybody repudiated him with
indecent haste.
"Well, I can swear he hasn't been near our shanty for weeks," or
the retort, "He was last seen comin' out of YOUR cabin," expressed
the eagerness with which Rattlers Ridge washed its hands of any
responsibility. Yet he was by no means a common dog, nor even an
unhandsome dog; and it was a singular fact that his severest
critics vied with each other in narrating instances of his
sagacity, insight, and agility which they themselves had witnessed.
He had been seen crossing the "flume" that spanned Grizzly Canyon
at a height of nine hundred feet, on a plank six inches wide. He
had tumbled down the "shoot" to the South Fork, a thousand feet
below, and was found sitting on the riverbank "without a scratch,
'cept that he was lazily givin' himself with his off hind paw." He
had been forgotten in a snowdrift on a Sierran shelf, and had come
home in the early spring with the conceited complacency of an
Alpine traveler and a plumpness alleged to have been the result of
an exclusive diet of buried mail bags and their contents. He was
generally believed to read the advance election posters, and
disappear a day or two before the candidates and the brass band--
which he hated--came to the Ridge. He was suspected of having
overlooked Colonel Johnson's hand at poker, and of having conveyed
to the Colonel's adversary, by a succession of barks, the danger of
betting against four kings.
While these statements were supplied by wholly unsupported
witnesses, it was a very human weakness of Rattlers Ridge that the
responsibility of corroboration was passed to the dog himself, and
HE was looked upon as a consummate liar.
"Snoopin' round yere, and CALLIN' yourself a poker sharp, are ye!
Scoot, you yaller pizin!" was a common adjuration whenever the
unfortunate animal intruded upon a card party. "Ef thar was a
spark, an ATOM of truth in THAT DOG, I'd believe my own eyes that I
saw him sittin' up and trying to magnetize a jay bird off a tree.
But wot are ye goin' to do with a yaller equivocator like that?"
I have said that he was yellow--or, to use the ordinary expression,
"yaller." Indeed, I am inclined to believe that much of the
ignominy attached to the epithet lay in this favorite
pronunciation. Men who habitually spoke of a "YELLOW bird," a
"YELLOW-hammer," a "YELLOW leaf," always alluded to him as a
"YALLER dog."
He certainly WAS yellow. After a bath--usually compulsory--he
presented a decided gamboge streak down his back, from the top of
his forehead to the stump of his tail, fading in his sides and
flank to a delicate straw color. His breast, legs, and feet--when
not reddened by "slumgullion," in which he was fond of wading--were
white. A few attempts at ornamental decoration from the India-ink
pot of the storekeeper failed, partly through the yellow dog's
excessive agility, which would never give the paint time to dry on
him, and partly through his success in transferring his markings to
the trousers and blankets of the camp.
The size and shape of his tail--which had been cut off before his
introduction to Rattlers Ridge--were favorite sources of
speculation to the miners, as determining both his breed and his
moral responsibility in coming into camp in that defective
condition. There was a general opinion that he couldn't have
looked worse with a tail, and its removal was therefore a
gratuitous effrontery.
His best feature was his eyes, which were a lustrous Vandyke brown,
and sparkling with intelligence; but here again he suffered from
evolution through environment, and their original trustful openness
was marred by the experience of watching for flying stones, sods,
and passing kicks from the rear, so that the pupils were
continually reverting to the outer angle of the eyelid.
Nevertheless, none of these characteristics decided the vexed
question of his BREED. His speed and scent pointed to a "hound,"
and it is related that on one occasion he was laid on the trail of
a wildcat with such success that he followed it apparently out of
the State, returning at the end of two weeks footsore, but blandly
contented.
Attaching himself to a prospecting party, he was sent under the
same belief, "into the brush" to drive off a bear, who was supposed
to be haunting the campfire. He returned in a few minutes WITH the
bear, DRIVING IT INTO the unarmed circle and scattering the whole
party. After this the theory of his being a hunting dog was
abandoned. Yet it was said--on the usual uncorroborated evidence--
that he had "put up" a quail; and his qualities as a retriever were
for a long time accepted, until, during a shooting expedition for
wild ducks, it was discovered that the one he had brought back had
never been shot, and the party were obliged to compound damages
with an adjacent settler.
His fondness for paddling in the ditches and "slumgullion" at one
time suggested a water spaniel. He could swim, and would
occasionally bring out of the river sticks and pieces of bark that
had been thrown in; but as HE always had to be thrown in with them,
and was a good-sized dog, his aquatic reputation faded also. He
remained simply "a yaller dog." What more could be said? His
actual name was "Bones"--given to him, no doubt, through the
provincial custom of confounding the occupation of the individual
with his quality, for which it was pointed out precedent could be
found in some old English family names.
But if Bones generally exhibited no preference for any particular
individual in camp, he always made an exception in favor of
drunkards. Even an ordinary roistering bacchanalian party brought
him out from under a tree or a shed in the keenest satisfaction.
He would accompany them through the long straggling street of the
settlement, barking his delight at every step or misstep of the
revelers, and exhibiting none of that mistrust of eye which marked
his attendance upon the sane and the respectable. He accepted even
their uncouth play without a snarl or a yelp, hypocritically
pretending even to like it; and I conscientiously believe would
have allowed a tin can to be attached to his tail if the hand that
tied it on were only unsteady, and the voice that bade him "lie
still" were husky with liquor. He would "see" the party cheerfully
into a saloon, wait outside the door--his tongue fairly lolling
from his mouth in enjoyment--until they reappeared, permit them
even to tumble over him with pleasure, and then gambol away before
them, heedless of awkwardly projected stones and epithets. He
would afterward accompany them separately home, or lie with them at
crossroads until they were assisted to their cabins. Then he would
trot rakishly to his own haunt by the saloon stove, with the
slightly conscious air of having been a bad dog, yet of having had
a good time.
We never could satisfy ourselves whether his enjoyment arose from
some merely selfish conviction that he was more SECURE with the
physically and mentally incompetent, from some active sympathy with
active wickedness, or from a grim sense of his own mental
superiority at such moments. But the general belief leant toward
his kindred sympathy as a "yaller dog" with all that was
disreputable. And this was supported by another very singular
canine manifestation--the "sincere flattery" of simulation or
imitation.
"Uncle Billy" Riley for a short time enjoyed the position of being
the camp drunkard, and at once became an object of Bones' greatest
solicitude. He not only accompanied him everywhere, curled at his
feet or head according to Uncle Billy's attitude at the moment,
but, it was noticed, began presently to undergo a singular
alteration in his own habits and appearance. From being an active,
tireless scout and forager, a bold and unovertakable marauder, he
became lazy and apathetic; allowed gophers to burrow under him
without endeavoring to undermine the settlement in his frantic
endeavors to dig them out, permitted squirrels to flash their tails
at him a hundred yards away, forgot his usual caches, and left his
favorite bones unburied and bleaching in the sun. His eyes grew
dull, his coat lusterless, in proportion as his companion became
blear-eyed and ragged; in running, his usual arrowlike directness
began to deviate, and it was not unusual to meet the pair together,
zigzagging up the hill. Indeed, Uncle Billy's condition could be
predetermined by Bones' appearance at times when his temporary
master was invisible. "The old man must have an awful jag on
today," was casually remarked when an extra fluffiness and
imbecility was noticeable in the passing Bones. At first it was
believed that he drank also, but when careful investigation proved
this hypothesis untenable, he was freely called a "derned time-
servin', yaller hypocrite." Not a few advanced the opinion that if
Bones did not actually lead Uncle Billy astray, he at least
"slavered him over and coddled him until the old man got conceited
in his wickedness." This undoubtedly led to a compulsory divorce
between them, and Uncle Billy was happily dispatched to a
neighboring town and a doctor.
Bones seemed to miss him greatly, ran away for two days, and was
supposed to have visited him, to have been shocked at his
convalescence, and to have been "cut" by Uncle Billy in his
reformed character; and he returned to his old active life again,
and buried his past with his forgotten bones. It was said that he
was afterward detected in trying to lead an intoxicated tramp into
camp after the methods employed by a blind man's dog, but was
discovered in time by the--of course--uncorroborated narrator.
I should be tempted to leave him thus in his original and
picturesque sin, but the same veracity which compelled me to
transcribe his faults and iniquities obliges me to describe his
ultimate and somewhat monotonous reformation, which came from no
fault of his own.
It was a joyous day at Rattlers Ridge that was equally the advent
of his change of heart and the first stagecoach that had been
induced to diverge from the highroad and stop regularly at our
settlement. Flags were flying from the post office and Polka
saloon, and Bones was flying before the brass band that he
detested, when the sweetest girl in the county--Pinkey Preston--
daughter of the county judge and hopelessly beloved by all Rattlers
Ridge, stepped from the coach which she had glorified by occupying
as an invited guest.
"What makes him run away?" she asked quickly, opening her lovely
eyes in a possibly innocent wonder that anything could be found to
run away from her.
"He don't like the brass band," we explained eagerly.
"How funny," murmured the girl; "is it as out of tune as all that?"
This irresistible witticism alone would have been enough to satisfy
us--we did nothing but repeat it to each other all the next day--
but we were positively transported when we saw her suddenly gather
her dainty skirts in one hand and trip off through the red dust
toward Bones, who, with his eyes over his yellow shoulder, had
halted in the road, and half-turned in mingled disgust and rage at
the spectacle of the descending trombone. We held our breath as
she approached him. Would Bones evade her as he did us at such
moments, or would he save our reputation, and consent, for the
moment, to accept her as a new kind of inebriate? She came nearer;
he saw her; he began to slowly quiver with excitement--his stump of
a tail vibrating with such rapidity that the loss of the missing
portion was scarcely noticeable. Suddenly she stopped before him,
took his yellow head between her little hands, lifted it, and
looked down in his handsome brown eyes with her two lovely blue
ones. What passed between them in that magnetic glance no one ever
knew. She returned with him; said to him casually: "We're not
afraid of brass bands, are we?" to which he apparently acquiesced,
at least stifling his disgust of them while he was near her--which
was nearly all the time.
During the speechmaking her gloved hand and his yellow head were
always near together, and at the crowning ceremony--her public
checking of Yuba Bill's "waybill" on behalf of the township, with a
gold pencil presented to her by the Stage Company--Bones' joy, far
from knowing no bounds, seemed to know nothing but them, and he
witnessed it apparently in the air. No one dared to interfere.
For the first time a local pride in Bones sprang up in our hearts--
and we lied to each other in his praises openly and shamelessly.
Then the time came for parting. We were standing by the door of
the coach, hats in hand, as Miss Pinkey was about to step into it;
Bones was waiting by her side, confidently looking into the
interior, and apparently selecting his own seat on the lap of Judge
Preston in the corner, when Miss Pinkey held up the sweetest of
admonitory fingers. Then, taking his head between her two hands,
she again looked into his brimming eyes, and said, simply, "GOOD
dog," with the gentlest of emphasis on the adjective, and popped
into the coach.
The six bay horses started as one, the gorgeous green and gold
vehicle bounded forward, the red dust rose behind, and the yellow
dog danced in and out of it to the very outskirts of the
settlement. And then he soberly returned.
A day or two later he was missed--but the fact was afterward known
that he was at Spring Valley, the county town where Miss Preston
lived, and he was forgiven. A week afterward he was missed again,
but this time for a longer period, and then a pathetic letter
arrived from Sacramento for the storekeeper's wife.
"Would you mind," wrote Miss Pinkey Preston, "asking some of your
boys to come over here to Sacramento and bring back Bones? I don't
mind having the dear dog walk out with me at Spring Valley, where
everyone knows me; but here he DOES make one so noticeable, on
account of HIS COLOR. I've got scarcely a frock that he agrees
with. He don't go with my pink muslin, and that lovely buff tint
he makes three shades lighter. You know yellow is SO trying."
A consultation was quickly held by the whole settlement, and a
deputation sent to Sacramento to relieve the unfortunate girl. We
were all quite indignant with Bones--but, oddly enough, I think it
was greatly tempered with our new pride in him. While he was with
us alone, his peculiarities had been scarcely appreciated, but the
recurrent phrase "that yellow dog that they keep at the Rattlers"
gave us a mysterious importance along the countryside, as if we had
secured a "mascot" in some zoological curiosity.
This was further indicated by a singular occurrence. A new church
had been built at the crossroads, and an eminent divine had come
from San Francisco to preach the opening sermon. After a careful
examination of the camp's wardrobe, and some felicitous exchange of
apparel, a few of us were deputed to represent "Rattlers" at the
Sunday service. In our white ducks, straw hats, and flannel
blouses, we were sufficiently picturesque and distinctive as
"honest miners" to be shown off in one of the front pews.
Seated near the prettiest girls, who offered us their hymn books--
in the cleanly odor of fresh pine shavings, and ironed muslin, and
blown over by the spices of our own woods through the open windows,
a deep sense of the abiding peace of Christian communion settled
upon us. At this supreme moment someone murmured in an awe-
stricken whisper:
"WILL you look at Bones?"
We looked. Bones had entered the church and gone up in the gallery
through a pardonable ignorance and modesty; but, perceiving his
mistake, was now calmly walking along the gallery rail before the
astounded worshipers. Reaching the end, he paused for a moment,
and carelessly looked down. It was about fifteen feet to the floor
below--the simplest jump in the world for the mountain-bred Bones.
Daintily, gingerly, lazily, and yet with a conceited airiness of
manner, as if, humanly speaking, he had one leg in his pocket and
were doing it on three, he cleared the distance, dropping just in
front of the chancel, without a sound, turned himself around three
times, and then lay comfortably down.
Three deacons were instantly in the aisle, coming up before the
eminent divine, who, we fancied, wore a restrained smile. We heard
the hurried whispers: "Belongs to them." "Quite a local
institution here, you know." "Don't like to offend sensibilities;"
and the minister's prompt "By no means," as he went on with his
service.
A short month ago we would have repudiated Bones; today we sat
there in slightly supercilious attitudes, as if to indicate that
any affront offered to Bones would be an insult to ourselves, and
followed by our instantaneous withdrawal in a body.
All went well, however, until the minister, lifting the large Bible
from the communion table and holding it in both hands before him,
walked toward a reading stand by the altar rails. Bones uttered a
distinct growl. The minister stopped.
We, and we alone, comprehended in a flash the whole situation. The
Bible was nearly the size and shape of one of those soft clods of
sod which we were in the playful habit of launching at Bones when
he lay half-asleep in the sun, in order to see him cleverly evade
it.
We held our breath. What was to be done? But the opportunity
belonged to our leader, Jeff Briggs--a confoundedly good-looking
fellow, with the golden mustache of a northern viking and the curls
of an Apollo. Secure in his beauty and bland in his self-conceit,
he rose from the pew, and stepped before the chancel rails.
"I would wait a moment, if I were you, sir," he said, respectfully,
"and you will see that he will go out quietly."
"What is wrong?" whispered the minister in some concern.
"He thinks you are going to heave that book at him, sir, without
giving him a fair show, as we do."
The minister looked perplexed, but remained motionless, with the
book in his hands. Bones arose, walked halfway down the aisle, and
vanished like a yellow flash!
With this justification of his reputation, Bones disappeared for a
week. At the end of that time we received a polite note from Judge
Preston, saying that the dog had become quite domiciled in their
house, and begged that the camp, without yielding up their valuable
PROPERTY in him, would allow him to remain at Spring Valley for an
indefinite time; that both the judge and his daughter--with whom
Bones was already an old friend--would be glad if the members of
the camp would visit their old favorite whenever they desired, to
assure themselves that he was well cared for.
I am afraid that the bait thus ingenuously thrown out had a good
deal to do with our ultimate yielding. However, the reports of
those who visited Bones were wonderful and marvelous. He was
residing there in state, lying on rugs in the drawing-room, coiled
up under the judicial desk in the judge's study, sleeping regularly
on the mat outside Miss Pinkey's bedroom door, or lazily snapping
at flies on the judge's lawn.
"He's as yaller as ever," said one of our informants, "but it don't
somehow seem to be the same back that we used to break clods over
in the old time, just to see him scoot out of the dust."
And now I must record a fact which I am aware all lovers of dogs
will indignantly deny, and which will be furiously bayed at by
every faithful hound since the days of Ulysses. Bones not only
FORGOT, but absolutely CUT US! Those who called upon the judge in
"store clothes" he would perhaps casually notice, but he would
sniff at them as if detecting and resenting them under their
superficial exterior. The rest he simply paid no attention to.
The more familiar term of "Bonesy"--formerly applied to him, as in
our rare moments of endearment--produced no response. This pained,
I think, some of the more youthful of us; but, through some strange
human weakness, it also increased the camp's respect for him.
Nevertheless, we spoke of him familiarly to strangers at the very
moment he ignored us. I am afraid that we also took some pains to
point out that he was getting fat and unwieldy, and losing his
elasticity, implying covertly that his choice was a mistake and his
life a failure.
A year after, he died, in the odor of sanctity and respectability,
being found one morning coiled up and stiff on the mat outside Miss
Pinkey's door. When the news was conveyed to us, we asked
permission, the camp being in a prosperous condition, to erect a
stone over his grave. But when it came to the inscription we could
only think of the two words murmured to him by Miss Pinkey, which
we always believe effected his conversion:
"GOOD Dog!"
-THE END-
Bret Harte's short story: A Yellow Dog
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