So we ate fried fish until we couldn’t eat anymore, and then we sat around outside until bedtime, and I tied Rover to one of the posts under our cottage, and we all went home and to bed.
Maybe I had eaten too much fried fish. Anyway, I lay awake awhile and heard Orpheus Cadwallader waddling past the house, going his rounds to see that everything was all right, and I heard Rover get up and walk to the end of his rope and wag his tail at Orpheus. His tail thumped against one of the posts, and I knew he was wagging it.
A little while later, Rover began to howl, and he is one of the loudest howlers in the world, I guess. The moon was one of the things he was fondest of howling at; he seemed to think it was hung in the sky as an insult to dogs. Whenever there was a moon and Rover saw it, he howled. And the other thing that made him howl was being tied up. He would stand being tied up for an hour or so, because he expected I would come and untie him, but, if he was tied for much longer than an hour, he felt hurt and miserable and neglected, and he would begin to howl. He would begin with an “Arr-oo—” and hang on to the “oo” until it quivered and trembled, and everybody within a mile wondered if it was ever going to stop, and got nervous, and tossed in bed, and swore. And then Rover would take another breath and begin another “Arr-oo—” longer and louder than ever. And keep it up all night, unless somebody went and untied him.
The reason I tied Rover that night was because he is a wandering dog. He likes to explore. And what he likes to explore for is dead fish, mostly, and the deader the better. If you didn’t tie him up at night, he would wander off until he found a dead fish, and then he would roll in it. The deader the fish was, the better he liked it; he thought it was perfumery, I guess. He would wander for miles around our island, and even swim across the slough to Oak Island and wander there, hunting a dead fish to perfume himself with. And he was such an affectionate and loving dog, and so proud of himself when he was all perfumed up, that mother and the rest of us just hated him when he was that way.
If I had known Rover was coming up that day, I would have gone around the shore of our island and the shore of Oak Island and got rid of all the dead fish, but Rover’s coming was a surprise, and we had had the fishing-prize contest that day, so all there was to do was to tie him up and let him howl. His howling was pretty bad, but it wasn’t as bad as dead fish, which is about the worst thing there is.
Well, after Orpheus Cadwallader passed our cottage again, going back, I turned over on my stomach and hoped I’d go to sleep, and I expected Rover would have a fine all-night howl, but all of a sudden he stopped howling and began to bark. It was his angry Woof! woof! bark, with a mean snarl at the end, which meant somebody was around who had no business to be around.
I sat up in bed, and I could feel the old cottage joggle as Rover jerked at his rope, and then, suddenly, the rope broke and off Rover went, barking to beat the band, full tilt toward the slough back of our cottages. About halfway there, I should judge, he came up with what had set him to barking. I heard a rough voice say, “Get away from here! Get away from here!” and a club thumping on Rover’s back, and more barking, and swearing, and then Rover yipped, and began to scream—if you can call it that—the way a dog does when it is hurt, or has its paw run over by a wagon, or breaks a toe.
In a second I was out of bed and getting into my clothes, and I heard Rover come yipping and whining back toward the cottage. I did not have many clothes to put on, and in a couple of seconds I was downstairs, and by the time I was out there and Rover was whining at my feet, Wampus and his Uncle Oscar and Skippy and Tad and Jibby were out there, too, and we heard Orph Cadwallader coming running as fast as such a fat man could.
Orph had his shotgun, and Wampus’s Uncle Oscar had a pistol, and Jibby had brought along an electric torch. We looked at Rover’s foot and saw it was hurt pretty bad, and that one of his ears was cut where it had been hit, and we were all pretty mad. Nobody had a right to be on our island but us, and most of the time nobody was there but the women and us kids and Orph Cadwallader, and tramps had no business there. They were too dangerous.
So Wampus’s Uncle Oscar took the electric torch from Jibby and said:
“You boys stay back here; this is a man’s job. Orph and I will attend to this!”
So the five of us, Jibby and Wampus and Tad and Skippy and I, we went along with Orph and Wampus’s uncle. I held the piece of rope that was tied around Rover’s neck, and he limped along, whining. We made quite a procession, and when we looked back we could see that all the cottages were lighted up. Everybody was out of bed. You couldn’t expect us to stay back when there was so much excitement.
We went through the woods and, before
