Page:Hardings luck - nesbit.djvu/171

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BURIED TREASURE
133

newspapers and the bits of sacking in Lavender Terrace, Rosemary Lane.

So Dickie went his way to the kennels to talk to the kennelman. He had been there before with Master Roger Fry, his fencing master, but he had never spoken to the kennelman. And when he got to the kennels he knocked on the door of the kennel man's house and called out, "What ho! within there!" just as people do in old plays. And the door was thrown open by a man in a complete suit of leather, and when Dickie looked in that man's face he saw that it was the face of the man who had lived next door in Lavender Terrace, Rosmary Lane—the man who dug up the garden for the parrot seed.

"Why," said Dickie, "it's you!"

"Who would it be but be, little master?" the man asked with a respectful salute, and Dickie perceived that though this man had the face of the Man Next Door, he had not the Man Next Door's memories.

"Do you live here?" he asked cautiously—"always, I mean."

"Where else should I live?" the man asked, "that have served my lord, your father, all my time, boy and man, and know every hair of every dog my lord owns."

Dickie thought that was a good deal to know—and so it was.

He stayed an hour at the kennels and came away knowing very much more about dogs than he did before, though some of the things he learned would surprise a modern veterinary