David has never had anybody but me. He is a good deal spoiled. I—There isn't money enough in the State to buy my dog, sir."
"Then what do you waste my time foolin' for?" cried the coachman, crossly. He took up his whip and would have driven off. But Jonathan stayed him.
"I can't pay his taxes, sir," he said, deprecating the servant. "I'm too poor. The dog-catcher has given me till Tuesday. Then they will kill him. I have only seventy-six cents. Besides, he says the Town ain't likely to let me keep him very long, anyhow, he's so big. Would you—" Jonathan summoned his sinking voice, and in a tone of anguish too fine for the ears that heard it, desperately faced his fate and David's. "Would you give as much as two dollars for him? I—I can't take money for David. I can't make money out of David. But—if his taxes were paid—if he weren't a pauper—like me—and had a kind home—perhaps I'd consider it. I don't see how I can let them kill David."
"I'll pay them taxes on the spot," answered the coachman, eagerly, "and bring you the receipt inside of twenty minutes."
Snapping the long whip about the ears of the pair, the fellow whirled away. In half an hour he returned with the tax receipt.
The old man and the dog were precisely as he had left them, sitting silently. David's head was upon his master's knee. Jonathan's face had fallen over upon David's head. Neither stirred as the coachman, who had brought a footman back with him, gave the reins to the boy and sprang down from the box.
"Here it is," he said, hurriedly, holding out the receipt. Jonathan did not reply.
"What's the matter with you, old fellow, anyhow?" demanded the coachman. "Why don't you wake up? It's a fair bargain. The dog's mine now. Here!"
Disregarding the protests of David, who was now alive to the emergency, the fellow tucked the tax receipt into the old man's cold hands, dexterously leashed and muzzled the dog, and pulled him away. Jonathan sat where and as he was. When the dog was taken from him, his gray head had fallen—or perhaps the purchaser of David had laid it over—upon the piazza rail. The old man did not stir. He was spared the separation. The coachman stopped at the nearest neighbor's and left word that old Jonathan was in a kind of a fit or a faint, and some woman better go see to him. Then he carried David home to his employer, to whom he sold the collie for twenty-five dollars.
The nearest neighbor came over. She was a young wife with a baby in her arms, and, thus encumbered, she did all she could for the old man. She made him some tea and got him to his room. In the morning she came in again, but he told her that he was perfectly well and needed nothing and wanted nobody; so she put bread and milk and water within his reach, asked him if he didn't want to kiss the baby, and went away. Jonathan lay as she had left him in the evening, and as she had found him in the morning, fallen upon the outside of his bed, silent and still.
She had tried to throw something over him, but when he found what it was, the old man flung it away—then fell to weeping, and drew it back—then pushed it from him, with a groan. It was the ragged coverlet under which or on which, according to the season, David had slept since he was a fall puppy and shivered the first winter through, a clawing, wobbling dependent on his master's tireless care and tenderness.
That first night Jonathan did not sleep at all. Sometimes his mind strayed and his trembling hand went down to pat the dog; the emptiness at the foot of the bed smote him cold and weak; his pulse fell and his breath shortened. When day came he must have got some broken sleep, perhaps not knowing it, for his dreaming and his waking ran together like the tints in a prism, so that it was difficult to say where one ended and another began. He tried to eat, but could not; he drank the water, and some of the milk, and turned his face to the wall. The dreadful hollowness of the room, the aching silence in the house, seemed to the lonely old man like a destiny which he had been denied the strength to face—the last buffet of a life which had worsted him everywhere. He retained
