CHAPTER XII
THE SOD ON THE PANE
ON the eighth day of Carron's idyl, Beetles the dog became ill. Whether his propensity for swallowing foreign substances—some venomous member of the tribe of insects to which he was devoted, from which he had received his name—had brought the sickness and the fever, was impossible to tell. He lay on a little piece of sacking on the side porch, and Blanche hung over him as though he had been an ailing infant. But her hands shook when she tried to get the medicine between his teeth. She drenched his poor head in wet cloths that would not stay cold. In her anxiety she made the wretched animal more wretched. Carron, gravely squatted on his heels, prescribed for the case and took it into his own hands. Sick dogs he had handled occasionally, as well as horses and men. He hung up a piece of wet sacking where the draft would blow through it coolly upon the forlorn creature, and he sat through intervals of a blazing afternoon, patiently putting cracked ice on Beetles' head, or, with hands
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