Page:The Country Boy.djvu/79

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THE COUNTRY BOY
71

fleas, as they stayed on him in preference to me.

I named him Duff when he was a few weeks old, and when I was at the Lewis and Clark exposition in Portland a long time afterwards many were the people that came, not to see my exhibit of birds and horses, but to talk about Duff. These people had been impressed years before by this rather ordinary looking bull terrier. Like a good many very worthy dogs, he would have been a joke at the New York Dog show.

He was anything the crowd he was with wanted him to be. His early character in Silverton represented the local color of the town. As a result he was more or less a clown. He and I went about without much purpose, and where there was the least resistance—not meaning that we tried any of the doorknobs. But we sort of loitered around at our leisure, and in that way got to know each other very well, and incidentally a lot of other people.

One Sunday we went to Wilhoit Springs, a mountain resort, where many prominent people came from Portland to spend a week or