!"

She dropped the curtains and the manuscripts, knelt and held out
her arms. The dog approached timidly, his tail going furiously. He
suspected a trap. The few whites he had ever known generally
offered to pet him when they really wanted to kick him. But when
Ruth's hand fell gently upon his bony head, he knew that no one in
this house would ever offer him a kick. So he decided to stay.

"You want him?"

"Please!" said Ruth.

"All right. What'll we call him--Rollo?"--ironically.

"I never had a pet. I never had even a real doll," she added, as
she snuggled the flea-bitten head to her heart. "See how glad he
is!"

His irony and displeasure subsided. She had never had a pet, never
had a real doll. Here was a little corner of the past--a tragic
corner. He knew that tragedy was as blind as justice, that it
struck the child and the grown-up impartially. He must never refuse
her anything which was within his power to grant--anything (he
modified) which did not lead to his motives.

"You poor child!--you can have all the dogs on the island, if you
want them! Come along to the kitchen, and we'll give Rollo a
tubbing."

And thus their domesticity at McClintock's began--with the tubbing
of a stray yellow dog. It was an uproarious affair, for Rollo now
knew that he had been grieviously betrayed: they were trying to
kill him in a new way. Nobody will ever know what the fleas
thought.

The two young fools laughed until they cried. They were drenched
with water and suds. Their laughter, together with the agonized
yowling of the dog, drew a circle of wondering natives; and at
length McClintock himself came over to see what the racket was
about. When he saw, his roars could be heard across the lagoon.

"You two will have this island by the ears," he said, wiping his
eyes. "Those boys out there think this is some new religious rite
and that you are skinning the dog alive to eat him!"

The shock of this information loosened Spurlock's grip on the dog,
who bolted out of the kitchen and out of the house, maintaining his
mile-a-minute gait until he reached the jungle muck, where he
proceeded to neutralize the poison with which he had been lathered
by rolling in the muck.

But they found him on the veranda when they returned from
McClintock's that evening. He had forgiven everybody. From then on
he was Ruth's dog.

Nothing else so quickly establishes the condition of comradeship as
the sharing of a laughable incident. C