Beautiful Joe - Marshall Saunders (the reading strategies book .TXT) 📗

afternoon but take care of his stable and yard. If he had kept

them neat, and groomed his horse, and cleaned the cows, and dug up the

garden, it would have taken up all his time; but he never tidied the

place at all, till his yard and stable got so littered up with things he

threw down that he could not make his way about.

 

His house and stable stood in the middle of a large field, and they were

at some distance from the road. Passers-by could not see how untidy the

place was. Occasionally, a man came to look at the premises, and see

that they were in good order, but Jenkins always knew when to expect

him, and had things cleaned up a little.

 

I used to wish that some of the people that took milk from him would

come and look at his cows. In the spring and summer he drove them out to

pasture, but during the winter they stood all the time in the dirty,

dark stable, where the chinks in the wall were so big that the snow

swept through almost in drifts. The ground was always muddy and wet;

there was only one small window on the north side, where the sun only

shone in for a short time in the afternoon.

 

They were very unhappy cows, but they stood patiently and never

complained, though sometimes I know they must have nearly frozen in the

bitter winds that blew through the stable on winter nights. They were

lean and poor, and were never in good health. Besides being cold they

were fed on very poor food.

 

Jenkins used to come home nearly every afternoon with a great tub in the

back of his cart that was full of what he called "peelings." It was

kitchen stuff that he asked the cooks at the different houses where he

delivered milk, to save for him. They threw rotten vegetables, fruit

parings, and scraps from the table into a tub, and gave them to him at

the end of a few days. A sour, nasty mess it always was, and not fit to

give any creature.

 

Sometimes, when he had not many "peelings," he would go to town and get

a load of decayed vegetables, that grocers were glad to have him take

off their hands.

 

This food, together with poor hay, made the cows give very poor milk,

and Jenkins used to put some white powder in it, to give it "body," as

he said.

 

Once a very sad thing happened about the milk, that no one knew about

but Jenkins and his wife. She was a poor, unhappy creature, very

frightened at her husband, and not daring to speak much to him. She was

not a clean woman, and I never saw a worse-looking house than she kept.

 

She used to do very queer things, that I know now no housekeeper should

I have seen her catch up the broom to pound potatoes in the pot. She

pounded with the handle, and the broom would fly up and down in the air,

dropping dust into the pot where the potatoes were. Her pan of

soft-mixed bread she often left uncovered in the kitchen, and sometimes

the hens walked in and sat in it.

 

The children used to play in mud puddles about the door. It was the

youngest of them that sickened with some kind of fever early in the

spring, before Jenkins began driving the cows out to pasture. The child

was very ill, and Mrs. Jenkins wanted to send for a doctor, but her

husband would not let her. They made a bed in the kitchen, close to the

stove, and Mrs. Jenkins nursed the child as best she could. She did all

her work near by, and I saw her several times wiping the child's face

with the cloth that she used for washing her milk pans.

 

Nobody knew outside the family that the little girl was ill. Jenkins had

such a bad name, that none of the neighbors would visit them. By-and-by

the child got well, and a week or two later Jenkins came home with quite

a frightened face, and told his wife that the husband of one of his

customers was very ill with typhoid fever.

 

After a time the gentleman died, and the cook told Jenkins that the

doctor wondered how he could have taken the fever, for there was not a

case in town.

 

There was a widow left with three orphans, and they never knew that they

had to blame a dirty, careless milkman for taking a kind husband and

father from them.

 

 

 

 

 

       *       *       *       *       *

 

CHAPTER II (THE CRUEL MILKMAN)

I have said that Jenkins spent most of his days in idleness. He had to

start out very early in the morning, in order to supply his customers

with milk for breakfast. Oh, how ugly he used to be, when he came into

the stable on cold winter mornings, before the sun was up.

 

He would hang his lantern on a hook, and get his milking stool, and if

the cows did not step aside just to suit him, he would seize a broom or

fork, and beat them cruelly.

 

My mother and I slept on a heap of straw in the corner of the stable,

and when she heard his step in the morning she always roused me, so that

we could run out-doors as soon as he opened the stable door. He always

aimed a kick at us as we passed, but my mother taught me how to dodge

him.

 

After he finished milking, he took the pails of milk up to the house for

Mrs. Jenkins to strain and put in the cans, and he came back and

harnessed his horse to the cart. His horse was called Toby, and a poor,

miserable, broken-down creature he was. He was weak in the knees, and

weak in the back, and weak all over, and Jenkins had to beat him all the

time, to make him go. He had been a cab horse, and his mouth had been

jerked, and twisted, and sawed at, till one would think there could be

no feeling left in it; still I have seen him wince and curl up his lip

when Jenkins thrust in the frosty bit on a winter's morning.

 

Poor old Toby! I used to lie on my straw sometimes and wonder he did not

cry out with pain. Cold and half starved he always was in the winter

time, and often with raw sores on his body that Jenkins would try to

hide by putting bits of cloth under the harness. But Toby never

murmured, and he never tried to kick and bite, and he minded the least

word from Jenkins, and if he swore at him. Toby would start back, or

step up quickly, he was so anxious to please him.

 

After Jenkins put him in the cart, and took in the cans, he set out on

his rounds. My mother, whose name was Jess, always went with him. I used

to ask her why she followed such a brute of a man, and she would hang

her head, and say that sometimes she got a bone from the different

houses they stopped at. But that was not the whole reason. She liked

Jenkins so much, that she wanted to be with him.

 

I had not her sweet and patient disposition, and I would not go with

her. I watched her out of sight, and then ran up to the house to see if

Mrs. Jenkins had any scraps for me. I nearly always got something, for

she pitied me, and often gave me a kind word or look with the bits of

food that she threw to me.

 

When Jenkins come home, I often coaxed mother to run about and see some

of the neighbors' dogs with me. But she never would, and I would not

leave her. So, from morning to night we had to sneak about, keeping out

of Jenkins' way as much as we could, and yet trying to keep him in

sight. He always sauntered about with a pipe in his mouth, and his hands

in his pockets, growling first at his wife and children, and then at his

dumb creatures.

 

I have not told what became of my brothers and sisters. One rainy day,

when we were eight weeks old, Jenkins, followed by two or three of his

ragged, dirty children, came into the stable and looked at us. Then he

began to swear because we were so ugly, and said if we had been

good-looking, he might have sold some of us. Mother watched him

anxiously, and fearing some danger to her puppies, ran and jumped in the

middle of us, and looked pleadingly up at him.

 

It only made him swear the more. He took one pup after another, and

right there, before his children and my poor distracted mother, put an

end to their lives. Some of them he seized by the legs and knocked

against the stalls, till their brains were dashed out, others he killed

with a fork. It was very terrible. My mother ran up and down the stable,

screaming with pain, and I lay weak and trembling, and expecting every

instant that my turn would come next. I don't know why he spared me. I

was the only one left.

 

His children cried, and he sent them out of the stable and went out

himself. Mother picked up all the puppies and brought them to our nest

in the straw and licked them, and tried to bring them back to life; but

it was of no use; they were quite dead. We had them in our corner of the

stable for some days, till Jenkins discovered them, and swearing

horribly at us, he took his stable fork and threw them out in the yard,

and put some earth over them.

 

My mother never seemed the same after this. She was weak and miserable,

and though she was only four years old, she seemed like an old dog. This

was on account of the poor food she had been fed on. She could not run

after Jenkins, and she lay on our heap of straw, only turning over with

her nose the scraps of food I brought her to eat. One day she licked me

gently, wagged her tail, and died.

 

As I sat by her, feeling lonely and miserable, Jenkins came into the

stable. I could not bear to look at him. He had killed my mother. There

she lay, a little, gaunt, scarred creature, starved and worried to death

by him. Her mouth was half open, her eyes were staring. She would never

again look kindly at me, or curl up to me at night to keep me warm. Oh,

how I hated her murderer! But I sat quietly, even when he went up and

turned her over with his foot to see if she was really dead. I think he

was a little sorry, for he turned scornfully toward me and said, "She

was worth two of you; why didn't you go instead?"

 

Still I kept quiet till he walked up to me and kicked at me. My heart

was nearly broken, and I could stand no more. I flew at him and gave him

a savage bite on the ankle.

 

"Oho," he said, "so you are going to be a fighter, are you? I'll fix you

for that." His face was red and furious. He seized me by the back of the

neck and carried me out to the yard where a log lay on the ground.

"Bill," he called to one of his children, "bring me the hatchet."

 

He laid my head on the log and pressed one hand on my struggling body. I

was now a year old and a full-sized dog. There was a quick, dreadful

pain, and he had cut off my ear, not in the way they cut puppies' ears,

but close to my head, so close that he cut