"It--it would be an insult to license a dog like Tom Jonah," sputtered Tess. "Just--just like a tag on an automobile!"
"Yo' right, honey," chuckled Uncle Rufus. "He done seem like folkses--don' he? I'se gwine tuh give him a reg'lar barf an' cure up dem sore feetses ob his. He'll be anudder dawg--sho' will!"
The old man took Tom Jonah to the grass plot near the garden hydrant, and soaped him well--with the "insect-suicide" soap Dot had talked about--and afterward washed him down with the hose. Tom Jonah stood for it all; he had evidently been used to having his toilet attended to.
When the girls came home from Sunday school, they found him lying on the porch, all warm and dried and his hair "fluffy." They had asked everybody they met--almost--about Tom Jonah; but not a soul knew anything regarding him.
"He's going to be ours for keeps! He's going to be ours for keeps!" sang Tess, with delight.
Sandyface's earlier family--Spotty, Almira, Bungle and Popocatepetl--had taken a good look at the big dog, and then backed away with swelling tails and muffled objections. But the old cat had to attend to the four little blind mites behind the kitchen range, so she had grown familiar enough with Tom Jonah to pass him on her way to and from the kitchen door.
He was too much of a gentleman, as his collar proclaimed, to pay her the least attention save for a friendly wag of his bushy tail. To the four half-grown cats he gave little heed. But Tess and Dot thought that he ought to become acquainted with the un-named kittens in the basket immediately.
"If they get used to him, you know," said Tess, "they'll all live together just like a 'happy family.'"
"Like _us_?" suggested Dot, who did not quite understand the reference, having forgotten the particular cage thus labeled in the circus they had seen the previous summer.
"Why! of course like us!" laughed Tess, and Sandyface being away foraging for her brood, Tess seized the basket and carried it out on the porch, setting it down before Tom Jonah who was lying in the sun.
The big dog sniffed at the basket but did not offer to disturb the sleeping kittens. That would not do for the curious girls. They had to delve deeper into the natural lack of affinity between the canine and the feline families.