“It’s a wonder they don’t poison him,” I told them, recalling the number of dogs whose deaths their owners attributed to poison.
The old tinker glared up at me, a shrewd twinkle in his old eyes. Then smiling he waved one hand toward his wife.
“It’s her,” he said, with a chuckle of appreciation. “When he was a pup she trained ’im. He won’t touch nothin’ ’thout it goes through her hands, not even from me. When I goes to the butcher’s and buys ’im a bone, he won’t touch it until she tells ’im to.”
“Tell the lady ’bout the pile of boiled sponges youse picked up in the yard,” the sick woman reminded him.
“Sure! I muster picked up a hundred, fust and last, in the yard between this house and my shop. You see Buster sleeps in my shop nights.”
“Will a sponge boiled in oil really kill a dog?” I asked, for I had heard so often since beginning to work in the tenements that such was the case.
The old man’s face ceased to twinkle; Julie cast down her eyes and picked at her bed.
“It does worse’n kill ’em,” she told me in a piping whisper. “It make’s ’em pine away and they suffer so, howlin’, squirmin’ with pain, until you’re glad to see ’em die.”
“You see it’s the sponge swellin’ inside ’em,” the tinker supplemented. “When you boils a sponge it natu’ly shrivels up to a hard knot. The dog gnaws it to get the oil,—swallows it. There ain’t nothin’ to be done unless you take all ’is insides out. We lost four that way before we got Buster.”
Though I received four other pencilled scrawls written by the same hand I paid no attention to them. The matter faded from my mind. When I covered my district I turned about, and again beginning on the north side of East Fourteenth Street, worked my way up-town. When I reached the tinker’s address I crossed the little back yard and stopped in the door of his shop.
He was busy mending a leak in an agate saucepan.
“You see I’m back again,” I announced cheerfully. “No use asking if you have renewed Buster’s license.”
“Yes. I got it out,” he replied, and though he paused in his work long enough to glance up at me he did not smile.
Such a different tinker! Something must have gone wrong. I glanced about the little shop. The place had been stripped. Except for the saucepan, a couple of pots, and his tools, all on the work-bench at his side, there was no evidence of his trade. The heaps of old brass, copper, and wrought iron that had filled all the corners were gone.