ellow butterfly zigzagged before him, knee-high,
across the sidewalk. He raised his foot and half kicked at it.

XIX

ESKEW ARP

As the Judge continued his walk down Main Street, he wished profoundly
that the butterfly (which exhibited no annoyance) had been of greater
bulk and more approachable; and it was the evil fortune of Joe's
mongrel to encounter him in the sinister humor of such a wish
unfulfilled. Respectability dwelt at Beaver Beach under the care of Mr.
Sheehan until his master should return; and Sheehan was kind; but the
small dog found the world lonely and time long without Joe. He had
grown more and more restless, and at last, this hot morning, having
managed to evade the eye of all concerned in his keeping, made off
unobtrusively, partly by swimming, and reaching the road, cantered into
town, his ears erect with anxiety. Bent upon reaching the familiar
office, he passed the grocery from the doorway of which the pimply
cheeked clerk had thrown a bad potato at him a month before. The same
clerk had just laid down the Tocsin as Respectability went by, and,
inspired to great deeds in behalf of justice and his native city, he
rushed to the door, lavishly seized, this time, a perfectly good
potato, and hurled it with a result which ecstasized him, for it took
the mongrel fairly aside the head, which it matched in size.

The luckless Respectability's purpose to reach Joe's stairway had been
entirely definite, but upon this violence he forgot it momentarily. It
is not easy to keep things in mind when one is violently smitten on
mouth, nose, cheek, eye, and ear by a missile large enough to strike
them simultaneously. Yelping and half blinded, he deflected to cross
Main Street. Judge Pike had elected to cross in the opposite
direction, and the two met in the middle of the street.

The encounter was miraculously fitted to the Judge's need: here was no
butterfly, but a solid body, light withal, a wet, muddy, and dusty
yellow dog, eminently kickable. The man was heavily built about the
legs, and the vigor of what he did may have been additionally inspired
by his recognition of the mongrel as Joe Louden's. The impact of his
toe upon the little runner's side was momentous, and the latter rose
into the air. The Judge hopped, as one hops who, unshod in the night,
discovers an unexpected chair. Let us be reconciled to his pain and
not reproach the gods with it,--for two of his unintending adversary's
rib