f you
please, miss, we'll call him Wyndham Kid." And so they did, and you can
see it on my overcoat in blue letters, and painted top of my kennel. It
was all too hard to understand. For days I just sat and wondered if I
was really me, and how it all come about, and why everybody was so kind.
But oh, it was so good they was, for if they hadn't been I'd never have
got the thing I most wished after. But, because they was kind, and not
liking to deny me nothing, they gave it me, and it was more to me than
anything in the world.

It came about one day when we was out driving. We was in the cart they
calls the dog-cart because it's the one Miss Dorothy keeps to take Jimmy
and me for an airing. Nolan was up behind, and me, in my new overcoat,
was sitting beside Miss Dorothy. I was admiring the view, and thinking
how good it was to have a horse pull you about so that you needn't get
yourself splashed and have to be washed, when I hears a dog calling loud
for help, and I pricks up my ears and looks over the horse's head. And I
sees something that makes me tremble down to my toes. In the road before
us three big dogs was chasing a little old lady-dog. She had a string to
her tail, where some boys had tied a can, and she was dirty with mud and
ashes, and torn most awful. She was too far done up to get away, and too
old to help herself, but she was making a fight for her life, snapping
her old gums savage, and dying game. All this I see in a wink, and then
the three dogs pinned her down, and I can't stand it no longer, and
clears the wheel and lands in the road on my head. It was my stylish
overcoat done that, and I cursed it proper, but I gets my pats again
quick, and makes a rush for the fighting. Behind me I hear Miss Dorothy
cry: "They'll kill that old dog. Wait, take my whip. Beat them off her!
The Kid can take care of himself"; and I hear Nolan fall into the road,
and the horse come to a stop. The old lady-dog was down, and the three
was eating her vicious; but as I come up, scattering the pebbles, she
hears, and thinking it's one more of them, she lifts her head, and my
heart breaks open like some one had sunk his teeth in it. For, under the
ashes and the dirt and the blood, I can see who it is, and I know that
my mother has come back to me.

I gives a yell that throws them three dogs off their legs.

"Mother!" I cries. "I'm the Kid," I cries. "I'm coming to you. Mother,
I'm coming!"

And I shoots over her at the throat