Last Laugh

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If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the
principal difference between a dog and a man.

—Mark Twain

Well sir, though it ain't got cold enough yet to make the ticks quit the woods, fall seems to be lookin' over the ridges here at Plumtree Crossin'. An' whilst I hate the thought of puttin' in an honest day's work as much as the next man (an' probably a clang sight more'n most!), my woodpile has got to the point where it won't take "no" fer an answer.

So I guess it's downright providential thet I was rummagin' through my closet a few days ago—tryin' to locate my long-handled underwear—an' come across a letter from of Bill Bragg Jr., from up by Casper, Wyoming. 01' Bill-fer those of you who haven't heered of him—is a downright prolific raconteur an' prevaricator (why, sometimes I don't even know iffen I can believe his name), with a passel of books to his credit.

In this particular missive, though, he wanted to pass along a story by another feller from up in the Equality State, a tale what Mr. Bragg hisself has been known to relate at such august gatherin's as the Wyoming Mining Association's annual meetin's. So, whilst I'm out back tryin' to figger how to get a wedge through some of that dadburned curly-grained sweet gum, you folks can set back an' enjoy the followin' story. I'll jist let Bill introduce it to you the same's he did in his letter to me.

* * *

A newspaperman named Bill Nye in Laramie in the 1870's turned into a would-be miner and went prospecting in one of the many booms that flared up in that area from time to time. He wrote an essay on his dog, and I have always liked it.

Some dogs are prized for their faithfulness, others for their sagacity, and still others for their beauty. My dog was not noticeable for his faithfulness, because he only clung to me when I did not want him, and when I felt lonely and needed sympathy and deep devotion, he was always away from home.

He was not very sagacious, either. He was always doing things which, in the light of chastened experience and cooler, calmer afterthought, he bitterly regretted. Thus, his life was a wide waste of shattered ambitions and the ghastly ruins of what he might have been.

Neither did I prize him for his beauty, for he was brindle where there was any hair on him and red where there was none, and he had, at one time, dropped his tail into a camp kettle of boiling water, so that when he took it out and looked at it sadly, he was surprised to see that it looked like a sausage.