“Now, you let me do the talking, Sade!” he insisted, half-grinning, yet more than half grimly.  “I’m the boss here.  If I’m not, then it’s safe to listen to me till the boss gets here.  And we’re goin’ to do whatever I say we are—­without any back-talk or sulks, either.  It’s this way:  Your brother gave the boy a birthday check.  We promised he could spend it any way he had a mind to.  He said he wanted a dog, didn’t he?  And I said, ’Go to it!’ didn’t I?  Well, he got the dog.  Just because it happens to be a she, that’s no reason why he oughtn’t to be allowed to keep it.  And he can.  That goes.”

“Oh, Dad!” squealed Dick in grateful heroworship.  “You’re a brick!  I’m not ever going to forget this, so long as I live.  Say, watch her shake hands, Dad!  I’ve taught her, already, to—­”

“Ed Hazen!” loudly protested his wife.  “Of all the softies!  You haven’t backbone enough for a prune.  And if my orders to my own son are going to be—­”

“That’ll be all, Sade!” interposed the man stiffly—­adding:  “By the way, I got a queer piece of news to tell you.  Come into the kitchen a minute.”

Grumbling, rebellious, scowling,—­yet unable to resist the lure of a “queer piece of news,” Mrs. Hazen followed her husband indoors, leaving Dick and his pet to gambol deliriously around the clothes-festooned yard in celebration of their victory.

“Listen here, old girl!” began Hazen the moment the kitchen door was shut behind them.  “Use some sense, can’t you?  I gave you the wink, and you wouldn’t catch on.  So I had to make the grandstand play.  I’m no more stuck on having a measly she-dog around here than you are.  And we’re not going to have her, either.  But—­”

“Then why did you say you were going to?  Why did you make a fool of me before Irene and everything?” she demanded, wrathful yet bewildered.

“It’s the boy’s birthday, isn’t it?” urged Hazen.  “And I’d promised him, hadn’t I?  And, last time he had one of those ‘turns,’ didn’t Doc Colfax say we mustn’t let him fret and worry any more’n we could help?  Well, if he had to take that dog back to-day, it’d have broke his heart.  He’d have felt like we were his enemies, and he’d never have felt the same to us again.  And it might have hurt his health too—­the shock and all.  So—­”

“But I tell you,” she persisted, “I won’t have a dirty little female—­”

“We aren’t going to,” he assured her.  “Keep your hair on, till I’ve finished.  Tonight, after Dick’s asleep, I’m going to get rid of her.  He’ll wake up in the morning and find she’s gone; and the door’ll be open.  He’ll think she’s run away.  He’ll go looking for her, and he’ll keep on hoping to find her.  So that’ll ease the shock, you see, by letting him down bit by bit, instead of snatching his pet away from him violent-like.  And he won’t hold it up against us, either, as he would the other way.  I can offer a reward for her, too.”