Of course, they don’t know I’m the best fighting bull-terrier of my weight in Montreal.  That’s why it wouldn’t be right for me to take no notice of what they shout.  They don’t know that if I once locked my jaws on them I’d carry away whatever I touched.  The night I fought Kelley’s White Rat, I wouldn’t loosen up until the Master made a noose in my leash and strangled me, and if the handlers hadn’t thrown red pepper down my nose, I never would have let go of that Ottawa dog.  I don’t think the handlers treated me quite right that time, but maybe they didn’t know the Ottawa dog was dead.  I did.

I learned my fighting from my mother when I was very young.  We slept in a lumber-yard on the river-front, and by day hunted for food along the wharves.  When we got it, the other tramp-dogs would try to take it off us, and then it was wonderful to see mother fly at them, and drive them away.  All I know of fighting I learned from mother, watching her picking the ash-heaps for me when I was too little to fight for myself.  No one ever was so good to me as mother.  When it snowed and the ice was in the St. Lawrence she used to hunt alone, and bring me back new bones, and she’d sit and laugh to see me trying to swallow ’em whole.  I was just a puppy then, my teeth was falling out.  When I was able to fight we kept the whole river-range to ourselves, I had the genuine long, “punishing” jaw, so mother said, and there wasn’t a man or a dog that dared worry us.  Those were happy days, those were; and we lived well, share and share alike, and when we wanted a bit of fun, we chased the fat old wharf-rats.  My! how they would squeal!

Then the trouble came.  It was no trouble to me.  I was too young to care then.  But mother took it so to heart that she grew ailing, and wouldn’t go abroad with me by day.  It was the same old scandal that they’re always bringing up against me.  I was so young then that I didn’t know.  I couldn’t see any difference between mother—­and other mothers.

But one day a pack of curs we drove off snarled back some new names at her, and mother dropped her head and ran, just as though they had whipped us.  After that she wouldn’t go out with me except in the dark, and one day she went away and never came back, and though I hunted for her in every court and alley and back street of Montreal, I never found her.

One night, a month after mother ran away, I asked Guardian, the old blind mastiff, whose Master is the night-watchman on our slip, what it all meant.  And he told me.

“Every dog in Montreal knows,” he says, “except you, and every Master knows.  So I think it’s time you knew.”