After the next show, where I takes three blue ribbons, four silver cups, two medals, and brings home forty-five dollars for Nolan, they gives me a “Registered” name, same as Jimmy’s.  Miss Dorothy wanted to call me “Regent Heir Apparent,” but I was that glad when Nolan says, “No, Kid don’t owe nothing to his father, only to you and hisself.  So, if 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 curse 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 someone 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.”