Well, there ain’t much more than that to tell.  Miss Dorothy, she settled it.

“If the Kid wants the poor old thing in the stables,” says she, “let her stay.”

“You see,” says she, “she’s a black-and-tan, and his mother was a black-and-tan, and maybe that’s what makes Kid feel so friendly toward her,” says she.

“Indeed, for me,” says Nolan, “she can have the best there is.  I’d never drive out no dog that asks for a crust nor a shelter,” he says.  “But what will Mr. Wyndham do?”

“He’ll do what I say,” says Miss Dorothy, “and if I say she’s to stay, she will stay, and I say—­she’s to stay!”

And so mother and Nolan, and me, found a home.  Mother was scared at first—­not being used to kind people—­but she was so gentle and loving, that the grooms got fonder of her than of me, and tried to make me jealous by patting of her, and giving her the pick of the vittles.  But that was the wrong way to hurt my feelings.  That’s all, I think.  Mother is so happy here that I tell her we ought to call it the Happy Hunting Grounds, because no one hunts you, and there is nothing to hunt; it just all comes to you.  And so we live in peace, mother sleeping all day in the sun, or behind the stove in the head-groom’s office, being fed twice a day regular by Nolan, and all the day by the other grooms most irregular, And, as for me, I go hurrying around the country to the bench-shows; winning money and cups for Nolan, and taking the blue ribbons away from father.

A DERELICT

When the war-ships of a navy lie cleared for action outside a harbor, and the war-ships of the country with which they are at war lie cleared for action inside the harbor, there is likely to be trouble.  Trouble between war-ships is news, and wherever there is news there is always a representative of the Consolidated Press.

As long as Sampson blockaded Havana and the army beat time back of the Tampa Bay Hotel, the central office for news was at Key West, but when Cervera slipped into Santiago Harbor and Sampson stationed his battle-ships at its mouth, Key West lost her only excuse for existence, and the press-boats burled their bows in the waters of the Florida Straits and raced for the cable-station at Port Antonio.  It was then that Keating, the “star” man of the Consolidated Press Syndicate, was forced to abandon his young bride and the rooms he had engaged for her at the Key West Hotel, and accompany his tug to the distant island of Jamaica.

Keating was a good and faithful servant to the Consolidated Press.  He was a correspondent after its own making, an industrious collector of facts.  The Consolidated Press did not ask him to comment on what it sent him to see; it did not require nor desire his editorial opinions or impressions.  It was no part of his work to go into the motives which led to the event of news interest which he was sent to report, nor to point out what there was of it which was dramatic, pathetic, or outrageous.