Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

So when the dog business happened, even Mr Hub Hampton himself didn’t get any closer than that to them. This was the dog business. We were getting paved streets in Jefferson now and so more new families, engineers and contractors and such like the little Riddell boy’s that gave us that holiday two years ago, had moved to Jefferson. One of them didn’t have any children but they had a Cadillac and his wife had a dog that they said cost five hundred dollars, the only dog higher than fifty dollars except a field-trial pointer or setter (and a part Airedale bear dog named Lion that Major de Spain, Mr de Spain’s father, owned once that hunting people in north Mississippi still talked about) that Jefferson ever heard of, let alone saw—a Pekinese with a gold name-plate on its collar that probably didn’t even know it was a dog, that rode in the Cadillac and sneered through the window not just at other dogs but at people too, and even ate special meat that Mr Wall Snopes’s butcher ordered special from Kansas City because it cost too much for just people to buy and eat it.

One day it disappeared. Nobody knew how, since the only time it wasn’t sneering out through the Cadillac window, it was sneering out through a window in the house where it—they—lived. But it was gone and I dont think anywhere else ever saw a woman take on over anything like Mrs Widrington did, with rewards in all the Memphis and north Mississippi and west Tennessee and east Arkansas papers and Mr Hampton and Mr Connors neither able to sleep at night for Mrs Widrington ringing their telephone, and the man from the insurance company (its life was insured too so maybe there were more people insured in Jefferson than there were dogs but then there was more of them not insured in Jefferson than there was dogs too) and Mrs Widrington herself likely at almost any time day or night to be in your back yard calling what Aleck Sander and I thought was Yow! Yow! Yow! until Uncle Gavin told us it was named Lao T’se for a Chinese poet. Until one day the four Snopes Indians came out of Christian’s drugstore and somebody passing on the street pointed his finger and hollered “Look!”

It was the collar with the gold name-plate. The little one was wearing it around its neck above the nightshirt. Mr Connors came quick and sent about as quick for Mr Hampton. And that was when Mr Hampton didn’t come any closer either and I reckon we all were thinking about what he was: what a mess that big gut of his would make on the sidewalk if he got too close to that knife before he knew it. And the four Snopes Indians or Indian Snopeses, whichever is right, standing in a row watching him, not looking dangerous, not looking anything; not innocent especially and nobody would have called it affectionate,not dangerous in the same sense that four shut pocket knives dont look threatening. They look like four shut pocket knives but they dont look lethal. Until Mr Hampton said:

“What do they do when they aint eating ice cream up here or breaking in or out of that bottling plant at two oclock in the morning?”

“They got a kind of camp or reservation or whatever you might call it in a cave they dug in the big ditch behind the school house,” Mr Connors said.

“Did you look there?” Mr Hampton said.

“Sure,” Mr Connors said. “Nothing there but just some trash and bones and stuff they play with.”

“Bones?” Mr Hampton said. “What bones?”

“Just bones,” Mr Connors said. “Chicken bones, spare ribs, stuff like that they been eating I reckon.”

So Mr Hampton went and got in his car and Mr Connors went to his that had the red light and the sireen on it and a few others got in while there was still room, and the two cars went to the school house, the rest of us walking because we wanted to see if Mr Hampton with his belly really would try to climb down into that ditch and if he did how he was going to get out again. But he did it, with Mr Connors showing him where the cave was but letting him go first since he was the sheriff, on to where the little pile of bones was behind the fireplace and turned them over with his toe and then raked a few of them to one side. Because he was a hunter, a woods man, a good one before his belly got too big to go through a thicket. “There’s your dog,” he said.