"Yes," he said with thoughtful simplicity, "that's what Kitty said." "Oh, Kitty said so," said both partners, gravely.
"Yes," stammered Barker, turning away with a heightened color, "and, as I didn't stay there to luncheon, I think I'd better be getting it ready." He picked up the coffeepot and turned to the hearth as his two partners stepped beyond the door.
"Wasn't it exactly like him ?" said Demorest.
"Him all over," said Stacy.
"And his worry over that note ?" said Demorest.
"And 'what Kitty said,'" said Stacy.
"Look here! I reckon that wasn't ALL that Kitty said." "Of course not." "What luck!" A YELLOW DOG I never knew why in the Western States of America a yellow dog should be proverbially considered the acme of canine degradation and incompetency, nor why the possession of one should seriously affect the social standing of its possessor.

But the fact being established, I think we accepted it at Rattlers Ridge without question.

The matter of ownership was more difficult to settle; and although the dog I have in my mind at the present writing attached himself impartially and equally to everyone in camp, no one ventured to exclusively claim him; while, after the perpetration of any canine atrocity, everybody repudiated him with indecent haste.
"Well, I can swear he hasn't been near our shanty for weeks," or the retort, "He was last seen comin' out of YOUR cabin," expressed the eagerness with which Rattlers Ridge washed its hands of any responsibility.

Yet he was by no means a common dog, nor even an unhandsome dog; and it was a singular fact that his severest critics vied with each other in narrating instances of his sagacity, insight, and agility which they themselves had witnessed.
He had been seen crossing the "flume" that spanned Grizzly Canyon at a height of nine hundred feet, on a plank six inches wide.

He had tumbled down the "shoot" to the South Fork, a thousand feet below, and was found sitting on the riverbank "without a scratch, 'cept that he was lazily givin' himself with his off hind paw." He had been forgotten in a snowdrift on a Sierran shelf, and had come home in the early spring with the conceited complacency of an Alpine traveler and a plumpness alleged to have been the result of an exclusive diet of buried mail bags and their contents.