fully. "It's better than you deserve, but it's a magic tooth. Your medicine man's no good then. You'll turn into a dentist and go around in a white coat."
Just how much Little Dog understood is problematical.
But Tom was very popular with the show people, and later on with the Colonel himself. That was after the day when Rosie, one of the elephants, was frightened during the parade and started to run. She was under a railroad bridge at the time, and a deadly monster of steel and iron came roaring over her head. She bellowed hysterically, lifted her great trunk, stuck out her absurd little tail, hurled her huge bulk out of line and started.
Tom, taller than the rest, saw her, and putting spurs to his horse, raced the flying gray behemoth down the crowded street. But an elephant on the run can move very fast. When his rope settled and drew taut it was Rosie's tail that was in the noose. It brought her up short, and as the noose tightened she sat down suddenly, loudly wailing.
The Colonel was very pleased over that.
"Uses his head," he said. "Got a head and uses it. He's a good boy."
He sent for Tom that day and handed him fifty dollars.
That was his life, until one day he wakened to find himself in the city where he had come to find Kay. He scowled when he heard it. The place held nothing but bitterness for him. The thought that he was there to amuse it, to make holiday for it, was gall and wormwood to him. His head was very high when he rode out with the parade, his eyes hard under the brim of his hat.
"Say, mister, are you a real cowboy?"
"Sure am, son."
But there was no smile, no flash of teeth—one of them partly gold!—from his tanned young face.
Kay, fitting her wedding slippers in town, heard the approaching parade and stepped out to the pavement. She had no suspicion that Tom was in town. Or that already, riding up the street, he was on his way to her, more picturesque than ever, more romantic; that he was coming heralded by a steam calliope, excruciatingly shrill and off tone,
