“Oh, indeed!” said the policeman. “Maybe it was this ’ankercher, was it?”
He produced a dreadful rag that had been picked up on the road. It fitted neatly with the other rag that had been round Mimi’s neck: awful _pièces de conviction_!
“I say it’s your ankercher. Don’t go for to deny it. I say it’s your ankercher; I ’appen to know it’s your ankercher. I say you did it all yerself!”
When a six-foot, black-moustached policeman, with boring eye, rolls out such an accusation in tremendous crescendo, what can a little criminal do but collapse? Jimmy collapsed. It was his ankercher. He ’ad done it. There never ’ad been no men. He never ’ad been knocked down. He ’ad rolled in the mud on purpose, in the ditch where it was thickest. He ’ad tried to ’urt Mimi.
Even our local Sherlock Holmes couldn’t extract anything like a plausible reason. Loki’s mistress had to piece one together for herself.
Jimmy hadn’t liked taking the dogs out on a wet day. He had therefore planned to strangle Mimi and throw her over the hedge, believing that if he showed himself unable to protect the dogs he would not be sent out with them any more.
The two immediate results of this event, extraordinary indeed in the annals of the Villino, where a St. Francis-like love of our little fur and feather brothers and sisters dominates, was the prompt restoration of Jimmy to the arms of Mrs. Mutton, his washerwoman mamma, and the summoning of Juvenal to the telephone. He was staying with his brother, a postmaster. We communicated the awful attempt. Juvenal averred, on the other side of the wire, that you could have knocked him down with a feather. Having thus re-established communications, we wrote, and, tactfully cloaking our own undignified yearnings with the innocence of the fur-children, we told him that the dogs missed him very much. He was swift to seize the “paw of friendship,” and, following our artful lead, responded by return of post that Betty had been “that fretted,” he did not know what to do with her--“_wine_ she did from morning till night!”
It was obvious that anyone with a grain of decent feeling must instantly remedy such a state of affairs. Juvenal returned with the twenty-four bird-cages and Betty the terrier.