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flew.”
    â€œFlew?” the man screeched, suddenly realizing he should not have chased away the giant bird. “But how will I get down?”
    The boy kept riding, but his words floated up to the mountaintop.
    â€œDon’t ask me. Ask the bones!”

The Four-Footed Horror
    â€¢ A Tale from the United States.•

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    M orning, noon and night, the man kicked at the little black dog.
    For some reason, the dog was always dripping wet, even on sunny days. And the man could not stand the smell of its damp fur. He tried to chase the dog out of his cabin. He threw his boots at it and even shot at it, but nothing frightened the little black dog. Finally, he went after it with his broom, but his broom swished right through it.
    That’s when the man noticed something that chilled him to the bone. The dog cast no shadow. The man shivered, because now he knew—that dog was a ghost.
    The dog followed him everywhere he went, sometimes making its presence known with a cold draft on the man’s ankles. Sometimes it appeared as the tip of one black ear, twitching nearby, or as a pair of disembodied eyes.
    And every time that dog came near, the man screamed.
    Neighbors heard him for miles around. They watched him running down the road, dodging and hopping, as if something were nipping at his heels. But no one saw a thing.
    They began to whisper about him and hurry to the other side of the road when he dashed past.
    One evening, the man tried to lure the dog outside his cabin by leaving a bowl of food on the porch, and a bowl of water, too. But that very night, the dog slipped into the man’s bed and burrowed under his blankets to warm itself. The man woke up freezing.
    And when he saw that ice-cold dog with its head on his pillow, he leaped straight into the air with a bloodcurdling yell.
    He hit the floor running, pulled on his trousers, and raced down to the barn. He grabbed his saddlebags, packed one with hay and grain and the other with apples and biscuits. Then he jumped on his mule and galloped right out of Kentucky. The more miles he put between himself and that dog, the better.
    When he finally reached Missouri he stopped to spend the night in a deserted cabin. He was sore from the long ride, hungry, and desperately tired.
    But when he opened the door, what did he see?
    The little black dog.
    Well, the man just about jumped out of his skin. He threw himself on his mule and rode all the way back to Kentucky. By now he was about to collapse, and so was the mule. And when he looked into his cabin, he fainted.
    There was the little black dog.
    When he came to, he saw that the dog was carrying a bone in its mouth, and it certainly wasn’t a hog bone. It was a human bone, from a human leg—a dripping wet human bone—and that dog was trying to drop it right on the man’s foot.
    He leaped to his feet and ran screeching down the road with the dog chasing him, the leg bone clutched in its teeth.
    Even the meanest dogs in the county slunk away when they sensed that little black dog coming, their tails tucked between their legs.
    But the man couldn’t get away from his ghostly companion. All the time he was pounding on his neighbor’s door, the dog was trying to drop that bone on him. “Help!” he cried.
    The neighbor peered out the window and watched the man hop around the porch, kicking at nothing. The neighbor was afraid to open his door, but he finally came out and asked, “What’s wrong?”
    â€œI haven’t had a moment’s peace,” the man cried, “since I killed a bothersome peddler, and his dog too, and threw them both in my pond.

    â€œSee that little black dog,” he sobbed. “It’s come back to haunt me.”
    The neighbor couldn’t see it. But he went to get the sheriff, and they pulled the bones out of the pond. Then they buried the bones of that loyal dog in the graveyard right beside the bones of its master