The Collected Works of Billy the Kid Read Online Free PDF Page B

looking thing she said. It could hardly walk up a stair at first because it was so heavy and long. Its tail, which was dark brown with an amber ridge all down the middle of its length, stood up like a plant, so when he moved up and down hills the first thing you saw was this tail. In the house, John’s clock banged away in the kitchen, the noise and whirr reeling out onto us on the porch. John and Sallie, the mutt Henry, and me. I had come in that morning.
    They call it a bassett says Sallie, and they used to breed them in France for all those fat noblemen whose hounds were too fast for them when they went hunting. So theygot the worst and slowest of every batch and bred them with the worst and slowest of every other batch and kept doing this until they got the slowest kind of hound they could think of. Looks pretty messy to me, I said. John scratched his groin awkwardly but politely—I mean not many would have noticed if they hadnt been on the lookout, expecting it as it were. John began a story.
    When I was in New Orleans during the war I met this character who had dogs. I met him because I was a singer then, and he liked to sing, so we used to sing together quite a lot. He seemed a pretty sane guy to me. I mean, he didnt twitch or nothing like that. Well, a month or two after I left New Orleans, I got a note from another friend who sang with us once in a while, and he said Livingstone, who was the first singer, had been eaten by his dogs. It was a postcard and it didnt say anymore. When I was in New Orleans again, two or three years later I found out.
    Livingstone had been mad apparently. Had been for a couple of years, and, while he couldnt fight in the war—he had a limp from a carriage accident—he hung around the soldiers like me. There was a rumour though that the reason he was not accepted was because no one that knew him would trust him with a gun. He had almost killed his mother with a twelve bore, fortunately only shooting an ugly vase to pieces and also her foot. (Her surgeon’s bills were over $40 for he took nearly three hours getting all the buckshot out of her thighs because she wouldnt let anyone go any further than her knees, not even a professional doctor.) After that, Livingstone stayed away from guns, was embarrassed by it all I suppose, and besides the episode was a joke all over town.
    Some time later he bought a spaniel, one of the American kind. A month later he bought another. He said he was going to start breeding dogs, and his mother, pleased at even a quirk of an ambition, encouraged him. But she didnt realise what he had been really doing until after his death and even then the vet had to explain it to her once more. Livingstone, and this was at the same time as he sang with me in the evenings, had decided to breed a race of mad dogs. He did this by inbreeding. His mother gave him money to start the business and he bought this wooden walled farm, put a vast fence around an area of 50 square feet, and keeping only the two original dogs he had bought, literally copulated them into madness. At least not them but their pups, who were bred and re-bred with their brothers and sisters and mothers and uncles and nephews. Every combination until their bones grew arched and tangled, ears longer than their feet, their tempers became either slothful or venomous and their jaws were black rather than red. You realise no one knew about this. It went on for two or three years before the accident. When people asked him how the dogs were coming along, he said fine; it was all a secret system and he didnt want anyone looking in. He said he liked to get a piece of work finished before he showed it to people. Then it was a surprise and they would get the total effect. It was like breeding roses.
    You are supposed to be able to tell how inbred a dog is by the width of their pupils and Livingstone knew this, for again he picked the two most far gone dogs and bred them one step further into madness. In three years