The Story of Danny Dunn Read Online Free PDF

verandah of the children’s ward when she went outside early for the first of four cigarettes she smoked each day. The old mutt thought all his Christmases had come at once. Happy had accompanied his master, who’d been admitted three months previously and had subsequently died. Afterwards the dog had refused to leave. On two occasions someone had agreed to adopt him, but he’d made his way back to the hospital at the first opportunity. On one such occasion he’d been taken bush to an outlying homestead and came limping back to the hospital a week later with his paws bleeding and one of his ears badly tattered and almost torn off. How he’d survived the trip through the bush at his age was close to a miracle. His wounds were dressed and he was allowed to stay.
    Over the second week Danny’s fever lessened and he began the slow road to recovery. Throughout this period Brenda lived with the fear that her son might suffer permanent damage to his heart or brain. Despite Dr Light’s assurance that he was coming along nicely and that there appeared to be no abnormal signs in his recovery, the die was cast, and for the remainder of his childhood she would fuss over his health. The slightest sniffle brought her running with the cod-liver oil; a cut or abrasion, and the iodine bottle appeared at the trot. But Danny recovered completely and seemed no worse for the experience. Despite his mother’s over-enthusiastic ministrations he was to become a rough-and-tumble kid, eager to play any kind of game and quite happy to take the school playground knocks and bumps without complaint.
    Incidentally, Happy decided he couldn’t live without Half Dunn’s bacon sandwiches, and agreed to be adopted by Brenda as the pub verandah dog. She’d hoped the old dog would be a mate for Danny, but, as they say, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks and Happy only had eyes for her. Half Dunn would make Happy’s favourite tucker every morning, but the dog would only accept the offering from his mistress. On one occasion she’d been away at her parents’ farm for the weekend and had returned to find an unhappy Happy with his nose beside four uneaten bacon-and-egg sandwiches, which he proceeded to wolf down the moment she granted him permission to do so.
    Brenda, grateful for her son’s full recovery, had only one abiding regret: the diphtheria and Danny’s lengthy recuperation meant he had missed a precious year of school. In fact, when he started school she discovered half the class was aged either six or seven, but she ever afterwards felt that she’d let a precious year of her son’s education slip by.
    In April that year, after a long battle with cancer, Dulcie died at the comparatively young age of fifty-three, followed three months later by Fred, after a sudden and massive heart attack on his way to the corner newsagent to get the morning paper. His friends, travelling up together on the train from Wagga Wagga for the second time in three months to attend the funeral, agreed that he’d almost certainly died of a broken heart over his beloved Dulcie.
    The mourning contingent were well prepared for the journey up to Sydney for Fred’s funeral with two crates of beer for the men and four bottles of sweet sherry for the ladies. After drinking their way through Cootamundra, Harden and Yass, they were pretty well oiled by the time the train rolled into Goulburn.
    The conversation had progressed beyond the virtues of the dearly departed to discussion of his origins. His father, Enoch Dunn, was claimed to have won the pub in a game of poker on the Bathurst goldfields in the 1860s. The general consensus was that, all in all, the Dunn name had stood for something in the town and there was speculation about the present and the future.
    Sergeant Bob Barrett, clad in a brown worsted suit that must once have buttoned over his front and looking decidedly uncomfortable out of his blue