Penny Read Online Free Page B

watched the flames a few minutes, then sat on the rug in front of it, watched the fire intently and lay down, facing it, and went to sleep. And Barbara said, “I wondered, when she took off this noon while you were out, if she would come back.”
    I said, “She’ll always come back now. Just like a bad penny—she’ll always come back.”
    â€œPenny,” Barbara said. “That’s it.” She called to the dog, drowsing in front of the fire, “Penny. Penny, come here, Penny!”
    The dog lifted her head and yawned, looked around at Barbara.
    Barbara said again, “Come here, Penny,” and the dog got to her feet, stretched and went to Barbara. “There,” Barbara said to me. “That’s her name, and she already knows it. I wonder what her name really was. Emmy, maybe. Or Jenny. Something with that ‘any’ sound, I’ll bet.”
    We got supper and ate, and Penny got her evening meal. We sat in front of the fire for a time, talking, and I put Penny outside and she came back and was put to bed on the back porch. Barbara said it had been one of the nicest birthdays she could remember. We sat and watched the embers fade and begin to die, and finally we went upstairs to get ready for bed.
    I was half undressed when I heard Johnny arrive. Johnny is the dairy farmer up the road who plows the snow out of our driveway every winter. The snow had stopped in midafternoon after giving us another eight inches, but Johnny had his evening milking to do and his barn chores. Then he ate his supper and relaxed a bit, and now he was here to plow out our driveway.
    He hadn’t much more than started when I heard Penny, all the way downstairs on the back porch. She was growling, the most furious growl you ever heard from a small dog. She barked baritone, but she growled basso profundo. It would scare the living daylights out of a prowler, I thought, for it sounded like the warning of an angry mastiff, maybe a full-grown lion. I listened and I smiled, wondering what she thought was going on outside. Then she began barking, that baritone bark. Threatening, challenging. She barked half a dozen times, waited, barked again. And I, in a robe, went downstairs and tried to make her understand that all was well, that the noise was normal in the circumstances. As long as I stayed there talking to her, she accepted my explanation. The minute I went back upstairs she barked her challenge again.
    She barked all the time Johnny was here plowing. When he had finished and gone home she continued to bark. She didn’t like the sound of the snowplow; she didn’t like the silence, either. And when I went downstairs again to explain the situation to her, she burst past me the moment I opened the door to the porch, raced through the kitchen and library to the front door and stood there barking. There was no way out of it—she had to be taken out and shown. So I went back upstairs, pulled on my pants, came down and put on my storm coat and boots, snapped the new leash on her collar—I wasn’t taking a chance on her bolting—and opened the front door. Her lunge out onto the front porch almost took me off my feet. But I held her somewhat in check all across the dooryard and took her to the driveway and garage to show her what all the noise was about. Near the garage she smelled dog—Johnny’s dog must have been with him. She sniffed the tracks and wanted to dash right up the road after them. I discouraged that. She marked all three places Johnny’s dog had marked. She sniffed the tracks of Johnny’s jeep. She inspected the whole apron in front of the garage. And finally I persuaded her to return to the house. We had a bit of an argument at the front steps—she wanted to go back to the garage, probably up the road to Johnny’s farmhouse. But I finally got her indoors, locked the front door, took her to her own bed, removed the leash, got out of my