But if you start
a swift-footed dog after him, you will enjoy it ever so much—
especially if it is a dog that has a good opinion of himself, and
has been brought up to think he knows something about speed.
The cayote will go swinging
gently off on that deceitful
trot of his, and
every little while he will
smile a fraudful smile
over his shoulder that
will fill that dog entirely
full of encouragement and
worldly ambition, and
make him lay his head
still lower to the ground,
and stretch his neck further
to the front, and
pant more fiercely, and
stick his tail out straighter
behind, and move his furious
legs with a yet
wilder frenzy, and leave a
broader and broader, and
higher and denser cloud
of desert sand smoking behind, and marking his long wake
across the level plain! And all this time the dog is only a short
twenty feet behind the cayote, and to save the soul of him he
cannot understand why it is that he cannot get perceptibly
closer; and he begins to get aggravated, and it makes him madder
and madder to see how gently the cayote glides along
and never pants or sweats or ceases to smile; and he grows still
more and more incensed to see how shamefully he has been
taken in by an entire stranger, and what an ignoble swindle
that long, calm, soft-footed trot is; and next he notices that he
is getting fagged, and that the cayote actually has to slacken
speed a little to keep from running away from him—and then
that town-dog is mad in earnest, and he begins to strain and
weep and swear, and paw the sand higher than ever, and reach
for the cayote with concentrated and desperate energy. This
“spurt” finds him six feet behind the gliding enemy, and two
miles from his friends. And then, in the instant that a wild
new hope is lighting up his face, the cayote turns and smiles
blandly upon him once more, and with a something about it
which seems to say: “Well, I shall have to tear myself away
from you, bub—business is business, and it will not do for me
to be fooling along this way all day”—and forthwith there is
a rushing sound, and the sudden splitting of a long crack
through the atmosphere, and behold that dog is solitary and
alone in the midst of a vast solitude!
It makes his head swim. He stops, and looks all around;
climbs the nearest sand-mound, and gazes into the distance;
shakes his head reflectively, and then, without a word, he
turns and jogs along back to his train, and takes up a humble
position under the hindmost wagon, and feels unspeakably
mean, and looks ashamed, and hangs his tail at half-mast for a
week. And for as much as a year after that, whenever there
is a great hue and cry after a cayote, that dog will merely
glance in that direction without emotion, and apparently observe
to himself, “I believe I do not wish any of the pie.”
Mark Twain
Perfesser Chaos wants to know how Samuel Clemens knew about sonic booms in 1872.
