Read "Mary Ware in Texas" by Annie Fellows Johnston online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
THREE alert and expectant little figures sat in a row on the steps of the gray cottage, and watched for Mary's coming the next afternoon. Brud, sawing his hatchet blade up and down on the edge of the step below him, made deep notches in the paint while he waited. Little Sister, fuming with impatience, sat with one arm around the young hunting dog which squatted beside her, and made dire threats as to her conduct, in case the new teacher should refuse to let him go with them.
He was a brown English pointer, with a white vest, and the silver plate on his collar bore the name by which he was registered among the aristocracy of dogs. The name was "Uncle August." Strangers always laughed when they read that on his collar, but as Brud usually began to explain about that time that he was a "peggydreed" dog, his sister thought that they were laughing at the way he pronounced pedigreed. Therefore, she would gravely correct him and add the information that one of his great gram'pas was the King of Kent and another was Rip-rap; that he was the finest bird-dog in the United States, -- her pappy said so, -- and that he had been to a dog college and learned all that there was for a dog _to_ know.