And the Yeah, Welcome back everyone to 1001 classic short stories and tales. This is your host John

Hagenorn and today's story A Yellow Dog by Brett Hart. I never knew why in the

Western States of America a yellow dog should be

proverbially considered the acme of canine degradation and incompetency, nor

why the possession of one should seriously affect the social standing of its possessor.

But the fact being established, I think we accepted it at Rattler's Ridge without question.

The matter of ownership was more difficult to settle, and although the dog I have in my mind at the present writing attached himself impartially and equally to everyone in camp, no one ventured to exclusively claim him, while after the perpetration of any canine atrocity,

everybody repudiated him with indecent haste.

Well, I can swear he hasn't been near our shanty for weeks.

Or the retort, he was last seen coming out of your cabin.

Express the eagerness with which Rattler's ridge washed its hands of any responsibility. Yet he was by no means a common dog, nor even an

unhandsome dog. And it was a singular fact that his severest critics vied with each other in

narrating instances of his sagacity, insight, and agility, which

they themselves had witnessed.

He had been seen crossing the Flume that spanned Grizzly Canyon at a height of 900 feet on a plank six inches wide.

He had tumbled down the chute to the south fork a thousand feet below and he was found

sitting on the river bank quote without a scratch

except the one he was lazily given himself with his hind paw end quote

he had been forgotten in a snowdrift on aeran shelf, and had come home in the early spring

with the conceded complacency of an alpine traveler and a plumpness alleged to have been

the result of an exclusive diet of buried mailbags in their contents.

He was generally believed to read the advance election posters

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