Mandie Collection, The: 8 by Lois Gladys Leppard

the cat as she held him in her arms. “Your feet are ice cold.” She rubbed his paws.
    Joe smiled and said, “If you carry him, you will both be warmer.”
    “He’s so heavy I can’t hurry, but I suppose I’ll have to tote him,” Mandie replied.
    They walked on for almost two miles before they saw anyone outside, and then it turned out to be an old woman. As they approached a falling-down log house on the road, a dog began barking ferociously.Snowball growled and dug his sharp claws into the shoulder of Mandie’s coat.
    “Oh no!” Mandie quickly stopped in the road as she tried to see where the dog was.
    “Stand there a minute,” Joe told her as the animal continued barking. He stepped ahead, and Mandie watched as a large brown mixed-breed dog appeared out of the bushes in the front yard of the shack. Joe looked back at Mandie and said, “He’s on a rope. We can get on by all right. He can’t reach us.”
    Mandie slowly moved forward to join Joe as she held firmly to her white cat. “Let’s hurry and get past him,” she told Joe.
    The two began moving faster, and the dog began barking louder. Just as they came in front of the house, an old woman came out of the undergrowth with a shotgun aimed directly at them.
    “We’re only passing by,” Joe called to her over the noise of the dog.
    “Don’t move another step, you hear?” the woman yelled at them as she walked closer.
    “We’re sorry for disturbing your dog, but we are not coming into your yard,” Mandie said in a loud voice.
    The woman came closer with the shotgun still pointed at the two, and then suddenly she dropped the gun down to her side as she laughed wildly and cried out, “Well, if it ain’t the doctor’s son!”
    “You know my father?” Joe quickly asked as the three of them stood there with the dog still making a loud protest.
    The woman turned back for a second toward the animal and yelled, “Now, cut that racket out, Mud, you hear? Shut up right now. Be quiet!”
    Mandie and Joe watched as the dog obeyed and sat down in the bushes to watch them.
    “Now, what is the doctor’s son doing out here on this lonely road so early in the morning, and Sunday morning at that?” the woman asked.
    Mandie looked her over as Snowball finally settled down in her arms. The woman was toothless, had thin gray hair, and was wearing only a thin shawl around the shoulders of her faded cotton dress. She must be very poor.
    “We are looking for my father, ma’am,” Joe replied. “Have you by any chance seen him?”
    “Have I seen your doctor father?” the woman repeated. “Of course, I saw your father when he drove past here last night. Old Mud here saw him, too, and started that yelping he does when he sees a friend, so I looked out the window and saw Dr. Woodard coming down the road in his buggy. I thought perhaps he was coming to check on my rheumatism, but he didn’t even slow up, kept going, and so I thought, there must be someone mighty sick because he sure was in a hurry.”
    “We’re staying at the Shaws’ house. This is Mandie Shaw. And my father went out on a call after supper last night and has not come back yet,” Joe explained.
    “Yes, I know who the Shaws are. Mighty good family, they are,” the woman said. “Been knowing those people all my life, I reckon. Now, I wonder where the doctor went. Not many houses beyond here before you get into the mountain, you know.”
    “He might have gone on into the mountain,” Mandie said.
    “But there’s no one living in the mountain but bootleggers and beggars,” the woman said. “But then again, I suppose one of those bootleggers might have fallen ill and had to have a doctor.”
    “But the man who came to our house to get Dr. Woodard said he had a friend who had been injured,” Mandie told her.
    “Well, come to think of it, I suppose some of those bootleggers could have been shooting each other, or they could have shot a beggar. I wouldn’t worry about it too much if I