Sword of Straw

Parents and Children Bartlemy Goodman was home the night the burglars came. He usually was at home. For a man who had seen so much, and done so much, he now led a very tranquil life, or so it appeared, visiting the village of Eade mainly to see Annie Ward, who was widely thought to be his niece, and rarely venturing beyond Crowford. He was known to own the bookshop where Annie and her son lodged, and believed to be a collector, though no one was quite sure of what. The villagers accepted his unspecified eccentricities, and respected him for no particular reason, except that he appeared worthy of respect. It was a part of his Gift that he could pass almost unremarked in the local community, giving rise to no gossip, awakening no curiosity, though he had lived at Thornyhill, the old house out in the woods, since the original Thorns had sold up and all but died out generations before. Without really thinking about it, people assumed that the house had been bought by Bartlemy's grandfather, or some other elderly relative, and had passed on from Goodman to Goodman until it reached the present incumbent. They never wondered why each successive owner should look the same, or remain apparently the same age, around sixty; indeed, had anyone been asked, they would have sworn to little differences among the Bartlemys, to periods of absence following the death of one when another must have been growing up somewhere abroad. Nor did they ever wonder about the dog. Every Goodman had had a dog, a large shaggy creature of mixed parentage and universal goodwill, with bright, intelligent eyes under whiskery eyebrows, and a lolling tongue. This one was called Hoover, because he devoured crumbs, and indeed anything else that came his way. The most wonderful cooking smells in the world would forgather in Bartlemy's kitchen, and the generosity of the leftovers made it canine heaven. Hoover had no reputation for savagery, welcoming every visitor, even the postman, with amiable enthusiasm, yet perhaps because of him the house had never been burgled before, except for the strange incident the previous year, and in that case the stolen object--which had belonged to someone else--had eventually been returned by Bartlemy himself, though no one knew how he retrieved it. The house was isolated, unprotected by alarms or security, and with the vague rumors that Bartlemy "collected" it should have been an obvious target, yet until that night in late April the criminal fraternity had left it alone. The burglars were two youths, as the newspapers would have called them, an Asian boy from Crowford who was only seventeen, and his sixteen-year-old sidekick, who was big and ginger-haired and not very bright. Getting in was easy: they broke a window, which was stupid, because the back door wasn't locked, and were just checking out the sitting room when the dog pounced. He didn't bark: it would've meant wasting time. Bartlemy came downstairs, wrapped in an enormous dark blue dressing gown with stars on it, to find the ginger-haired sidekick shivering in a corner while the other boy lay on his back with Hoover standing over him. He wasn't growling--he never growled--but the boy could see, behind the panting tongue and doggy grin, two rows of large yellow teeth that wouldn't have looked out of place on a wolf. There was a knife lying on the rug a little way away. Bartlemy picked it up by the blade. Afterward, the boy puzzled over how the house owner had known to come down, when neither the intruders nor the dog had made much noise. "This is--this is assault," the youth stammered, keeping his voice to a whisper. "I can sue." "I haven't assaulted you," Bartlemy pointed out in his placid way. "The dog--" "He hasn't assaulted you, either." Yet, said the ensuing pause. "We didn't mean no harm," offered Ginger, between sullenness and fright. [read more]