The Tenacious Turtle

"It's Martha's Stray," the big man gasped in a kind of impatient alarm.
"I just left him here a minute ago to go front." Together he and I
started around the long room with its bar on the one side backed up by a
mirror whose gilt frame was swathed in mosquito netting and on either
side of which were shelves bearing pyramids of bottles. On the bar at
one end were piled oranges and at the other lemons and limes whose
sophistication seemed out of place somehow in the Settlement in the
Harpeth Valley. All the trappings that I judge would go with the
dispensing of liquor were present, but our eyes could discover no small
child and we stood together and waited anxiously.

"He's got me toe, me toe, and won't let go. He's chewing it off!" at
last came a lusty yell from just outside a back door that led out into a
side yard from behind the bar, and with one accord the proprietor of
the Last Chance and I ran to the scene of the devouring. And as we ran I
heard a door slam in the rooms back of the bar and we met Martha face to
face on the scene of action. I shall never forget the picture that
confronted me there in that little back yard upon which the bar of the
Last Chance opened, and I somehow never want to.

On a little grass plot a small boy danced and yelled and firmly to one
of the capering feet was hung a large mud turtle which was flapped this
way and that by the strenuous young leg, but which held on with
apparently every intention of letting only the traditional thunder
loosen its grasp on the pink prize.