This man, who stood with his back to the house as one besieged, was plump, half-bald, with eyes much magnified by glasses. “Attacked me!” he cried in a high whine. “Rang my bell and absolutely leaped on me!”

Out of the seven or eight small boys clustered around them came overlapping fragments of shrill sentences. It was clear only that they opposed the man. A small woman in a print dress, a man in shorts, whose bare chest was winter-white, stood a little apart, hesitant and distressed. Up on the veranda of the house the screen door was half-open, and a woman seated in a wheelchair peered forth anxiously.

On the green grass, in the shade, perhaps thirty feet away, there lay in death a small brown-and-white dog.

The Judge’s luncheon guest observed all this. When the Judge drew near, there was a lessening of the noise. Judge Kittinger said, “This is Freddy Titus, isn’t it? Mr. Matlin? What’s happened?”

The man’s head jerked. “I,” he said, “did nothing to the dog. Why would I trouble to hurt the boy’s dog? I try—you know this, Judge—I try to live in peace here. But these kids are terrors! They’ve made this block a perfect hell for me and my family.” The man’s voice shook. “My wife, who is not strong . . . My stepdaughter, who is a cripple . . . These kids are no better than a slum gang. They are vicious! That boy rang my bell and attacked . . .! I’ll have him up for assault! I . . .”

The Judge’s face was old ivory and he was aloof behind it.

On the porch a girl pushed past the woman in the chair, a girl who walked with a lurching gait.

Mike Russell asked, quietly, “Why do the boys say it was you, Mr. Matlin, who hurt the dog?”

The kids chorused. “He’s an ole mean . . .” “He’s a nut . . .” “Just because . . .” “. . . took Clive’s bat and . . .” “. . . chases us . . .” “. . . tries to put everything on us . . .” “. . . told my mother lies . . .” “. . . just because . . .”

He is our enemy, they were saying; he is our enemy.

“They . . .” began Matlin, his threat thick with anger.

“Hold it a minute.” The second cop, the thin one, walked toward where the dog was lying.

“Somebody,” said Mike Russell in a low voice, “must do something for the boy.”

The Judge looked down at the frantic child. He said, gently, “I am as sorry as I can be, Freddy . . .” But in his old heart there was too much known, and too many little dogs he remembered that had already died, and even if he were as sorry as he could be, he couldn’t be sorry enough. The boy’s eyes turned, rejected, returned. To the enemy.

Russell moved near the woman in blue, who pertained to this boy somehow. “His mother?”