Down through the beech alley where Lotti’s papa had taught her to ride, past Lotti’s Mama’s secret reading spot, over the little bridge. He stopped to relieve himself on the elegant lawn, dug a hole, rolled in it, leaped into the stream, vigorously shook off the water then, remembering his original intention, set off again.

He was thirty feet from the French windows when the pheasant caught his eye.

Federico was fast. The pheasant, unused to predators in the calm grounds of Barton Lacey, was unprepared. Federico approached at a gallop. By the time the pheasant took off in a great beating of wings, the little dog was snapping at its tail feathers.

The pheasant lost its balance. Federico leaped. The pheasant screamed. Federico’s jaws snapped shut around its neck.

His entrance to the drawing room was spectacular. Several ladies shrieked. The vicar’s wife—a practical person—tried to remove the pheasant from the dog’s jaws. Federico refused to let it go. Aunt Vera turned poppy-red, then the color of dirty snow.

Lotti froze.

Delicately, gracefully, as though offering a great gift, Federico deposited the dead pheasant at her feet then sat back and wagged his tail.

Yip?

“Well, I never!” Lady Clarion exclaimed. “If that isn’t Malachy Campbell’s Chihuahua!”

Chapter Eight

Aunt Vera screamed for her husband. The committee ladies all left, but not before Lady Clarion had explained how Malachy Campbell had once tried to sell her this very dog—it had been thinner then, to be sure, but she would know it anywhere by its ears! Now Lotti hunched by the French windows clutching a trembling Federico as she tried to explain herself to her incandescent uncle and distraught aunt.

“I didn’t steal him, I rescued him,” she insisted. “It was so cruel, the way Mr. Campbell was keeping him. Someone had to do something …”

“Do something?” thundered Uncle Hubert. “I’ll show you something! I am going to call the police.”

He strode out into the hall where the telephone was kept. There was a brief, shouted conversation, then he marched back in again.

“I spoke to that constable, Albert Skinner,” he raged to his wife. “He says no one’s reported the dog’s theft; says this Campbell character’s a well-known crook and probably stole the dog in the first place. Then when I ordered him to fetch the creature himself, he had the nerve to tell me he’s off on leave! Someone can come up from the dog pound tomorrow, he said. So now”—he glared at Lotti—“on top of harboring an actual thief, we have to shelter the little brute as well.”

He lunged forward and seized Federico by the scruff of the neck. The little dog tried to howl but his throat was pulled too tight and he choked.

“You’re hurting him!”