Rose heard the yell but it took her a moment to realize that the comments were directed her way. The courtly way of speaking was a little odd, and she really hadn’t been expecting company. Nor was she expecting to see a man dressed all in black with a sword running at her.
She held up her hands, and called urgently, “Oh don’t scare them!” Rose shook her head and gentled her voice. “They’re strays, who knows what they’ve suffered. If you run at them like that, you might scare them. Then who knows what might happen.”
Her hand came down to pat a furry head, though she was pretty sure what she was petting wasn’t a dog at all. The ears felt more like a cat’s, But that couldn’t be right, because it was far too tall. Whatever she was petting leaned against her hip, though, so she knew it was happy and she didn’t want to see any of the strays become too afraid to come back.
“Eunice Klopfenstein scared a stray once,” Rose mused as she made her way toward the back door. Maybe explaining it to the stranger would keep him from making the same mistake. “She and her husband Ernie had a chicken farm, and one night when Ernie was away at an egg conference in Minneapolis, Eunice was sure there a fox had gotten into one of the henhouses. She could hear them clucking and fussing away, so she grabbed the shotgun and ran out to save the chickens. Turns out it wasn’t a fox at all! It was a St. Bernard! Or so she thought. She fired the gun in the air to chase it off, but the dog ran right into one of the coops. So Eunice went right in after it, and that’s when she found Ernie.”
Rose bit her bottom lip. “It’s a good thing they’d only packed the shells with rock salt, or Ernie might never have walked again. As it was, he had to sit down to go to the restroom after that.” She shook her head, her look becoming far away and speculative. “They never did explain why he was naked in that chicken coop.”
She refocused on the man. “But you see, scaring a stray can have results you don’t expect. If it hadn’t been for Eunice scaring that St. Bernard and chasing him, Ernie might have been able to have children, and Eunice might never have moved to St. Paul with that lady gym teacher from Moose Lake. You just never know!”