THE HERO DOG

Lida Rose Minnick - you remember her, she was old Mose Sprat's daughter by his third wife, Hexane. Well, Lida Rose loved kids and dogs. It was hard to tell which she liked better, her four kids or her twelve hound dogs. Folks said that she could remember the names of all twelve dogs but she never called the kids by their right names.  Names aside, she treated the kids and the dogs just like family should be treated.  Her husband, Siler Minnick, said he wished she would treat him like family.  After they got married he swore that she only called him "honey" four times.

Of all her dogs, Lida Rose Minnick's favorite was a brown and white mixed breed hound named " Ol' Thunder". Lida Rose liked Thunder best because he would sit for hours with his head in her lap while she listened to radio shows coming from Cincinnati, Ohio. She and Thunder listened to The Romance of Helen Trent and Our Gal Sunday and I Love a Mystery and a whole bunch of other great shows. When things were going good Lida Rose would stroke ol' Thunder's head and he would sigh with a great deep-throated rumble.  When the shows got too exciting she would hang onto his ears and he would show his teeth and growl.

One morning, while it was still foggy on the mountain where they lived, ol' Thunder caught wind of a fox.  Next to sitting with his head on Lida Rose's lap, he thought the best thing in all the world was to chase after a fox. In actual truth, Thunder was too old and too slow ever to catch a fox. And if, by accident, he had caught one, he wouldn't have had the slightest notion what to do with it. Foxes smell bad, have sharp teeth and, when caught, have a generally bad disposition.  This fox had been chased by ol' Thunder many times, but he had never been in danger of being caught.

The morning in question, the fox was feeling especially frisky and, as soon as he was sure ol' Thunder was on his trail, he headed for the cliff over the NR&P railroad tunnel.  At the edge of the cliff he took a great leap and landed on a ledge some 20 feet below the rim.  The fox had been here many times before and he knew the way home.  Ol' Thunder, hot on his trail, had never been over the cliff before, but he was duty bound to follow his prey.  When he launched himself into space at the edge of the cliff, the poor dog knew he had, at last, reached the ultimate end of the earth.  And when he crashed to the ground, twenty feet below on a narrow ledge he knew his worst dreams had come true.  He was in a desperate situation.  True to form, when things looked bad, ol' Thunder sat on his hind end and started to howl.  He howled like he had never howled before.  He howled so long and loud that people said it must be the town's most unsuccessful politician, Elmer Woodrum.  Everyone knew that when Elmer got a snoot full of corn liquor he would sit on the bench outside the courthouse and howl up a storm. But, when Lida Rose Minnick heard the noise, she immediately knew that her favorite dog, ol' Thunder, was the source and that he was in deep trouble.

Lida Rose went into action.  She rounded up her four kids, the eleven dogs and Siler.  Then she drafted Siler's brother Mandrake and Mandrake's second cousin Pinkham.  She told the whole bunch of them, in no uncertain terms, that they were to help her find the dog and bring him home in one piece.

Finding ol' Thunder proved to be no problem at all.  Siler, Mandrake, Pinkham, the four kids, the eleven dogs and Lida Rose simply followed the hair-raising howls to their source.  In no time at all they located the dog stranded on the narrow cliff shelf.

Pinkham had a rope and he said he'd climb down and hook up ol' Thunder and they could haul him up the cliff like a sack of flour.  It was at this point that fate took a strange turn.  Sometimes little things determine the course of great and important events.

Unknown to anyone was the fact that just inside Streaker's Neck Tunnel - the railroad tunnel that cuts through Bear Mountain at the base of the cliff where the dog was trapped - a huge rock had fallen from the roof of the tunnel and onto the tracks.  A train approaching the tunnel at speed would crash into that boulder causing the train and all that rode it to be smashed.  As fate would have it, at that very moment, #16, the NR&P's crack passenger train was speeding directly toward the curve that leads to Streaker's Neck Tunnel.

The engineer on #16 was Montezuma Scaggs, an experienced man at the top of his profession.  Montezuma had started on the NR&P as a candy butcher on the Brill car run between Sun and the coal camp at Bear Mountain.  Over the years he had worked his way up to brakeman to fireman and finally to engineer.  On the day in question, Montezuma had his head out the cab window enjoying the stiff breeze as #16 flashed along the silver rails.

Suddenly Montezuma heard a noise - a strange noise.  It wasn't his locomotive.  No locomotive driven by Montezuma Scaggs would make such an unearthly racket.  The noise sounded like a howl coming from around the long curve just before the tracks swept into Streaker's Neck Tunnel.  "Do you hear that noise?" Montezuma yelled at Fluky Dunn, his fireman.  "I sure do, Monty".  What the ever loving heck do you suppose it is?" Fluky replied.

It was at this precise moment that the great Irish nature photographer D. Gary O'Type snapped the picture you see. D. Gary had been shooting pictures in the hills above the railroad. He heard the unearthly racket and set out to find the source of the noise.  From the hill opposite the cliff D. Gary O'Type saw Thunder and the rescue efforts of the Minnick clan. He recognized the possibility of a great human-interest picture.  Quickly setting up his view camera, D. Gary powdered his flashgun and prepared to shoot. He was a wonderful nature photographer but, unfortunately, rather forgetful.  On this particular day he loaded the flash pan with twice the powder necessary, and then forgot and loaded it again.  There was enough flash powder in that container to turn midnight into high noon.  When O'Type fired the flashgun, the cliff, the hillside, the people the dogs, the fox and the entire railroad was flooded with a blinding explosion of brilliant white light.

"My gawd, stop the train!" yelled Montezuma.  He threw on the emergency brake and #16 ground to a full stop inches from the entrance to Streaker's Neck Tunnel and, unknown to Montezuma Scaggs, seconds away from destruction.

Well, the dust cleared and all the passengers who had been thrown saucer over teakettle were calmed.  Monty and Fluky walked up the track to get away from the crowd and to their utter amazement they saw the giant boulder just inside the tunnel.  Everyone agreed that, beyond all doubt, ol' Thunder had saved the train and the lives of scores of passengers.  The next day a crowd of curious onlookers came to see the scene of the almost disaster.  Someone in the crowd said that somebody ought to do something to honor the howling hero dog that had saved all of their lives. Somebody else said it ought to be something noisy.  Well, would you believe it, they actually did name something noisy and important for ol' Thunder.

Lida Rose, Siler, Montezuma, most of the passengers and the dog Thunder are gone now, dead these many years.  But some of the old folks still remember that day at Streaker's Neck Tunnel and many more people, who never knew the story of the heroic dog, still call their porcelain necessity a "Thunder Mug".

And that's the truth, according to information and belief, or, at least so I think I have been told.