JINX, the Dog

The dog in the picture is Jinx. A mixed terrier breed. It is a story in itself. I was tutoring Latin to a schoolmate of mine. Incidentally he became a Optomologist. His family was given this dog as a puppy and couldn't keep him. So they gave him to me. This was about in 1940. We were in between dogs. The one we had was a bum and got into some poison. His name was Dusty. Dusty was not alone in being a bum. All our dogs were bums as were most of the dogs in the towns where we lived.
Jinx filled the vacant spot left by Dusty both physically and in our hearts. Jinx was like Jr. in that we all left home and he stayed. Mom and Dad kept him until he died sometime in the mid-fifties. Jinx started out in Buffalo and when the family moved to Wayzata he, of course, went along. The folks lived next door to a family named Johnson and the Johnsons had a Black Lab. Jinx would fight with this Lab at the drop of a hat. For some reason they hated each other. The Lab was three times bigger than Jinx. They would really get into it and would be torn-eared and bloody. Somebody always had to pull them apart at no small risk to themself.
One day when I was still going to the U of M and was married and living and working part time in Wayzata, Mother called and said the Jinx was missing. He had been missing for a couple of days and she feared for his life. We all conducted a search to no avail. Then a few days after that somebody came into the Filling Station where I worked, and asked me if I had a black and white Terrier. I told him that my folks had such dog. He told me that he thought he had seen him beside the road. He assumed that Jinx had been hit by a car and was dead. I called Mom and told her what had happened and that I would go and retrieve his body and bring it home so that we could bury him.
I drove up to the highway where I had been told he was and found him. He was not dead but barely alive. He could hardly wag his tail when he saw me. I put him on a blanket and took him to my folks. We checked him for injuries since he couldn't stand up and could hardly lap up water. It appeared that his leg had been broken because it was kind of crooked. He probably had some internal injuries as well. Mom called the vet and he told her that if the leg was broken it was probably set by now and that we should wait to see if he would heal from the other injuries. To make a long story short, he survived. Besides his leg he must have suffered some back injury for he was kind of twisted. He never ventured far from home after that. Nor did he fight with the Black Lab again. They never became friends and kept a grudging distance from each other.