Fidelis Waldvogel and Pete Kozka

Fidelis Waldvogel and Pete Kozka’s relationship moves from employer and employee to amicable competitors, then into a bitter feud over Hottentot, Pete’s dog, and finally toward reconciliation through music. Their rivalry is rooted in competing ways of doing business and in a joke Fidelis keeps extending past the point of good humor; its return to friendship comes when Pete joins the singing club Fidelis founded.

From Employer to Competitor

Pete Kozka first hired Fidelis and became his chief—and, after Fidelis opened his own shop, his only—competitor in Argus. Pete was good-natured but humorless, and his inexpensive business practices meant that he was often short of help. The men’s early rivalry remained friendly, expressed chiefly through pranks and boasts. Fidelis had never concealed his intention to set up on his own, and Pete initially accepted the departure stoically.

Fidelis financed the move with a bank loan and the proceeds from selling his share of a family building in Ludwigsruhe. He bought an old farmstead at the opposite end of Argus, as far from the Kozkas as he could be while remaining in town, and attached a storefront to the farmhouse. The choice of site initially suggested consideration rather than provocation: the shops were separated, and when Fidelis opened, Argus seemed likely to have business enough for both. Later, the rerouting of the main highway brought traffic directly past Fidelis’s new shop, but commercial advantage was not the deepest source of conflict between the men.

Hottentot and the Joke That Escalates

The more personal disagreement concerned dogs. Fidelis regarded canine devotion as largely self-interested, while Pete believed that dogs’ loyalty arose from love. Pete and his wife, Fritzie, bred purebred chow dogs; their prized stud, Hottentot, was a large, temperamental dog whose visits to Fidelis’s shop turned the abstract disagreement into a practical contest. Fidelis distributed butcher-shop waste to dogs, itinerants, and poor residents rather than saving every scrap for a dealer. Hottentot began crossing town for those offerings, giving Fidelis particular satisfaction: Pete’s cherished dog seemed to confirm Fidelis’s view by following food.

Fidelis initially rewarded Hottentot with scraps and a large cow bone to take home. Then his teasing streak took over. He supplied the dog with increasingly unwelcome remnants, including a carefully trimmed heifer’s spinal column, which Hottentot dragged through Argus and took to chew near the Kozkas’ shop. Pete tried to restrain the dog, first with a rope and then a chain, but Hottentot escaped both. His return to Fidelis’s shop with more remains continued the joke, until Pete was badly bitten while trying to take an oozing boar’s skull away from him. Doctor Heech treated Pete, but Pete did not blame his dog; he believed Fidelis had corrupted Hottentot’s loyalty and resolved to get even.

Fritzie eventually demanded that Pete deal with the mess the dog had brought to their shop. Pete gathered the bones and drove to Waldvogel’s Meats, intending to leave them outside. Finding the shop closed, he imagined Fidelis could afford a vacation because his business was thriving. Envy and a sense of betrayal pushed Pete beyond the original prank: he entered the Waldvogel home and put the rotten bones in Fidelis and Eva’s bedroom, under their white eiderdown and embroidered sheets. The household’s careful separation of domestic cleanliness from the butcher shop was violated, and Eva remained angry with the Kozkas afterward.

Fidelis nonetheless refused to let the joke end. He sent Hottentot home with a month’s accumulated braid of chicken feet, even after Pete’s retaliation had made the exchange personal. The dog’s repeated escapes and returns eventually prompted the Kozkas to build a wire pen, which only rarely failed to hold him. The feud also acquired a wider audience: people in town watched Hottentot carry the gifts through the streets, while Eva told other women that the dog was responsible for Fidelis having to wear a knee brace and endure adjustments to it. For a time, the butcher shops divided Argus, and Fidelis and Pete’s damaged friendship became a subject of local talk.

Reconciliation Through Song

The repair began indirectly. Missing the singing club he had known in Ludwigsruhe, Fidelis started a new one in his slaughtering room, where the high ceiling returned the sound to the singers. Its membership crossed ordinary social boundaries, bringing together townsmen including the sheriff, the doctor, a banker, a bootlegger, and Roy Watzka. Pete, who loved singing, felt the absence keenly enough to tell Fritzie he would start his own club if Fidelis had not already gathered the men with good voices.

Pete eventually came to one of the club’s meetings as though nothing had happened. Fidelis made no show of resentment, and when the two butchers sang together, their quarrel was nearly put to rest. The singing club thus accomplished what the contest over Hottentot could not: it gave Pete a place among the men gathered by Fidelis, and allowed their relationship to recover through participation rather than a formal settlement. Although people continued to discuss the rivalry for a while, its rancor gradually became old news.

Significance of the Relationship

The friendship’s rupture grows out of a clash between competing convictions about loyalty, intensified by Fidelis’s inability to stop a joke once it has become harmful. Pete interprets Hottentot’s attachment to the scraps as evidence that Fidelis has taken something personal from him; Fidelis treats the dog’s behavior as confirmation of his own belief about canine opportunism. Their misreading turns an ordinary competition into retaliation, and the bones brought into the bedroom make the conflict a breach of domestic as well as commercial boundaries.

Their eventual reconciliation does not erase that history. Instead, song supplies a shared practice in which rivalry can give way to cooperation: the men join their voices, and Pete can return without first winning the argument about the dog. Their relationship therefore offers a local counterpoint to the town’s recurring shocks and concealed harms. Argus is not protected from conflict or loss, but fellowship can still be rebuilt through a place where people listen and sing together.