Winoka, Dakota Territory– Recent hotel manager hires Charles and Caroline Ingalls failed to mention their dog when negotiating a room for their children for a five dollar reduction in monthly pay.
Mr. Thoms, the hiring manager who selected Charles and Caroline, initially balked when he learned that the couple had children.
“I had already made the offer when they mentioned having children,” Mr. Thoms notes. “That sort of information could have been disclosed earlier, and now we are losing an entire room. Still, they insisted that their children are quiet and those biscuits were good, so I guess we’ll see how this goes.”
After the Ingalls family settled in, residents in the city walking past the hotel noticed a black and white dog consistently hanging out near a window in the hotel.
“Whose dog is that?” one passerby wonders aloud. “I don’t remember there being a dog there before, and now I see this one all the time. Does the dog live at the hotel? I heard there were kids living there now, but I had no idea there would be a dog too.”
Bandit Ingalls, meanwhile, expresses gratefulness at the upgrade in living quarters.
Wagging his tail excitedly, Bandit barks “This is great! Have you seen the kitchen in this place? Talk about scraps! And there are always people around to pet me! Woof!”
At press time, the noisy Ingalls children responded to a complaint about noise by blaming it on Bandit. Charles Ingalls in turn insisted that the complaints must be unfounded because their dog “never barks” and “you wouldn’t even know he lives here.” Meanwhile, Jack’s ghost expresses disappointment that he never got to live at a hotel, as if being forced to walk behind the wagon on multiple long trips through the rain and almost drowning in the river weren’t bad enough.