Get-Rich-Quick Peggy

Dust-caked dawn over a drought-brittle farm: a child’s fingers coax mottled eggs from beneath a hen while a shaggy dog, half shepherd, half mythic guardian, keeps jealous roosters at bay. Abruptly the pair—Peggy, pocket-sized and preternaturally poised, and Teddy, whose tail writes cursive against the horizon—are banished by a landlord who sees only unpaid rent in their silhouettes. They hitch a ride on a hay-wagon bound for the city’s electric labyrinth, where skyscrapers needle the sky like hypodermics of ambition. At the marble steps of a limestone palace, millionaire Uncle expects a pampered niece; instead he receives a sun-browned imposter whose overalls still carry the scent of barn straw. Mistaken identity blooms into silk-lined farce: velvet sashes replace calico, ivory gloves eclipse calloused palms, and Peggy—now a porcelain doll perched on settees of rose damask—learns that wealth is a dialect spoken with forks and fingerbowls. But the idyll fractures when a caravan of kaleidoscopic caravans rattles past, brass bells clanging like warnings. Gypsy kidnappers—part folklore, part economic desperation—spirit the child away into a moonlit forest where embers pulse like tiger eyes. Enter the gypsy queen, equal parts matriarch and metaphysician, who senses in Peggy a mirror of her own displaced girlhood. Meanwhile Teddy, nostrils flaring with epic purpose, rallies alley strays and dockside mongrels into a four-legged militia. The rescue unspools as shadow-play: lanterns swing, violins sob, and the real heiress—an alabaster tot swaddled in Brussels lace—arrives just as Peggy leaps from a moving wagon into Teddy’s shaggy embrace, a communion that dissolves class into fur and breath.