It's Max, the wonderdog

Robin Lennon knew her five-year-old pug, Max, was a curious dog with a touch of wanderlust; the dog had disappeared from her Walpole backyard before. But when he vanished on Friday, he was not found in any of the usual places. Not the Norwood dog pound, where he'd turned up the last time, and not the blocks around her house.

"My stomach was in knots," she said.

Lennon, 44, had such a bad feeling about what might have happened that she concealed the escape from her 16-year-old daughter, Liane, fearing how much it would upset her.

Max was indeed in danger. That morning, as a commuter rail train roared into Walpole station, engineer Kym Berry saw a small dog by the side of the tracks peering at the approaching train. To her horror, the dog leapt onto the tracks and sprinted in front of the train, as though to outrun it. Berry blew the horn and slammed on the emergency brake, to no avail.

"He never stopped running," she said. "We just went right over him."

It was a horrible moment: Berry made a somber announcement over the radio that the train may have hit a dog. An assistant conductor, Pete Tomassini, scanned the ground near the tracks, expecting the worst. Instead, a small wrinkly head of a pug popped from beneath the chassis, unscathed and with hardly a hair out of place.

"We have a little friend of yours," a conductor told Berry over the radio.

"I don't know how he survived," Berry said. "He's just about 8 inches tall, but that was just tall enough."

The pug had only a red collar, but no tag, so they didn't know whom to call. Rather than let him wander off, possibly to have another dangerous encounter, they brought the dog on board with Berry, who placed him on a pile of newspapers for the ride to Boston. The dog obediently sat when told and was well fed.

At South Station, Tomassini decided to take the dog home. He used his belt as a makeshift leash, and the pug led the way to Rowes Wharf, where Tomassini boarded the ferry for his home in Hull.

"You see big guys walking little dogs," he said. "I used to say, 'Hey, I'm a German shepherd kind of guy.' But he was defenseless, so I just wanted to take care of him."

When he got home, Tomassini, 58, who has never owned a dog, bought some dog food and a toy dog bone. They played in the morning. They took a nap together, the pug snoring away on the floor. And on a walk on the beach later, even when the dog was 100 yards away, Tomassini could call, and the pug would come running. "I would just say, 'Hey!' and he'd come back," he said. "All of a sudden, I felt drawn to dog owners."

Meanwhile, Berry was calling local animal shelters and other authorities to see if she could find an owner.

Walpole police said a woman had reported a missing pug named Max. Berry then called Max's worried owner at home.

"She said, 'I'm going to give you your Christmas gift,' " Lennon said, and the two made arrangements to bring Max home on the train that afternoon.

That night, passengers on the outbound commuter rail train held Max while Tomassini worked. When he passed by or yelled out a station stop, they'd say the dog would look for him. "I'm saying to them, 'Don't make this any tougher,' " he said of the pending separation from his newfound friend.

The reunion happened at 5:52 after the train pulled into Walpole station and Tomassini emerged with Max grinning under his arm.

"I bonded with him today," Tomassini told Lennon, who hugged all the conductors as she and her daughter Liane handed them cards that read: Thank you for being so dog-gone nice.

Max came home and slept for 12 hours. Lennon says from now on she'll keep him on a leash in the backyard.

As for Tomassini, he and his wife are now seriously thinking about getting a dog. Maybe even a pug.