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+Project Gutenberg Etext Michael, Brother of Jerry by Jack London
+#71 in our series by Jack London
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+Michael, Brother of Jerry
+
+by Jack London
+
+May, 1999  [Etext #1730]
+
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+Project Gutenberg Etext Michael, Brother of Jerry by Jack London
+******This file should be named mcjer10.txt or mcjer10.zip******
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+This etext was prepared by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+from the 1917 Mills & Boon edition.
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+
+
+
+MICHAEL, BROTHER OF JERRY
+
+
+
+
+FOREWORD
+
+
+
+Very early in my life, possibly because of the insatiable
+curiosity that was born in me, I came to dislike the performances
+of trained animals.  It was my curiosity that spoiled for me this
+form of amusement, for I was led to seek behind the performance in
+order to learn how the performance was achieved.  And what I found
+behind the brave show and glitter of performance was not nice.  It
+was a body of cruelty so horrible that I am confident no normal
+person exists who, once aware of it, could ever enjoy looking on
+at any trained-animal turn.
+
+Now I am not a namby-pamby.  By the book reviewers and the namby-
+pambys I am esteemed a sort of primitive beast that delights in
+the spilled blood of violence and horror.  Without arguing this
+matter of my general reputation, accepting it at its current face
+value, let me add that I have indeed lived life in a very rough
+school and have seen more than the average man's share of
+inhumanity and cruelty, from the forecastle and the prison, the
+slum and the desert, the execution-chamber and the lazar-house, to
+the battlefield and the military hospital.  I have seen horrible
+deaths and mutilations.  I have seen imbeciles hanged, because,
+being imbeciles, they did not possess the hire of lawyers.  I have
+seen the hearts and stamina of strong men broken, and I have seen
+other men, by ill-treatment, driven to permanent and howling
+madness.  I have witnessed the deaths of old and young, and even
+infants, from sheer starvation.  I have seen men and women beaten
+by whips and clubs and fists, and I have seen the rhinoceros-hide
+whips laid around the naked torsos of black boys so heartily that
+each stroke stripped away the skin in full circle.  And yet, let
+me add finally, never have I been so appalled and shocked by the
+world's cruelty as have I been appalled and shocked in the midst
+of happy, laughing, and applauding audiences when trained-animal
+turns were being performed on the stage.
+
+One with a strong stomach and a hard head may be able to tolerate
+much of the unconscious and undeliberate cruelty and torture of
+the world that is perpetrated in hot blood and stupidity.  I have
+such a stomach and head.  But what turns my head and makes my
+gorge rise, is the cold-blooded, conscious, deliberate cruelty and
+torment that is manifest behind ninety-nine of every hundred
+trained-animal turns.  Cruelty, as a fine art, has attained its
+perfect flower in the trained-animal world.
+
+Possessed myself of a strong stomach and a hard head, inured to
+hardship, cruelty, and brutality, nevertheless I found, as I came
+to manhood, that I unconsciously protected myself from the hurt of
+the trained-animal turn by getting up and leaving the theatre
+whenever such turns came on the stage.  I say "unconsciously."  By
+this I mean it never entered my mind that this was a programme by
+which the possible death-blow might be given to trained-animal
+turns.  I was merely protecting myself from the pain of witnessing
+what it would hurt me to witness.
+
+But of recent years my understanding of human nature has become
+such that I realize that no normal healthy human would tolerate
+such performances did he or she know the terrible cruelty that
+lies behind them and makes them possible.  So I am emboldened to
+suggest, here and now, three things:
+
+First, let all humans inform themselves of the inevitable and
+eternal cruelty by the means of which only can animals be
+compelled to perform before revenue-paying audiences.  Second, I
+suggest that all men and women, and boys and girls, who have so
+acquainted themselves with the essentials of the fine art of
+animal-training, should become members of, and ally themselves
+with, the local and national organizations of humane societies and
+societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals.
+
+And the third suggestion I cannot state until I have made a
+preamble.  Like hundreds of thousands of others, I have worked in
+other fields, striving to organize the mass of mankind into
+movements for the purpose of ameliorating its own wretchedness and
+misery.  Difficult as this is to accomplish, it is still more
+difficult to persuade the human into any organised effort to
+alleviate the ill conditions of the lesser animals.
+
+Practically all of us will weep red tears and sweat bloody sweats
+as we come to knowledge of the unavoidable cruelty and brutality
+on which the trained-animal world rests and has its being.  But
+not one-tenth of one per cent. of us will join any organization
+for the prevention of cruelty to animals, and by our words and
+acts and contributions work to prevent the perpetration of
+cruelties on animals.  This is a weakness of our own human nature.
+We must recognize it as we recognize heat and cold, the opaqueness
+of the non-transparent, and the everlasting down-pull of gravity.
+
+And still for us, for the ninety-nine and nine-tenths per cent. of
+us, under the easy circumstance of our own weakness, remains
+another way most easily to express ourselves for the purpose of
+eliminating from the world the cruelty that is practised by some
+few of us, for the entertainment of the rest of us, on the trained
+animals, who, after all, are only lesser animals than we on the
+round world's surface.  It is so easy.  We will not have to think
+of dues or corresponding secretaries.  We will not have to think
+of anything, save when, in any theatre or place of entertainment,
+a trained-animal turn is presented before us.  Then, without
+premeditation, we may express our disapproval of such a turn by
+getting up from our seats and leaving the theatre for a promenade
+and a breath of fresh air outside, coming back, when the turn is
+over, to enjoy the rest of the programme.  All we have to do is
+just that to eliminate the trained-animal turn from all public
+places of entertainment.  Show the management that such turns are
+unpopular, and in a day, in an instant, the management will cease
+catering such turns to its audiences.
+
+JACK LONDON
+GLEN ELLEN, SONOMA COUNTY, CALIFORNIA,
+December 8, 1915
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+
+But Michael never sailed out of Tulagi, nigger-chaser on the
+Eugenie.  Once in five weeks the steamer Makambo made Tulagi its
+port of call on the way from New Guinea and the Shortlands to
+Australia.  And on the night of her belated arrival Captain Kellar
+forgot Michael on the beach.  In itself, this was nothing, for, at
+midnight, Captain Kellar was back on the beach, himself climbing
+the high hill to the Commissioner's bungalow while the boat's crew
+vainly rummaged the landscape and canoe houses.
+
+In fact, an hour earlier, as the Makambo's anchor was heaving out
+and while Captain Kellar was descending the port gangplank,
+Michael was coming on board through a starboard port-hole.  This
+was because Michael was inexperienced in the world, because he was
+expecting to meet Jerry on board this boat since the last he had
+seen of him was on a boat, and because he had made a friend.
+
+Dag Daughtry was a steward on the Makambo, who should have known
+better and who would have known better and done better had he not
+been fascinated by his own particular and peculiar reputation.  By
+luck of birth possessed of a genial but soft disposition and a
+splendid constitution, his reputation was that for twenty years he
+had never missed his day's work nor his six daily quarts of
+bottled beer, even, as he bragged, when in the German islands,
+where each bottle of beer carried ten grains of quinine in
+solution as a specific against malaria.
+
+The captain of the Makambo (and, before that, the captains of the
+Moresby, the Masena, the Sir Edward Grace, and various others of
+the queerly named Burns Philp Company steamers had done the same)
+was used to pointing him out proudly to the passengers as a man-
+thing novel and unique in the annals of the sea.  And at such
+times Dag Daughtry, below on the for'ard deck, feigning
+unawareness as he went about his work, would steal side-glances up
+at the bridge where the captain and his passengers stared down on
+him, and his breast would swell pridefully, because he knew that
+the captain was saying:  "See him! that's Dag Daughtry, the human
+tank.  Never's been drunk or sober in twenty years, and has never
+missed his six quarts of beer per diem.  You wouldn't think it, to
+look at him, but I assure you it's so.  I can't understand.  Gets
+my admiration.  Always does his time, his time-and-a-half and his
+double-time over time.  Why, a single glass of beer would give me
+heartburn and spoil my next good meal.  But he flourishes on it.
+Look at him!  Look at him!"
+
+And so, knowing his captain's speech, swollen with pride in his
+own prowess, Dag Daughtry would continue his ship-work with extra
+vigour and punish a seventh quart for the day in advertisement of
+his remarkable constitution.  It was a queer sort of fame, as
+queer as some men are; and Dag Daughtry found in it his
+justification of existence.
+
+Wherefore he devoted his energy and the soul of him to the
+maintenance of his reputation as a six-quart man.  That was why he
+made, in odd moments of off-duty, turtle-shell combs and hair
+ornaments for profit, and was prettily crooked in such a matter as
+stealing another man's dog.  Somebody had to pay for the six
+quarts, which, multiplied by thirty, amounted to a tidy sum in the
+course of the month; and, since that man was Dag Daughtry, he
+found it necessary to pass Michael inboard on the Makambo through
+a starboard port-hole.
+
+On the beach, that night at Tulagi, vainly wondering what had
+become of the whaleboat, Michael had met the squat, thick, hair-
+grizzled ship's steward.  The friendship between them was
+established almost instantly, for Michael, from a merry puppy, had
+matured into a merry dog.  Far beyond Jerry, was he a sociable
+good fellow, and this, despite the fact that he had known very few
+white men.  First, there had been Mister Haggin, Derby and Bob, of
+Meringe; next, Captain Kellar and Captain Kellar's mate of the
+Eugenie; and, finally, Harley Kennan and the officers of the
+Ariel.  Without exception, he had found them all different, and
+delightfully different, from the hordes of blacks he had been
+taught to despise and to lord it over.
+
+And Dag Daughtry had proved no exception from his first greeting
+of "Hello, you white man's dog, what 'r' you doin' herein nigger
+country?"  Michael had responded coyly with an assumption of
+dignified aloofness that was given the lie by the eager tilt of
+his ears and the good-humour that shone in his eyes.  Nothing of
+this was missed by Dag Daughtry, who knew a dog when he saw one,
+as he studied Michael in the light of the lanterns held by black
+boys where the whaleboats were landing cargo.
+
+Two estimates the steward quickly made of Michael:  he was a
+likable dog, genial-natured on the face of it, and he was a
+valuable dog.  Because of those estimates Dag Daughtry glanced
+about him quickly.  No one was observing.  For the moment, only
+blacks stood about, and their eyes were turned seaward where the
+sound of oars out of the darkness warned them to stand ready to
+receive the next cargo-laden boat.  Off to the right, under
+another lantern, he could make out the Resident Commissioner's
+clerk and the Makambo's super-cargo heatedly discussing some error
+in the bill of lading.
+
+The steward flung another quick glance over Michael and made up
+his mind.  He turned away casually and strolled along the beach
+out of the circle of lantern light.  A hundred yards away he sat
+down in the sand and waited.
+
+"Worth twenty pounds if a penny," he muttered to himself.  "If I
+couldn't get ten pounds for him, just like that, with a thank-you-
+ma'am, I'm a sucker that don't know a terrier from a greyhound.--
+Sure, ten pounds, in any pub on Sydney beach."
+
+And ten pounds, metamorphosed into quart bottles of beer, reared
+an immense and radiant vision, very like a brewery, inside his
+head.
+
+A scurry of feet in the sand, and low sniffings, stiffened him to
+alertness.  It was as he had hoped.  The dog had liked him from
+the start, and had followed him.
+
+For Dag Daughtry had a way with him, as Michael was quickly to
+learn, when the man's hand reached out and clutched him, half by
+the jowl, half by the slack of the neck under the ear.  There was
+no threat in that reach, nothing tentative nor timorous.  It was
+hearty, all-confident, and it produced confidence in Michael.  It
+was roughness without hurt, assertion without threat, surety
+without seduction.  To him it was the most natural thing in the
+world thus to be familiarly seized and shaken about by a total
+stranger, while a jovial voice muttered:  "That's right, dog.
+Stick around, stick around, and you'll wear diamonds, maybe."
+
+Certainly, Michael had never met a man so immediately likable.
+Dag Daughtry knew, instinctively to be sure, how to get on with
+dogs.  By nature there was no cruelty in him.  He never exceeded
+in peremptoriness, nor in petting.  He did not overbid for
+Michael's friendliness.  He did bid, but in a manner that conveyed
+no sense of bidding.  Scarcely had he given Michael that
+introductory jowl-shake, when he released him and apparently
+forgot all about him.
+
+He proceeded to light his pipe, using several matches as if the
+wind blew them out.  But while they burned close up to his
+fingers, and while he made a simulation of prodigious puffing, his
+keen little blue eyes, under shaggy, grizzled brows, intently
+studied Michael.  And Michael, ears cocked and eyes intent, gazed
+at this stranger who seemed never to have been a stranger at all.
+
+If anything, it was disappointment Michael experienced, in that
+this delightful, two-legged god took no further notice of him.  He
+even challenged him to closer acquaintance with an invitation to
+play, with an abrupt movement lifting his paws from the ground and
+striking them down, stretched out well before, his body bent down
+from the rump in such a curve that almost his chest touched the
+sand, his stump of a tail waving signals of good nature while he
+uttered a sharp, inviting bark.  And the man was uninterested,
+pulling stolidly away at his pipe, in the darkness following upon
+the third match.
+
+Never was there a more consummate love-making, with all the base
+intent of betrayal, than this cavalier seduction of Michael by the
+elderly, six-quart ship's steward.  When Michael, not entirely
+unwitting of the snub of the man's lack of interest, stirred
+restlessly with a threat to depart, he had flung at him gruffly:
+
+"Stick around, dog, stick around."
+
+Dag Daughtry chuckled to himself, as Michael, advancing, sniffed
+his trousers' legs long and earnestly.  And the man took advantage
+of his nearness to study him some more, lighting his pipe and
+running over the dog's excellent lines.
+
+"Some dog, some points," he said aloud approvingly.  "Say, dog,
+you could pull down ribbons like a candy-kid in any bench show
+anywheres.  Only thing against you is that ear, and I could almost
+iron it out myself.  A vet. could do it."
+
+Carelessly he dropped a hand to Michael's ear, and, with tips of
+fingers instinct with sensuous sympathy, began to manipulate the
+base of the ear where its roots bedded in the tightness of skin-
+stretch over the skull.  And Michael liked it.  Never had a man's
+hand been so intimate with his ear without hurting it.  But these
+fingers were provocative only of physical pleasure so keen that he
+twisted and writhed his whole body in acknowledgment.
+
+Next came a long, steady, upward pull of the ear, the ear slipping
+slowly through the fingers to the very tip of it while it tingled
+exquisitely down to its roots.  Now to one ear, now to the other,
+this happened, and all the while the man uttered low words that
+Michael did not understand but which he accepted as addressed to
+him.
+
+"Head all right, good 'n' flat," Dag Daughtry murmured, first
+sliding his fingers over it, and then lighting a match.  "An' no
+wrinkles, 'n' some jaw, good 'n' punishing, an' not a shade too
+full in the cheek or too empty."
+
+He ran his fingers inside Michael's mouth and noted the strength
+and evenness of the teeth, measured the breadth of shoulders and
+depth of chest, and picked up a foot.  In the light of another
+match he examined all four feet.
+
+"Black, all black, every nail of them," said Daughtry, "an' as
+clean feet as ever a dog walked on, straight-out toes with the
+proper arch 'n' small 'n' not too small.  I bet your daddy and
+your mother cantered away with the ribbons in their day."
+
+Michael was for growing restless at such searching examination,
+but Daughtry, in the midst of feeling out the lines and build of
+the thighs and hocks, paused and took Michael's tail in his magic
+fingers, exploring the muscles among which it rooted, pressing and
+prodding the adjacent spinal column from which it sprang, and
+twisting it about in a most daringly intimate way.  And Michael
+was in an ecstasy, bracing his hindquarters to one side or the
+other against the caressing fingers.  With open hands laid along
+his sides and partly under him, the man suddenly lifted him from
+the ground.  But before he could feel alarm he was back on the
+ground again.
+
+"Twenty-six or -seven--you're over twenty-five right now, I'll bet
+you on it, shillings to ha'pennies, and you'll make thirty when
+you get your full weight," Dag Daughtry told him.  "But what of
+it?  Lots of the judges fancy the thirty-mark.  An' you could
+always train off a few ounces.  You're all dog n' all correct
+conformation.  You've got the racing build and the fighting
+weight, an' there ain't no feathers on your legs."
+
+"No, sir, Mr. Dog, your weight's to the good, and that ear can be
+ironed out by any respectable dog--doctor.  I bet there's a
+hundred men in Sydney right now that would fork over twenty quid
+for the right of calling you his."
+
+And then, just that Michael should not make the mistake of
+thinking he was being much made over, Daughtry leaned back,
+relighted his pipe, and apparently forgot his existence.  Instead
+of bidding for good will, he was bent on making Michael do the
+bidding.
+
+And Michael did, bumping his flanks against Daughtry's knee;
+nudging his head against Daughtry's hand, in solicitation for more
+of the blissful ear-rubbing and tail-twisting.  Daughtry caught
+him by the jowl instead and slowly moved his head back and forth
+as he addressed him:
+
+"What man's dog are you?  Maybe you're a nigger's dog, an' that
+ain't right.  Maybe some nigger's stole you, an' that'd be awful.
+Think of the cruel fates that sometimes happens to dogs.  It's a
+damn shame.  No white man's stand for a nigger ownin' the likes of
+you, an' here's one white man that ain't goin' to stand for it.
+The idea!  A nigger ownin' you an' not knowin' how to train you.
+Of course a nigger stole you.  If I laid eyes on him right now I'd
+up and knock seven bells and the Saint Paul chimes out of 'm.  '
+Sure thing I would.  Just show 'm to me, that's all, an' see what
+I'd do to him.  The idea of you takin' orders from a nigger an'
+fetchin' 'n' carryin' for him!  No, sir, dog, you ain't goin' to
+do it any more.  You're comin' along of me, an' I reckon I won't
+have to urge you."
+
+Dag Daughtry stood up and turned carelessly along the beach.
+Michael looked after him, but did not follow.  He was eager to,
+but had received no invitation.  At last Daughtry made a low
+kissing sound with his lips.  So low was it that he scarcely heard
+it himself and almost took it on faith, or on the testimony of his
+lips rather than of his ears, that he had made it.  No human being
+could have heard it across the distance to Michael; but Michael
+heard it, and sprang away after in a great delighted rush.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+
+Dag Daughtry strolled along the beach, Michael at his heels or
+running circles of delight around him at every repetition of that
+strange low lip-noise, and paused just outside the circle of
+lantern light where dusky forms laboured with landing cargo from
+the whale-boats and where the Commissioner's clerk and the
+Makambo's super-cargo still wrangled over the bill of lading.
+When Michael would have gone forward, the man withstrained him
+with the same inarticulate, almost inaudible kiss.
+
+For Daughtry did not care to be seen on such dog-stealing
+enterprises and was planning how to get on board the steamer
+unobserved.  He edged around outside the lantern shine and went on
+along the beach to the native village.  As he had foreseen, all
+the able-bodied men were down at the boat-landing working cargo.
+The grass houses seemed lifeless, but at last, from one of them,
+came a challenge in the querulous, high-pitched tones of age:
+
+"What name?"
+
+"Me walk about plenty too much," he replied in the beche-de-mer
+English of the west South Pacific.  "Me belong along steamer.
+Suppose 'm you take 'm me along canoe, washee-washee, me give 'm
+you fella boy two stick tobacco."
+
+"Suppose 'm you give 'm me ten stick, all right along me," came
+the reply.
+
+"Me give 'm five stick," the six-quart steward bargained.
+"Suppose 'm you no like 'm five stick then you fella boy go to
+hell close up."
+
+There was a silence.
+
+"You like 'm five stick?" Daughtry insisted of the dark interior.
+
+"Me like 'm," the darkness answered, and through the darkness the
+body that owned the voice approached with such strange sounds that
+the steward lighted a match to see.
+
+A blear-eyed ancient stood before him, balancing on a single
+crutch.  His eyes were half-filmed over by a growth of morbid
+membrane, and what was not yet covered shone red and irritated.
+His hair was mangy, standing out in isolated patches of wispy
+grey.  His skin was scarred and wrinkled and mottled, and in
+colour was a purplish blue surfaced with a grey coating that might
+have been painted there had it not indubitably grown there and
+been part and parcel of him.
+
+A blighted leper--was Daughtry's thought as his quick eyes leapt
+from hands to feet in quest of missing toe- and finger-joints.
+But in those items the ancient was intact, although one leg ceased
+midway between knee and thigh.
+
+"My word!  What place stop 'm that fella leg?" quoth Daughtry,
+pointing to the space which the member would have occupied had it
+not been absent.
+
+"Big fella shark-fish, that fella leg stop 'm along him," the
+ancient grinned, exposing a horrible aperture of toothlessness for
+a mouth.
+
+"Me old fella boy too much," the one-legged Methuselah quavered.
+"Long time too much no smoke 'm tobacco.  Suppose 'm you big fella
+white marster give 'm me one fella stick, close up me washee-
+washee you that fella steamer."
+
+"Suppose 'm me no give?" the steward impatiently temporized.
+
+For reply, the old man half-turned, and, on his crutch, swinging
+his stump of leg in the air, began sidling hippity-hop into the
+grass hut.
+
+"All right," Daughtry cried hastily.  "Me give 'm you smoke 'm
+quick fella."
+
+He dipped into a side coat-pocket for the mintage of the Solomons
+and stripped off a stick from the handful of pressed sticks.  The
+old man was transfigured as he reached avidly for the stick and
+received it.  He uttered little crooning noises, alternating with
+sharp cries akin to pain, half-ecstatic, half-petulant, as he drew
+a black clay pipe from a hole in his ear-lobe, and into the bowl
+of it, with trembling fingers, untwisted and crumbled the cheap
+leaf of spoiled Virginia crop.
+
+Pressing down the contents of the full bowl with his thumb, he
+suddenly plumped upon the ground, the crutch beside him, the one
+limb under him so that he had the seeming of a legless torso.
+From a small bag of twisted coconut hanging from his neck upon his
+withered and sunken chest, he drew out flint and steel and tinder,
+and, even while the impatient steward was proffering him a box of
+matches, struck a spark, caught it in the tinder, blew it into
+strength and quantity, and lighted his pipe from it.
+
+With the first full puff of the smoke he gave over his moans and
+yelps, the agitation began to fade out of him, and Daughtry,
+appreciatively waiting, saw the trembling go out of his hands, the
+pendulous lip-quivering cease, the saliva stop flowing from the
+corners of his mouth, and placidity come into the fiery remnants
+of his eyes.
+
+What the old man visioned in the silence that fell, Daughtry did
+not try to guess.  He was too occupied with his own vision, and
+vividly burned before him the sordid barrenness of a poorhouse
+ward, where an ancient, very like what he himself would become,
+maundered and gibbered and drooled for a crumb of tobacco for his
+old clay pipe, and where, of all horrors, no sip of beer ever
+obtained, much less six quarts of it.
+
+And Michael, by the dim glows of the pipe surveying the scene of
+the two old men, one squatted in the dark, the other standing,
+knew naught of the tragedy of age, and was only aware, and
+overwhelmingly aware, of the immense likableness of this two-
+legged white god, who, with fingers of magic, through ear-roots
+and tail-roots and spinal column, had won to the heart of him.
+
+The clay pipe smoked utterly out, the old black, by aid of the
+crutch, with amazing celerity raised himself upstanding on his one
+leg and hobbled, with his hippity-hop, to the beach.  Daughtry was
+compelled to lend his strength to the hauling down from the sand
+into the water of the tiny canoe.  It was a dug-out, as ancient
+and dilapidated as its owner, and, in order to get into it without
+capsizing, Daughtry wet one leg to the ankle and the other leg to
+the knee.  The old man contorted himself aboard, rolling his body
+across the gunwale so quickly, that, even while it started to
+capsize, his weight was across the danger-point and
+counterbalancing the canoe to its proper equilibrium.
+
+Michael remained on the beach, waiting invitation, his mind not
+quite made up, but so nearly so that all that was required was
+that lip-noise.  Dag Daughtry made the lip-noise so low that the
+old man did not hear, and Michael, springing clear from sand to
+canoe, was on board without wetting his feet.  Using Daughtry's
+shoulder for a stepping-place, he passed over him and down into
+the bottom of the canoe.  Daughtry kissed with his lips again, and
+Michael turned around so as to face him, sat down, and rested his
+head on the steward's knees.
+
+"I reckon I can take my affydavy on a stack of Bibles that the dog
+just up an' followed me," he grinned in Michael's ear.
+
+"Washee-washee quick fella," he commanded.
+
+The ancient obediently dipped his paddle and started pottering an
+erratic course in the general direction of the cluster of lights
+that marked the Makambo.  But he was too feeble, panting and
+wheezing continually from the exertion and pausing to rest off
+strokes between strokes.  The steward impatiently took the paddle
+away from him and bent to the work.
+
+Half-way to the steamer the ancient ceased wheezing and spoke,
+nodding his head at Michael.
+
+"That fella dog he belong big white marster along schooner . . .
+You give 'm me ten stick tobacco," he added after due pause to let
+the information sink in.
+
+"I give 'm you bang alongside head," Daughtry assured him
+cheerfully.  "White marster along schooner plenty friend along me
+too much.  Just now he stop 'm along Makambo.  Me take 'm dog
+along him along Makambo."
+
+There was no further conversation from the ancient, and though he
+lived long years after, he never mentioned the midnight passenger
+in the canoe who carried Michael away with him.  When he saw and
+heard the confusion and uproar on the beach later that night when
+Captain Kellar turned Tulagi upside-down in his search for
+Michael, the old one-legged one remained discreetly silent.  Who
+was he to seek trouble with the strange ones, the white masters
+who came and went and roved and ruled?
+
+In this the ancient was in nowise unlike the rest of his dark-
+skinned Melanesian race.  The whites were possessed of unguessed
+and unthinkable ways and purposes.  They constituted another world
+and were as a play of superior beings on an exalted stage where
+was no reality such as black men might know as reality, where,
+like the phantoms of a dream, the white men moved and were as
+shadows cast upon the vast and mysterious curtain of the Cosmos.
+
+The gang-plank being on the port side, Dag Daughtry paddled around
+to the starboard and brought the canoe to a stop under a certain
+open port.
+
+"Kwaque!" he called softly, once, and twice.
+
+At the second call the light of the port was obscured apparently
+by a head that piped down in a thin squeak.
+
+"Me stop 'm, marster."
+
+"One fella dog stop 'm along you," the steward whispered up.
+"Keep 'm door shut.  You wait along me.  Stand by!  Now!"
+
+With a quick catch and lift, he passed Michael up and into unseen
+hands outstretched from the iron wall of the ship, and paddled
+ahead to an open cargo port.  Dipping into his tobacco pocket, he
+thrust a loose handful of sticks into the ancient's hand and
+shoved the canoe adrift with no thought of how its helpless
+occupant would ever reach shore.
+
+The old man did not touch the paddle, and he was unregardless of
+the lofty-sided steamer as the canoe slipped down the length of it
+into the darkness astern.  He was too occupied in counting the
+wealth of tobacco showered upon him.  No easy task, his counting.
+Five was the limit of his numerals.  When he had counted five, he
+began over again and counted a second five.  Three fives he found
+in all, and two sticks over; and thus, at the end of it, he
+possessed as definite a knowledge of the number of sticks as would
+be possessed by the average white man by means of the single
+number SEVENTEEN.
+
+More it was, far more, than his avarice had demanded.  Yet he was
+unsurprised.  Nothing white men did could surprise.  Had it been
+two sticks instead of seventeen, he would have been equally
+unsurprised.  Since all acts of white men were surprises, the only
+surprise of action they could achieve for a black man would be the
+doing of an unsurprising thing.
+
+Paddling, wheezing, resting, oblivious of the shadow-world of the
+white men, knowing only the reality of Tulagi Mountain cutting its
+crest-line blackly across the dim radiance of the star-sprinkled
+sky, the reality of the sea and of the canoe he so feebly urged
+across it, and the reality of his fading strength and of the death
+into which he would surely end, the ancient black man slowly made
+his shoreward way.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+
+In the meanwhile, Michael.  Lifted through the air, exchanged into
+invisible hands that drew him through a narrow diameter of brass
+into a lighted room, Michael looked about him in expectancy of
+Jerry.  But Jerry, at that moment, lay cuddled beside Villa
+Kennan's sleeping-cot on the slant deck of the Ariel, as that trim
+craft, the Shortlands astern and New Guinea dead ahead, heeled her
+scuppers a-whisper and garrulous to the sea-welter alongside as
+she logged her eleven knots under the press of the freshening
+trades.  Instead of Jerry, from whom he had last parted on board a
+boat, Michael saw Kwaque.
+
+Kwaque?  Well, Kwaque was Kwaque, an individual, more unlike all
+other men than most men are unlike one another.  No queerer estray
+ever drifted along the stream of life.  Seventeen years old he
+was, as men measure time; but a century was measured in his lean-
+lined face, his wrinkled forehead, his hollowed temples, and his
+deep-sunk eyes.  From his thin legs, fragile-looking as
+windstraws, the bones of which were sheathed in withered skin with
+apparently no muscle padding in between--from such frail stems
+sprouted the torso of a fat man.  The huge and protuberant stomach
+was amply supported by wide and massive hips, and the shoulders
+were broad as those of a Hercules.  But, beheld sidewise, there
+was no depth to those shoulders and the top of the chest.  Almost,
+at that part of his anatomy, he seemed builded in two dimensions.
+Thin his arms were as his legs, and, as Michael first beheld him,
+he had all the seeming of a big-bellied black spider.
+
+He proceeded to dress, a matter of moments, slipping into duck
+trousers and blouse, dirty and frayed from long usage.  Two
+fingers of his left hand were doubled into a permanent bend, and,
+to an expert, would have advertised that he was a leper.  Although
+he belonged to Dag Daughtry just as much as if the steward
+possessed a chattel bill of sale of him, his owner did not know
+that his anaesthetic twist of ravaged nerves tokened the dread
+disease.
+
+The manner of the ownership was simple.  At King William Island,
+in the Admiralties, Kwaque had made, in the parlance of the South
+Pacific, a pier-head jump.  So to speak, leprosy and all, he had
+jumped into Dag Daughtry's arms.  Strolling along the native
+runways in the fringe of jungle just beyond the beach, as was his
+custom, to see whatever he might pick up, the steward had picked
+up Kwaque.  And he had picked him up in extremity.
+
+Pursued by two very active young men armed with fire-hardened
+spears, tottering along with incredible swiftness on his two
+spindle legs, Kwaque had fallen exhausted at Daughtry's feet and
+looked up at him with the beseeching eyes of a deer fleeing from
+the hounds.  Daughtry had inquired into the matter, and the
+inquiry was violent; for he had a wholesome fear of germs and
+bacilli, and when the two active young men tried to run him
+through with their filth-corroded spears, he caught the spear of
+one young man under his arm and put the other young man to sleep
+with a left hook to the jaw.  A moment later the young man whose
+spear he held had joined the other in slumber.
+
+The elderly steward was not satisfied with the mere spears.  While
+the rescued Kwaque continued to moan and slubber thankfulness at
+his feet, he proceeded to strip them that were naked.  Nothing
+they wore in the way of clothing, but from around each of their
+necks he removed a necklace of porpoise teeth that was worth a
+gold sovereign in mere exchange value.  From the kinky locks of
+one of the naked young men he drew a hand-carved, fine-toothed
+comb, the lofty back of which was inlaid with mother-of-pearl,
+which he later sold in Sydney to a curio shop for eight shillings.
+Nose and ear ornaments of bone and turtle-shell he also rifled, as
+well as a chest-crescent of pearl shell, fourteen inches across,
+worth fifteen shillings anywhere.  The two spears ultimately
+fetched him five shillings each from the tourists at Port Moresby.
+Not lightly may a ship steward undertake to maintain a six-quart
+reputation.
+
+When he turned to depart from the active young men, who, back to
+consciousness, were observing him with bright, quick, wild-animal
+eyes, Kwaque followed so close at his heels as to step upon them
+and make him stumble.  Whereupon he loaded Kwaque with his trove
+and put him in front to lead along the runway to the beach.  And
+for the rest of the way to the steamer, Dag Daughtry grinned and
+chuckled at sight of his plunder and at sight of Kwaque, who
+fantastically titubated and ambled along, barrel-like, on his
+pipe-stems.
+
+On board the steamer, which happened to be the Cockspur, Daughtry
+persuaded the captain to enter Kwaque on the ship's articles as
+steward's helper with a rating of ten shillings a month.  Also, he
+learned Kwaque's story.
+
+It was all an account of a pig.  The two active young men were
+brothers who lived in the next village to his, and the pig had
+been theirs--so Kwaque narrated in atrocious beche-de-mer English.
+He, Kwaque, had never seen the pig.  He had never known of its
+existence until after it was dead.  The two young men had loved
+the pig.  But what of that?  It did not concern Kwaque, who was as
+unaware of their love for the pig as he was unaware of the pig
+itself.
+
+The first he knew, he averred, was the gossip of the village that
+the pig was dead, and that somebody would have to die for it.  It
+was all right, he said, in reply to a query from the steward.  It
+was the custom.  Whenever a loved pig died its owners were in
+custom bound to go out and kill somebody, anybody.  Of course, it
+was better if they killed the one whose magic had made the pig
+sick.  But, failing that one, any one would do.  Hence Kwaque was
+selected for the blood-atonement.
+
+Dag Daughtry drank a seventh quart as he listened, so carried away
+was he by the sombre sense of romance of this dark jungle event
+wherein men killed even strangers because a pig was dead.
+
+Scouts out on the runways, Kwaque continued, brought word of the
+coming of the two bereaved pig-owners, and the village had fled
+into the jungle and climbed trees--all except Kwaque, who was
+unable to climb trees.
+
+"My word," Kwaque concluded, "me no make 'm that fella pig sick."
+
+"My word," quoth Dag Daughtry, "you devil-devil along that fella
+pig too much.  You look 'm like hell.  You make 'm any fella thing
+sick look along you.  You make 'm me sick too much."
+
+It became quite a custom for the steward, as he finished his sixth
+bottle before turning in, to call upon Kwaque for his story.  It
+carried him back to his boyhood when he had been excited by tales
+of wild cannibals in far lands and dreamed some day to see them
+for himself.  And here he was, he would chuckle to himself, with a
+real true cannibal for a slave.
+
+A slave Kwaque was, as much as if Daughtry had bought him on the
+auction-block.  Whenever the steward transferred from ship to ship
+of the Burns Philp fleet, he always stipulated that Kwaque should
+accompany him and be duly rated at ten shillings.  Kwaque had no
+say in the matter.  Even had he desired to escape in Australian
+ports, there was no need for Daughtry to watch him.  Australia,
+with her "all-white" policy, attended to that.  No dark-skinned
+human, whether Malay, Japanese, or Polynesian, could land on her
+shore without putting into the Government's hand a cash security
+of one hundred pounds.
+
+Nor at the other islands visited by the Makambo had Kwaque any
+desire to cut and run for it.  King William Island, which was the
+only land he had ever trod, was his yard-stick by which he
+measured all other islands.  And since King William Island was
+cannibalistic, he could only conclude that the other islands were
+given to similar dietary practice.
+
+As for King William Island, the Makambo, on the former run of the
+Cockspur, stopped there every ten weeks; but the direst threat
+Daughtry ever held over him was the putting ashore of him at the
+place where the two active young men still mourned their pig.  In
+fact, it was their regular programme, each trip, to paddle out and
+around the Makambo and make ferocious grimaces up at Kwaque, who
+grimaced back at them from over the rail.  Daughtry even
+encouraged this exchange of facial amenities for the purpose of
+deterring him from ever hoping to win ashore to the village of his
+birth.
+
+For that matter, Kwaque had little desire to leave his master,
+who, after all, was kindly and just, and never lifted a hand to
+him.  Having survived sea-sickness at the first, and never setting
+foot upon the land so that he never again knew sea-sickness,
+Kwaque was certain he lived in an earthly paradise.  He never had
+to regret his inability to climb trees, because danger never
+threatened him.  He had food regularly, and all he wanted, and it
+was such food!  No one in his village could have dreamed of any
+delicacy of the many delicacies which he consumed all the time.
+Because of these matters he even pulled through a light attack of
+home-sickness, and was as contented a human as ever sailed the
+seas.
+
+And Kwaque it was who pulled Michael through the port-hole into
+Dag Daughtry's stateroom and waited for that worthy to arrive by
+the roundabout way of the door.  After a quick look around the
+room and a sniff of the bunk and under the bunk which informed him
+that Jerry was not present, Michael turned his attention to
+Kwaque.
+
+Kwaque tried to be friendly.  He uttered a clucking noise in
+advertisement of his friendliness, and Michael snarled at this
+black who had dared to lay hands upon him--a contamination,
+according to Michael's training--and who now dared to address him
+who associated only with white gods.
+
+Kwaque passed off the rebuff with a silly gibbering laugh and
+started to step nearer the door to be in readiness to open it at
+his master's coming.  But at first lift of his leg, Michael flew
+at it.  Kwaque immediately put it down, and Michael subsided,
+though he kept a watchful guard.  What did he know of this strange
+black, save that he was a black and that, in the absence of a
+white master, all blacks required watching?  Kwaque tried slowly
+sliding his foot along the floor, but Michael knew the trick and
+with bristle and growl put a stop to it.
+
+It was upon this tableau that Daughtry entered, and, while he
+admired Michael much under the bright electric light, he realized
+the situation.
+
+"Kwaque, you make 'm walk about leg belong you," he commanded, in
+order to make sure.
+
+Kwaque's glance of apprehension at Michael was convincing enough,
+but the steward insisted.  Kwaque gingerly obeyed, but scarcely
+had his foot moved an inch when Michael's was upon him.  The foot
+and leg petrified, while Michael stiff-leggedly drew a half-circle
+of intimidation about him.
+
+"Got you nailed to the floor, eh?" Daughtry chuckled.  "Some
+nigger-chaser, my word, any amount."
+
+"Hey, you, Kwaque, go fetch 'm two fella bottle of beer stop 'm
+along icey-chestis," he commanded in his most peremptory manner.
+
+Kwaque looked beseechingly, but did not stir.  Nor did he stir at
+a harsher repetition of the order.
+
+"My word!" the steward bullied.  "Suppose 'm you no fetch 'm beer
+close up, I knock 'm eight bells 'n 'a dog-watch onta you.
+Suppose 'm you no fetch 'm close up, me make 'm you go ashore 'n'
+walk about along King William Island."
+
+"No can," Kwaque murmured timidly.  "Eye belong dog look along me
+too much.  Me no like 'm dog kai-kai along me."
+
+"You fright along dog?" his master demanded.
+
+"My word, me fright along dog any amount."
+
+Dag Daughtry was delighted.  Also, he was thirsty from his trip
+ashore and did not prolong the situation.
+
+"Hey, you, dog," he addressed Michael.  "This fella boy he all
+right.  Savvee?  He all right."
+
+Michael bobbed his tail and flattened his ears in token that he
+was trying to understand.  When the steward patted the black on
+the shoulder, Michael advanced and sniffed both the legs he had
+kept nailed to the floor.
+
+"Walk about," Daughtry commanded.  "Walk about slow fella," he
+cautioned, though there was little need.
+
+Michael bristled, but permitted the first timid step.  At the
+second he glanced up at Daughtry to make certain.
+
+"That's right," he was reassured.  "That fella boy belong me.  He
+all right, you bet."
+
+Michael smiled with his eyes that he understood, and turned
+casually aside to investigate an open box on the floor which
+contained plates of turtle-shell, hack-saws, and emery paper.
+
+
+"And now," Dag Daughtry muttered weightily aloud, as, bottle in
+hand, he leaned back in his arm-chair while Kwaque knelt at his
+feet to unlace his shoes, "now to consider a name for you, Mister
+Dog, that will be just to your breeding and fair to my powers of
+invention."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+
+Irish terriers, when they have gained maturity, are notable, not
+alone for their courage, fidelity, and capacity for love, but for
+their cool-headedness and power of self-control and restraint.
+They are less easily excited off their balance; they can recognize
+and obey their master's voice in the scuffle and rage of battle;
+and they never fly into nervous hysterics such as are common, say,
+with fox-terriers.
+
+Michael possessed no trace of hysteria, though he was more
+temperamentally excitable and explosive than his blood-brother
+Jerry, while his father and mother were a sedate old couple indeed
+compared with him.  Far more than mature Jerry, was mature Michael
+playful and rowdyish.  His ebullient spirits were always on tap to
+spill over on the slightest provocation, and, as he was afterwards
+to demonstrate, he could weary a puppy with play.  In short,
+Michael was a merry soul.
+
+"Soul" is used advisedly.  Whatever the human soul may be--
+informing spirit, identity, personality, consciousness--that
+intangible thing Michael certainly possessed.  His soul, differing
+only in degree, partook of the same attributes as the human soul.
+He knew love, sorrow, joy, wrath, pride, self-consciousness,
+humour.  Three cardinal attributes of the human soul are memory,
+will, and understanding; and memory, will, and understanding were
+Michael's.
+
+Just like a human, with his five senses he contacted with the
+world exterior to him.  Just like a human, the results to him of
+these contacts were sensations.  Just like a human, these
+sensations on occasion culminated in emotions.  Still further,
+like a human, he could and did perceive, and such perceptions did
+flower in his brain as concepts, certainly not so wide and deep
+and recondite as those of humans, but concepts nevertheless.
+
+Perhaps, to let the human down a trifle from such disgraceful
+identity of the highest life-attributes, it would be well to admit
+that Michael's sensations were not quite so poignant, say in the
+matter of a needle-thrust through his foot as compared with a
+needle-thrust through the palm of a hand.  Also, it is admitted,
+when consciousness suffused his brain with a thought, that the
+thought was dimmer, vaguer than a similar thought in a human
+brain.  Furthermore, it is admitted that never, never, in a
+million lifetimes, could Michael have demonstrated a proposition
+in Euclid or solved a quadratic equation.  Yet he was capable of
+knowing beyond all peradventure of a doubt that three bones are
+more than two bones, and that ten dogs compose a more redoubtable
+host than do two dogs.
+
+One admission, however, will not be made, namely, that Michael
+could not love as devotedly, as wholeheartedly, unselfishly,
+madly, self-sacrificingly as a human.  He did so love--not because
+he was Michael, but because he was a dog.
+
+Michael had loved Captain Kellar more than he loved his own life.
+No more than Jerry for Skipper, would he have hesitated to risk
+his life for Captain Kellar.  And he was destined, as time went by
+and the conviction that Captain Kellar had passed into the
+inevitable nothingness along with Meringe and the Solomons, to
+love just as absolutely this six-quart steward with the
+understanding ways and the fascinating lip-caress.  Kwaque, no;
+for Kwaque was black.  Kwaque he merely accepted, as an
+appurtenance, as a part of the human landscape, as a chattel of
+Dag Daughtry.
+
+But he did not know this new god as Dag Daughtry.  Kwaque called
+him "marster"; but Michael heard other white men so addressed by
+the blacks.  Many blacks had he heard call Captain Kellar
+"marster."  It was Captain Duncan who called the steward
+"Steward."  Michael came to hear him, and his officers, and all
+the passengers, so call him; and thus, to Michael, his god's name
+was Steward, and for ever after he was to know him and think of
+him as Steward.
+
+There was the question of his own name.  The next evening after he
+came on board, Dag Daughtry talked it over with him.  Michael sat
+on his haunches, the length of his lower jaw resting on Daughtry's
+knee, the while his eyes dilated, contracted and glowed, his ears
+ever pricking and repricking to listen, his stump tail thumping
+ecstatically on the floor.
+
+"It's this way, son," the steward told him.  "Your father and
+mother were Irish.  Now don't be denying it, you rascal--"
+
+This, as Michael, encouraged by the unmistakable geniality and
+kindness in the voice, wriggled his whole body and thumped double
+knocks of delight with his tail.  Not that he understood a word of
+it, but that he did understand the something behind the speech
+that informed the string of sounds with all the mysterious
+likeableness that white gods possessed.
+
+"Never be ashamed of your ancestry.  An' remember, God loves the
+Irish--Kwaque!  Go fetch 'm two bottle beer fella stop 'm along
+icey-chestis!--Why, the very mug of you, my lad, sticks out Irish
+all over it."  (Michael's tail beat a tattoo.)  "Now don't be
+blarneyin' me.  'Tis well I'm wise to your insidyous, snugglin',
+heart-stealin' ways.  I'll have ye know my heart's impervious.
+'Tis soaked too long this many a day in beer.  I stole you to sell
+you, not to be lovin' you.  I could've loved you once; but that
+was before me and beer was introduced.  I'd sell you for twenty
+quid right now, coin down, if the chance offered.  An' I ain't
+goin' to love you, so you can put that in your pipe 'n' smoke it."
+
+"But as I was about to say when so rudely interrupted by your
+'fectionate ways--"
+
+Here he broke off to tilt to his mouth the opened bottle Kwaque
+handed him.  He sighed, wiped his lips with the back of his hand,
+and proceeded.
+
+"'Tis a strange thing, son, this silly matter of beer.  Kwaque,
+the Methusalem-faced ape grinnin' there, belongs to me.  But by my
+faith do I belong to beer, bottles 'n' bottles of it 'n' mountains
+of bottles of it enough to sink the ship.  Dog, truly I envy you,
+settin' there comfortable-like inside your body that's untainted
+of alcohol.  I may own you, and the man that gives me twenty quid
+will own you, but never will a mountain of bottles own you.
+You're a freer man than I am, Mister Dog, though I don't know your
+name.  Which reminds me--"
+
+He drained the bottle, tossed it to Kwaque, and made signs for him
+to open the remaining one.
+
+"The namin' of you, son, is not lightly to be considered.  Irish,
+of course, but what shall it be?  Paddy?  Well may you shake your
+head.  There's no smack of distinction to it.  Who'd mistake you
+for a hod-carrier?  Ballymena might do, but it sounds much like a
+lady, my boy.  Ay, boy you are.  'Tis an idea.  Boy!  Let's see.
+Banshee Boy?  Rotten.  Lad of Erin!"
+
+He nodded approbation and reached for the second bottle.  He drank
+and meditated, and drank again.
+
+"I've got you," he announced solemnly.  "Killeny is a lovely name,
+and it's Killeny Boy for you.  How's that strike your
+honourableness?--high-soundin', dignified as a earl or . . . or a
+retired brewer.  Many's the one of that gentry I've helped to
+retire in my day."
+
+He finished his bottle, caught Michael suddenly by both jowls,
+and, leaning forward, rubbed noses with him.  As suddenly
+released, with thumping tail and dancing eyes, Michael gazed up
+into the god's face.  A definite soul, or entity, or spirit-thing
+glimmered behind his dog's eyes, already fond with affection for
+this hair-grizzled god who talked with him he knew not what, but
+whose very talking carried delicious and unguessable messages to
+his heart.
+
+"Hey!  Kwaque, you!"
+
+Kwaque, squatted on the floor, his hams on his heels, paused from
+the rough-polishing of a shell comb designed and cut out by his
+master, and looked up, eager to receive command and serve.
+
+"Kwaque, you fella this time now savvee name stop along this fella
+dog.  His name belong 'm him, Killeny Boy.  You make 'm name stop
+'m inside head belong you.  All the time you speak 'm this fella
+dog, you speak 'm Killeny Boy.  Savvee?  Suppose 'm you no savvee,
+I knock 'm block off belong you.  Killeny Boy, savvee!  Killeny
+Boy.  Killeny Boy."
+
+As Kwaque removed his shoes and helped him undress, Daughtry
+regarded Michael with sleepy eyes.
+
+"I've got you, laddy," he announced, as he stood up and swayed
+toward bed.  "I've got your name, an' here's your number--I got
+that, too:  HIGH-STRUNG BUT REASONABLE.  It fits you like the
+paper on the wall.
+
+"High-strung but reasonable, that's what you are, Killeny Boy,
+high-strung but reasonable," he continued to mumble as Kwaque
+helped to roll him into his bunk.
+
+Kwaque returned to his polishing.  His lips stammered and halted
+in the making of noiseless whispers, as, with corrugated brows of
+puzzlement, he addressed the steward:
+
+"Marster, what name stop 'm along that fella dog?"
+
+"Killeny Boy, you kinky-head man-eater, Killeny Boy, Killeny Boy,"
+Dag Daughtry murmured drowsily.  "Kwaque, you black blood-drinker,
+run n' fetch 'm one fella bottle stop 'm along icey-chestis."
+
+"No stop 'm, marster," the black quavered, with eyes alert for
+something to be thrown at him.  "Six fella bottle he finish
+altogether."
+
+The steward's sole reply was a snore.
+
+The black, with the twisted hand of leprosy and with a barely
+perceptible infiltration of the same disease thickening the skin
+of the forehead between the eyes, bent over his polishing, and
+ever his lips moved, repeating over and over, "Killeny Boy."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+
+For a number of days Michael saw only Steward and Kwaque.  This
+was because he was confined to the steward's stateroom.  Nobody
+else knew that he was on board, and Dag Daughtry, thoroughly aware
+that he had stolen a white man's dog, hoped to keep his presence
+secret and smuggle him ashore when the Makambo docked in Sydney.
+
+Quickly the steward learned Michael's pre-eminent teachableness.
+In the course of his careful feeding of him, he gave him an
+occasional chicken bone.  Two lessons, which would scarcely be
+called lessons, since both of them occurred within five minutes
+and each was not over half a minute in duration, sufficed to teach
+Michael that only on the floor of the room in the corner nearest
+the door could he chew chicken bones.  Thereafter, without
+prompting, as a matter of course when handed a bone, he carried it
+to the corner.
+
+And why not?  He had the wit to grasp what Steward desired of him;
+he had the heart that made it a happiness for him to serve.
+Steward was a god who was kind, who loved him with voice and lip,
+who loved him with touch of hand, rub of nose, or enfolding arm.
+As all service flourishes in the soil of love, so with Michael.
+Had Steward commanded him to forego the chicken bone after it was
+in the corner, he would have served him by foregoing.  Which is
+the way of the dog, the only animal that will cheerfully and
+gladly, with leaping body of joy, leave its food uneaten in order
+to accompany or to serve its human master.
+
+Practically all his waking time off duty, Dag Daughtry spent with
+the imprisoned Michael, who, at command, had quickly learned to
+refrain from whining and barking.  And during these hours of
+companionship Michael learned many things.  Daughtry found that he
+already understood and obeyed simple things such as "no," "yes,"
+"get up," and "lie down," and he improved on them, teaching him,
+"Go into the bunk and lie down," "Go under the bunk," "Bring one
+shoe," "Bring two shoes."  And almost without any work at all, he
+taught him to roll over, to say his prayers, to play dead, to sit
+up and smoke a pipe with a hat on his head, and not merely to
+stand up on his hind legs but to walk on them.
+
+Then, too, was the trick of "no can and can do."  Placing a
+savoury, nose-tantalising bit of meat or cheese on the edge of the
+bunk on a level with Michael's nose, Daughtry would simply say,
+"No can."  Nor would Michael touch the food till he received the
+welcome, "Can do."  Daughtry, with the "no can" still in force,
+would leave the stateroom, and, though he remained away half an
+hour or half a dozen hours, on his return he would find the food
+untouched and Michael, perhaps, asleep in the corner at the head
+of the bunk which had been allotted him for a bed.  Early in this
+trick once when the steward had left the room and Michael's eager
+nose was within an inch of the prohibited morsel, Kwaque,
+playfully inclined, reached for the morsel himself and received a
+lacerated hand from the quick flash and clip of Michael's jaws.
+
+None of the tricks that he was ever eager to do for Steward, would
+Michael do for Kwaque, despite the fact that Kwaque had no touch
+of meanness or viciousness in him.  The point was that Michael had
+been trained, from his first dawn of consciousness, to
+differentiate between black men and white men.  Black men were
+always the servants of white men--or such had been his experience;
+and always they were objects of suspicion, ever bent on wreaking
+mischief and requiring careful watching.  The cardinal duty of a
+dog was to serve his white god by keeping a vigilant eye on all
+blacks that came about.
+
+Yet Michael permitted Kwaque to serve him in matters of food,
+water, and other offices, at first in the absence of Steward
+attending to his ship duties, and, later, at any time.  For he
+realized, without thinking about it at all, that whatever Kwaque
+did for him, whatever food Kwaque spread for him, really
+proceeded, not from Kwaque, but from Kwaque's master who was also
+his master.  Yet Kwaque bore no grudge against Michael, and was
+himself so interested in his lord's welfare and comfort--this lord
+who had saved his life that terrible day on King William Island
+from the two grief-stricken pig-owners--that he cherished Michael
+for his lord's sake.  Seeing the dog growing into his master's
+affection, Kwaque himself developed a genuine affection for
+Michael--much in the same way that he worshipped anything of the
+steward's, whether the shoes he polished for him, the clothes he
+brushed and cleaned for him, or the six bottles of beer he put
+into the ice-chest each day for him.
+
+In truth, there was nothing of the master-quality in Kwaque, while
+Michael was a natural aristocrat.  Michael, out of love, would
+serve Steward, but Michael lorded it over the kinky-head.  Kwaque
+possessed overwhelmingly the slave-nature, while in Michael there
+was little more of the slave-nature than was found in the North
+American Indians when the vain attempt was made to make them into
+slaves on the plantations of Cuba.  All of which was no personal
+vice of Kwaque or virtue of Michael.  Michael's heredity, rigidly
+selected for ages by man, was chiefly composed of fierceness and
+faithfulness.  And fierceness and faithfulness, together,
+invariably produce pride.  And pride cannot exist without honour,
+nor can honour without poise.
+
+Michael's crowning achievement, under Daughtry's tutelage, in the
+first days in the stateroom, was to learn to count up to five.
+Many hours of work were required, however, in spite of his unusual
+high endowment of intelligence.  For he had to learn, first, the
+spoken numerals; second, to see with his eyes and in his brain
+differentiate between one object, and all other groups of objects
+up to and including the group of five; and, third, in his mind, to
+relate an object, or any group of objects, with its numerical name
+as uttered by Steward.
+
+In the training Dag Daughtry used balls of paper tied about with
+twine.  He would toss the five balls under the bunk and tell
+Michael to fetch three, and neither two, nor four, but three would
+Michael bring forth and deliver into his hand.  When Daughtry
+threw three under the bunk and demanded four, Michael would
+deliver the three, search about vainly for the fourth, then dance
+pleadingly with bobs of tail and half-leaps about Steward, and
+finally leap into the bed and secure the fourth from under the
+pillow or among the blankets.
+
+It was the same with other known objects.  Up to five, whether
+shoes or shirts or pillow-slips, Michael would fetch the number
+requested.  And between the mathematical mind of Michael, who
+counted to five, and the mind of the ancient black at Tulagi, who
+counted sticks of tobacco in units of five, was a distance shorter
+than that between Michael and Dag Daughtry who could do
+multiplication and long division.  In the same manner, up the same
+ladder of mathematical ability, a still greater distance separated
+Dag Daughtry from Captain Duncan, who by mathematics navigated the
+Makambo.  Greatest mathematical distance of all was that between
+Captain Duncan's mind and the mind of an astronomer who charted
+the heavens and navigated a thousand million miles away among the
+stars and who tossed, a mere morsel of his mathematical knowledge,
+the few shreds of information to Captain Duncan that enabled him
+to know from day to day the place of the Makambo on the sea.
+
+In one thing only could Kwaque rule Michael.  Kwaque possessed a
+jews' harp, and, whenever the world of the Makambo and the
+servitude to the steward grew wearisome, he could transport
+himself to King William Island by thrusting the primitive
+instrument between his jaws and fanning weird rhythms from it with
+his hand, and when he thus crossed space and time, Michael sang--
+or howled, rather, though his howl possessed the same soft
+mellowness as Jerry's.  Michael did not want to howl, but the
+chemistry of his being was such that he reacted to music as
+compulsively as elements react on one another in the laboratory.
+
+While he lay perdu in Steward's stateroom, his voice was the one
+thing that was not to be heard, so Kwaque was forced to seek the
+solace of his jews' harp in the sweltering heat of the gratings
+over the fire-room.  But this did not continue long, for, either
+according to blind chance, or to the lines of fate written in the
+book of life ere ever the foundations of the world were laid,
+Michael was scheduled for an adventure that was profoundly to
+affect, not alone his own destiny, but the destinies of Kwaque and
+Dag Daughtry and determine the very place of their death and
+burial.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+
+The adventure that was so to alter the future occurred when
+Michael, in no uncertain manner, announced to all and sundry his
+presence on the Makambo.  It was due to Kwaque's carelessness, to
+commence with, for Kwaque left the stateroom without tight-closing
+the door.  As the Makambo rolled on an easy sea the door swung
+back and forth, remaining wide open for intervals and banging shut
+but not banging hard enough to latch itself.
+
+Michael crossed the high threshold with the innocent intention of
+exploring no farther than the immediate vicinity.  But scarcely
+was he through, when a heavier roll slammed the door and latched
+it.  And immediately Michael wanted to get back.  Obedience was
+strong in him, for it was his heart's desire to serve his lord's
+will, and from the few days' confinement he sensed, or guessed, or
+divined, without thinking about it, that it was Steward's will for
+him to stay in the stateroom.
+
+For a long time he sat down before the closed door, regarding it
+wistfully but being too wise to bark or speak to such inanimate
+object.  It had been part of his early puppyhood education to
+learn that only live things could be moved by plea or threat, and
+that while things not alive did move, as the door had moved, they
+never moved of themselves, and were deaf to anything life might
+have to say to them.  Occasionally he trotted down the short
+cross-hall upon which the stateroom opened, and gazed up and down
+the long hall that ran fore and aft.
+
+For the better part of an hour he did this, returning always to
+the door that would not open.  Then he achieved a definite idea.
+Since the door would not open, and since Steward and Kwaque did
+not return, he would go in search of them.  Once with this concept
+of action clear in his brain, without timidities of hesitation and
+irresolution, he trotted aft down the long hall.  Going around the
+right angle in which it ended, he encountered a narrow flight of
+steps.  Among many scents, he recognized those of Kwaque and
+Steward and knew they had passed that way.
+
+Up the stairs and on the main deck, he began to meet passengers.
+Being white gods, he did not resent their addresses to him, though
+he did not linger and went out on the open deck where more of the
+favoured gods reclined in steamer-chairs.  Still no Kwaque or
+Steward.  Another flight of narrow, steep stairs invited, and he
+came out on the boat-deck.  Here, under the wide awnings, were
+many more of the gods--many times more than he had that far seen
+in his life.
+
+The for'ard end of the boat-deck terminated in the bridge, which,
+instead of being raised above it, was part of it.  Trotting around
+the wheel-house to the shady lee-side of it, he came upon his
+fate; for be it known that Captain Duncan possessed on board in
+addition to two fox-terriers, a big Persian cat, and that cat
+possessed a litter of kittens.  Her chosen nursery was the wheel-
+house, and Captain Duncan had humoured her, giving her a box for
+her kittens and threatening the quartermasters with all manner of
+dire fates did they so much as step on one of the kittens.
+
+But Michael knew nothing of this.  And the big Persian knew of his
+existence before he did of hers.  In fact, the first he knew was
+when she launched herself upon him out of the open wheel-house
+doorway.  Even as he glimpsed this abrupt danger, and before he
+could know what it was, he leaped sideways and saved himself.
+From his point of view, the assault was unprovoked.  He was
+staring at her with bristling hair, recognizing her for what she
+was, a cat, when she sprang again, her tail the size of a large
+man's arm, all claws and spitting fury and vindictiveness.
+
+This was too much for a self-respecting Irish terrier.  His wrath
+was immediate with her second leap, and he sprang to the side to
+avoid her claws, and in from the side to meet her, his jaws
+clamping together on her spinal column with a jerk while she was
+still in mid-air.  The next moment she lay sprawling and
+struggling on the deck with a broken back.
+
+But for Michael this was only the beginning.  A shrill yelling,
+rather than yelping, of more enemies made him whirl half about,
+but not quick enough.  Struck in flank by two full-grown fox-
+terriers, he was slashed and rolled on the deck.  The two, by the
+way, had long before made their first appearance on the Makambo as
+little puppies in Dag Daughtry's coat pockets--Daughtry, in his
+usual fashion, having appropriated them ashore in Sydney and sold
+them to Captain Duncan for a guinea apiece.
+
+By this time, scrambling to his feet, Michael was really angry.
+In truth, it was raining cats and dogs, such belligerent shower
+all unprovoked by him who had picked no quarrels nor even been
+aware of his enemies until they assailed him.  Brave the fox-
+terriers were, despite the hysterical rage they were in, and they
+were upon him as he got his legs under him.  The fangs of one
+clashed with his, cutting the lips of both of them, and the
+lighter dog recoiled from the impact.  The other succeeded in
+taking Michael in flank, fetching blood and hurt with his teeth.
+With an instant curve, that was almost spasmodic, of his body,
+Michael flung his flank clear, leaving the other's mouth full of
+his hair, and at the same moment drove his teeth through an ear
+till they met.  The fox-terrier, with a shrill yelp of pain,
+sprang back so impetuously as to ribbon its ear as Michael's teeth
+combed through it.
+
+The first terrier was back upon him, and he was whirling to meet
+it, when a new and equally unprovoked assault was made upon him.
+This time it was Captain Duncan, in a rage at sight of his slain
+cat.  The instep of his foot caught Michael squarely under the
+chest, half knocking the breath out of him and wholly lifting him
+into the air, so that he fell heavily on his side.  The two
+terriers were upon him, filling their mouths with his straight,
+wiry hair as they sank their teeth in.  Still on his side, as he
+was beginning to struggle to his feet, he clipped his jaws
+together on a leg of one, who screamed with pain and retreated on
+three legs, holding up the fourth, a fore leg, the bone of which
+Michael's teeth had all but crushed.
+
+Twice Michael slashed the other four-footed foe and then pursued
+him in a circle with Captain Duncan pursuing him in turn.
+Shortening the distance by leaping across a chord of the arc of
+the other's flight, Michael closed his jaws on the back and side
+of the neck.  Such abrupt arrest in mid-flight by the heavier dog
+brought the fox-terrier down on deck with, a heavy thump.
+Simultaneous with this, Captain Duncan's second kick landed,
+communicating such propulsion to Michael as to tear his clenched
+teeth through the flesh and out of the flesh of the fox-terrier.
+
+And Michael turned on the Captain.  What if he were a white god?
+In his rage at so many assaults of so many enemies, Michael, who
+had been peacefully looking for Kwaque and Steward, did not stop
+to reckon.  Besides, it was a strange white god upon whom he had
+never before laid eyes.
+
+At the beginning he had snarled and growled.  But it was a more
+serious affair to attack a god, and no sound came from him as he
+leaped to meet the leg flying toward him in another kick.  As with
+the cat, he did not leap straight at it.  To the side to avoid,
+and in with a curve of body as it passed, was his way.  He had
+learned the trick with many blacks at Meringe and on board the
+Eugenie, so that as often he succeeded as failed at it.  His teeth
+came together in the slack of the white duck trousers.  The
+consequent jerk on Captain Duncan's leg made that infuriated
+mariner lose his balance.  Almost he fell forward on his face,
+part recovered himself with a violent effort, stumbled over
+Michael who was in for another bite, tottered wildly around, and
+sat down on the deck.
+
+How long he might have sat there to recover his breath is
+problematical, for he rose as rapidly as his stoutness would
+permit, spurred on by Michael's teeth already sunk into the fleshy
+part of his shoulder.  Michael missed his calf as he uprose, but
+tore the other leg of the trousers to shreds and received a kick
+that lifted him a yard above the deck in a half-somersault and
+landed him on his back on deck.
+
+Up to this time the Captain had been on the ferocious offensive,
+and he was in the act of following up the kick when Michael
+regained his feet and soared up in the air, not for leg or thigh,
+but for the throat.  Too high it was for him to reach it, but his
+teeth closed on the flowing black scarf and tore it to tatters as
+his weight drew him back to deck.
+
+It was not this so much that turned Captain Duncan to the pure
+defensive and started him retreating backward, as it was the
+silence of Michael.  Ominous as death it was.  There were no
+snarls nor throat-threats.  With eyes straight-looking and
+unblinking, he sprang and sprang again.  Neither did he growl when
+he attacked nor yelp when he was kicked.  Fear of the blow was not
+in him.  As Tom Haggin had so often bragged of Biddy and Terrence,
+they bred true in Jerry and Michael in the matter of not wincing
+at a blow.  Always--they were so made--they sprang to meet the
+blow and to encounter the creature who delivered the blow.  With a
+silence that was invested with the seriousness of death, they were
+wont to attack and to continue to attack.
+
+And so Michael.  As the Captain retreated kicking, he attacked,
+leaping and slashing.  What saved Captain Duncan was a sailor with
+a deck mop on the end of a stick.  Intervening, he managed to
+thrust it into Michael's mouth and shove him away.  This first
+time his teeth closed automatically upon it.  But, spitting it
+out, he declined thereafter to bite it, knowing it for what it
+was, an inanimate thing upon which his teeth could inflict no
+hurt.
+
+Nor, beyond trying to avoid him, was he interested in the sailor.
+It was Captain Duncan, leaning his back against the rail,
+breathing heavily, and wiping the streaming sweat from his face,
+who was Michael's meat.  Long as it has taken to tell the battle,
+beginning with the slaying of the Persian cat to the thrusting of
+the mop into Michael's jaws, so swift had been the rush of events
+that the passengers, springing from their deck-chairs and hurrying
+to the scene, were just arriving when Michael eluded the mop of
+the sailor by a successful dodge and plunged in on Captain Duncan,
+this time sinking his teeth so savagely into a rotund calf as to
+cause its owner to splutter an incoherent curse and howl of
+wrathful surprise.
+
+A fortunate kick hurled Michael away and enabled the sailor to
+intervene once again with the mop.  And upon the scene came Dag
+Daughtry, to behold his captain, frayed and bleeding and breathing
+apoplectically, Michael raging in ghastly silence at the end of a
+mop, and a large Persian mother-cat writhing with a broken back.
+
+"Killeny Boy!" the steward cried imperatively.
+
+Through no matter what indignation and rage that possessed him,
+his lord's voice penetrated his consciousness, so that, cooling
+almost instantly, Michael's ears flattened, his bristling hair lay
+down, and his lips covered his fangs as he turned his head to look
+acknowledgment.
+
+"Come here, Killeny!"
+
+Michael obeyed--not crouching cringingly, but trotting eagerly,
+gladly, to Steward's feet.
+
+"Lie down, Boy."
+
+He turned half around as he flumped himself down with a sigh of
+relief, and, with a red flash of tongue, kissed Steward's foot.
+
+"Your dog, Steward?" Captain Duncan demanded in a smothered voice
+wherein struggled anger and shortness of breath.
+
+"Yes, sir.  My dog.  What's he been up to, sir?"
+
+The totality of what Michael had been up to choked the Captain
+completely.  He could only gesture around from the dying cat to
+his torn clothes and bleeding wounds and the fox-terriers licking
+their injuries and whimpering at his feet.
+
+"It's too bad, sir . . . " Daughtry began.
+
+"Too bad, hell!" the captain shut him off.  "Bo's'n!  Throw that
+dog overboard."
+
+"Throw the dog overboard, sir, yes, sir," the boat-swain repeated,
+but hesitated.
+
+Dag Daughtry's face hardened unconsciously with the stiffening of
+his will to dogged opposition, which, in its own slow quiet way,
+would go to any length to have its way.  But he answered
+respectfully enough, his features, by a shrewd effort, relaxing
+into a seeming of his customary good-nature.
+
+"He's a good dog, sir, and an unoffending dog.  I can't imagine
+what could a-made 'm break loose this way.  He must a-had cause,
+sir--"
+
+"He had," one of the passengers, a coconut planter from the
+Shortlands, interjected.
+
+The steward threw him a grateful glance and continued.
+
+"He's a good dog, sir, a most obedient dog, sir--look at the way
+he minded me right in the thick of the scrap an' come 'n' lay
+down.  He's smart as chain-lightnin', sir; do anything I tell him.
+I'll make him make friends.  See. . . "
+
+Stepping over to the two hysterical terriers, Daughtry called
+Michael to him.
+
+"He's all right, savvee, Killeny, he all right," he crooned, at
+the same time resting one hand on a terrier and the other on
+Michael.
+
+The terrier whimpered and backed solidly against Captain Duncan's
+legs, but Michael, with a slow bob of tail and unbelligerent ears,
+advanced to him, looked up to Steward to make sure, then sniffed
+his late antagonist, and even ran out his tongue in a caress to
+the side of the other's ear.
+
+"See, sir, no bad feelings," Daughtry exulted.  "He plays the
+game, sir.  He's a proper dog, he's a man-dog.--Here, Killeny!
+The other one.  He all right.  Kiss and make up.  That's the
+stuff."
+
+The other fox-terrier, the one with the injured foreleg, endured
+Michael's sniff with no more than hysterical growls deep in the
+throat; but the flipping out of Michael's tongue was too much.
+The wounded terrier exploded in a futile snap at Michael's tongue
+and nose.
+
+"He all right, Killeny, he all right, sure," Steward warned
+quickly.
+
+With a bob of his tail in token of understanding, without a shade
+of resentment, Michael lifted a paw and with a playful casual
+stroke, dab-like, brought its weight on the other's neck and
+rolled him, head-downward, over on the deck.  Though he snarled
+wrathily, Michael turned away composedly and looked up into
+Steward's face for approval.
+
+A roar of laughter from the passengers greeted the capsizing of
+the fox-terrier and the good-natured gravity of Michael.  But not
+alone at this did they laugh, for at the moment of the snap and
+the turning over, Captain Duncan's unstrung nerves had exploded,
+causing him to jump as he tensed his whole body.
+
+"Why, sir," the steward went on with growing confidence, "I bet I
+can make him friends with you, too, by this time to-morrow . . . "
+
+"By this time five minutes he'll be overboard," the captain
+answered.  "Bo's'n!  Over with him!"
+
+The boatswain advanced a tentative step, while murmurs of protest
+arose from the passengers.
+
+"Look at my cat, and look at me," Captain Duncan defended his
+action.
+
+The boatswain made another step, and Dag Daughtry glared a threat
+at him.
+
+"Go on!" the Captain commanded.
+
+"Hold on!" spoke up the Shortlands planter.  "Give the dog a
+square deal.  I saw the whole thing.  He wasn't looking for
+trouble.  First the cat jumped him.  She had to jump twice before
+he turned loose.  She'd have scratched his eyes out.  Then the two
+dogs jumped him.  He hadn't bothered them.  Then you jumped him.
+He hadn't bothered you.  And then came that sailor with the mop.
+And now you want the bo's'n to jump him and throw him overboard.
+Give him a square deal.  He's only been defending himself.  What
+do you expect any dog that is a dog to do?--lie down and be walked
+over by every strange dog and cat that comes along?  Play the
+game, Skipper.  You gave him some mighty hard kicks.  He only
+defended himself."
+
+"He's some defender," Captain Duncan grinned, with a hint of the
+return of his ordinary geniality, at the same time tenderly
+pressing his bleeding shoulder and looking woefully down at his
+tattered duck trousers.  "All right, Steward.  If you can make him
+friends with me in five minutes, he stays on board.  But you'll
+have to make it up to me with a new pair of trousers."
+
+"And gladly, sir, thank you, sir," Daughtry cried.  "And I'll make
+it up with a new cat as well, sir--Come on, Killeny Boy.  This big
+fella marster he all right, you bet."
+
+And Michael listened.  Not with the smouldering, smothering,
+choking hysteria that still worked in the fox-terriers did he
+listen, nor with quivering of muscles and jumps of over-wrought
+nerves, but coolly, composedly, as if no battle royal had just
+taken place and no rips of teeth and kicks of feet still burned
+and ached his body.
+
+He could not help bristling, however, when first he sniffed a
+trousers' leg into which his teeth had so recently torn.
+
+"Put your hand down on him, sir," Daughtry begged.
+
+And Captain Duncan, his own good self once more, bent and rested a
+firm, unhesitating hand on Michael's head.  Nay, more; he even
+caressed the ears and rubbed about the roots of them.  And Michael
+the merry-hearted, who fought like a lion and forgave and forgot
+like a man, laid his neck hair smoothly down, wagged his stump
+tail, smiled with his eyes and ears and mouth, and kissed with his
+tongue the hand with which a short time before he had been at war.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+
+For the rest of the voyage Michael had the run of the ship.
+Friendly to all, he reserved his love for Steward alone, though he
+was not above many an undignified romp with the fox-terriers.
+
+"The most playful-minded dog, without being silly, I ever saw,"
+was Dag Daughtry's verdict to the Shortlands planter, to whom he
+had just sold one of his turtle-shell combs.  "You see, some dogs
+never get over the play-idea, an' they're never good for anything
+else.  But not Killeny Boy.  He can come down to seriousness in a
+second.  I'll show you, and I'll show you he's got a brain that
+counts to five an' knows wireless telegraphy.  You just watch."
+
+At the moment the steward made his faint lip-noise--so faint that
+he could not hear it himself and was almost for wondering whether
+or not he had made it; so faint that the Shortlands planter did
+not dream that he was making it.  At that moment Michael was lying
+squirming on his back a dozen feet away, his legs straight up in
+the air, both fox-terriers worrying with well-stimulated
+ferociousness.  With a quick out-thrust of his four legs, he
+rolled over on his side and with questioning eyes and pricked ears
+looked and listened.  Again Daughtry made the lip-noise; again the
+Shortlands planter did not hear nor guess; and Michael bounded to
+his feet and to his lord's side.
+
+"Some dog, eh?" the steward boasted.
+
+"But how did he know you wanted him?" the planter queried.  "You
+never called him."
+
+"Mental telepathy, the affinity of souls pitched in the same
+whatever-you-call-it harmony," the steward mystified.  "You see,
+Killeny an' me are made of the same kind of stuff, only run into
+different moulds.  He might a-been my full brother, or me his,
+only for some mistake in the creation factory somewhere.  Now I'll
+show you he knows his bit of arithmetic."
+
+And, drawing the paper balls from his pocket, Dag Daughtry
+demonstrated to the amazement and satisfaction of the ring of
+passengers Michael's ability to count to five.
+
+"Why, sir," Daughtry concluded the performance, "if I was to order
+four glasses of beer in a public-house ashore, an' if I was
+absent-minded an' didn't notice the waiter 'd only brought three,
+Killeny Boy there 'd raise a row instanter."
+
+Kwaque was no longer compelled to enjoy his jews' harp on the
+gratings over the fire-room, now that Michael's presence on the
+Makambo was known, and, in the stateroom, on stolen occasions, he
+made experiments of his own with Michael.  Once the jews' harp
+began emitting its barbaric rhythms, Michael was helpless.  He
+needs must open his mouth and pour forth an unwilling, gushing
+howl.  But, as with Jerry, it was not mere howl.  It was more akin
+to a mellow singing; and it was not long before Kwaque could lead
+his voice up and down, in rough time and tune, within a definite
+register.
+
+Michael never liked these lessons, for, looking down upon Kwaque,
+he hated in any way to be under the black's compulsion.  But all
+this was changed when Dag Daughtry surprised them at a singing
+lesson.  He resurrected the harmonica with which it was his wont,
+ashore in public-houses, to while away the time between bottles.
+The quickest way to start Michael singing, he discovered, was with
+minors; and, once started, he would sing on and on for as long as
+the music played.  Also, in the absence of an instrument, Michael
+would sing to the prompting and accompaniment of Steward's voice,
+who would begin by wailing "kow-kow" long and sadly, and then
+branch out on some old song or ballad.  Michael had hated to sing
+with Kwaque, but he loved to do it with Steward, even when Steward
+brought him on deck to perform before the laughter-shrieking
+passengers.
+
+Two serious conversations were held by the steward toward the
+close of the voyage:  one with Captain Duncan and one with
+Michael.
+
+"It's this way, Killeny," Daughtry began, one evening, Michael's
+head resting on his lord's knees as he gazed adoringly up into his
+lord's face, understanding no whit of what was spoken but loving
+the intimacy the sounds betokened.  "I stole you for beer money,
+an' when I saw you there on the beach that night I knew you'd
+bring ten quid anywheres.  Ten quid's a horrible lot of money.
+Fifty dollars in the way the Yankees reckon it, an' a hundred Mex
+in China fashion.
+
+"Now, fifty dollars gold 'd buy beer to beat the band--enough to
+drown me if I fell in head first.  Yet I want to ask you one
+question.  Can you see me takin' ten quid for you? . . . Go on.
+Speak up.  Can you?"
+
+And Michael, with thumps of tail to the floor and a high sharp
+bark, showed that he was in entire agreement with whatever had
+been propounded.
+
+"Or say twenty quid, now.  That's a fair offer.  Would I?  Eh!
+Would I?  Not on your life.  What d'ye say to fifty quid?  That
+might begin to interest me, but a hundred quid would interest me
+more.  Why, a hundred quid all in beer 'd come pretty close to
+floatin' this old hooker.  But who in Sam Hill'd offer a hundred
+quid?  I'd like to clap eyes on him once, that's all, just once.
+D'ye want to know what for?  All right.  I'll whisper it.  So as I
+could tell him to go to hell.  Sure, Killeny Boy, just like that--
+oh, most polite, of course, just a kindly directin' of his steps
+where he'd never suffer from frigid extremities."
+
+Michael's love for Steward was so profound as almost to he a mad
+but enduring infatuation.  What the steward's regard for Michael
+was coming to be was best evidenced by his conversation with
+Captain Duncan.
+
+"Sure, sir, he must 've followed me on board," Daughtry finished
+his unveracious recital.  "An' I never knew it.  Last I seen of 'm
+was on the beach.  Next I seen of 'm there, he was fast asleep in
+my bunk.  Now how'd he get there, sir?  How'd he pick out my room?
+I leave it to you, sir.  I call it marvellous, just plain
+marvellous."
+
+"With a quartermaster at the head of the gangway!" Captain Duncan
+snorted.  "As if I didn't know your tricks, Steward.  There's
+nothing marvellous about it.  Just a plain case of steal.
+Followed you on board?  That dog never came over the side.  He
+came through a port-hole, and he never came through by himself.
+That nigger of yours, I'll wager, had a hand in the helping.  But
+let's have done with beating about the bush.  Give me the dog, and
+I'll say no more about the cat."
+
+"Seein' you believe what you believe, then you'd be for
+compoundin' the felony," Daughtry retorted, the habitual obstinate
+tightening of his brows showing which way his will set.  "Me, sir,
+I'm only a ship's steward, an' it wouldn't mean nothin' at all
+bein' arrested for dog-stealin'; but you, sir, a captain of a fine
+steamer, how'd it sound for you, sir?  No, sir; it'd be much wiser
+for me to keep the dog that followed me aboard."
+
+"I'll give ten pounds in the bargain," the captain proffered.
+
+"No, it wouldn't do, it wouldn't do at all, sir, an' you a
+captain," the steward continued to reiterate, rolling his head
+sombrely.  "Besides, I know where's a peach of an Angora in
+Sydney.  The owner is gone to the country an' has no further use
+of it, an' it'd be a kindness to the cat, air to give it a good
+regular home like the Makambo."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIIII
+
+
+
+Another trick Dag Daughtry succeeded in teaching Michael so
+enhanced him in Captain Duncan's eyes as to impel him to offer
+fifty pounds, "and never mind the cat."  At first, Daughtry
+practised the trick in private with the chief engineer and the
+Shortlands planter.  Not until thoroughly satisfied did he make a
+public performance of it.
+
+"Now just suppose you're policemen, or detectives," Daughtry told
+the first and third officers, "an' suppose I'm guilty of some
+horrible crime.  An' suppose Killeny is the only clue, an' you've
+got Killeny.  When he recognizes his master--me, of course--you've
+got your man.  You go down the deck with him, leadin' by the rope.
+Then you come back this way with him, makin' believe this is the
+street, an' when he recognizes me you arrest me.  But if he don't
+realize me, you can't arrest me.  See?"
+
+The two officers led Michael away, and after several minutes
+returned along the deck, Michael stretched out ahead on the taut
+rope seeking Steward.
+
+"What'll you take for the dog?" Daughtry demanded, as they drew
+near--this the cue he had trained Michael to know.
+
+And Michael, straining at the rope, went by, without so much as a
+wag of tail to Steward or a glance of eye.  The officers stopped
+before Daughtry and drew Michael back into the group.
+
+"He's a lost dog," said the first officer.
+
+"We're trying to find his owner," supplemented the third.
+
+"Some dog that--what'll you take for 'm?" Daughtry asked, studying
+Michael with critical eyes of interest.  "What kind of a temper's
+he got?"
+
+"Try him," was the answer.
+
+The steward put out his hand to pat him on the head, but withdrew
+it hastily as Michael, with bristle and growl, viciously bared his
+teeth.
+
+"Go on, go on, he won't hurt you," the delighted passengers urged.
+
+This time the steward's hand was barely missed by a snap, and he
+leaped back as Michael ferociously sprang the length of the rope
+at him.
+
+"Take 'm away!" Dag Daughtry roared angrily.  "The treacherous
+beast!  I wouldn't take 'm for gift!"
+
+And as they obeyed, Michael strained backward in a paroxysm of
+rage, making fierce short jumps to the end of the tether as he
+snarled and growled with utmost fierceness at the steward.
+
+"Eh?  Who'd say he ever seen me in his life?" Daughtry demanded
+triumphantly.  "It's a trick I never seen played myself, but I've
+heard tell about it.  The old-time poachers in England used to do
+it with their lurcher dogs.  If they did get the dog of a strange
+poacher, no gamekeeper or constable could identify 'm by the dog--
+mum was the word."
+
+"Tell you what, he knows things, that Killeny.  He knows English.
+Right now, in my room, with the door open, an' so as he can find
+'m, is shoes, slippers, cap, towel, hair-brush, an' tobacco pouch.
+What'll it be?  Name it an' he'll fetch it."
+
+So immediately and variously did the passengers respond that every
+article was called for.
+
+"Just one of you choose," the steward advised.  "The rest of you
+pick 'm out."
+
+"Slipper," said Captain Duncan, selected by acclamation.
+
+"One or both?" Daughtry asked.
+
+"Both."
+
+"Come here, Killeny," Daughtry began, bending toward him but
+leaping back from the snap of jaws that clipped together close to
+his nose
+
+"My mistake," he apologized.  "I ain't told him the other game was
+over.  Now just listen an, watch. 'n' see if you can catch on to
+the tip I'm goin' to give 'm."
+
+No one saw anything, heard anything, yet Michael, with a whine of
+eagerness and joy, with laughing mouth and wriggling body, was
+upon the steward, licking his hands madly, squirming and twisting
+in the embrace of the loved hands he had so recently threatened,
+making attempts at short upward leaps as he flashed his tongue
+upward toward his lord's face.  For hard it was on Michael, a
+nerve and mental strain of the severest for him so to control
+himself as to play-act anger and threat of hurt to his beloved
+Steward.
+
+"Takes him a little time to get over a thing like that," Daughtry
+explained, as he soothed Michael down.
+
+"Now, Killeny!  Go fetch 'm slipper!  Wait!  Fetch 'm ONE slipper.
+Fetch 'm TWO slipper."
+
+Michael looked up with pricked ears, and with eyes filled with
+query as all his intelligent consciousness suffused them.
+
+"TWO slipper!  Fetch 'm quick!"
+
+He was off and away in a scurry of speed that seemed to flatten
+him close to the deck, and that, as he turned the corner of the
+deck-house to the stairs, made his hind feet slip and slide across
+the smooth planks.
+
+Almost in a trice he was back, both slippers in his mouth, which
+he deposited at the steward's feet.
+
+"The more I know dogs the more amazin' marvellous they are to me,"
+Dag Daughtry, after he had compassed his fourth bottle, confided
+in monologue to the Shortlands planter that night just before
+bedtime.  "Take Killeny Boy.  He don't do things for me
+mechanically, just because he's learned to do 'm.  There's more to
+it.  He does 'm because he likes me.  I can't give you the hang of
+it, but I feel it, I KNOW it.
+
+"Maybe, this is what I'm drivin' at.  Killeny can't talk, as you
+'n 'me talk, I mean; so he can't tell me how he loves me, an' he's
+all love, every last hair of 'm.  An' actions speakin' louder 'n'
+words, he tells me how he loves me by doin' these things for me.
+Tricks?  Sure.  But they make human speeches of eloquence cheaper
+'n dirt.  Sure it's speech.  Dog-talk that's tongue-tied.  Don't I
+know?  Sure as I'm a livin' man born to trouble as the sparks fly
+upward, just as sure am I that it makes 'm happy to do tricks for
+me . . . just as it makes a man happy to lend a hand to a pal in a
+ticklish place, or a lover happy to put his coat around the girl
+he loves to keep her warm.  I tell you . . . "
+
+Here, Dag Daughtry broke down from inability to express the
+concepts fluttering in his beer-excited, beer-sodden brain, and,
+with a stutter or two, made a fresh start.
+
+"You know, it's all in the matter of talkin', an' Killeny can't
+talk.  He's got thoughts inside that head of his--you can see 'm
+shinin' in his lovely brown eyes--but he can't get 'em across to
+me.  Why, I see 'm tryin' to tell me sometimes so hard that he
+almost busts.  There's a big hole between him an' me, an' language
+is about the only bridge, and he can't get over the hole, though
+he's got all kinds of ideas an' feelings just like mine.
+
+"But, say!  The time we get closest together is when I play the
+harmonica an' he yow-yows.  Music comes closest to makin' the
+bridge.  It's a regular song without words.  And . . . I can't
+explain how . . . but just the same, when we've finished our song,
+I know we've passed a lot over to each other that don't need words
+for the passin'."
+
+"Why, d'ye know, when I'm playin' an' he's singin', it's a regular
+duet of what the sky-pilots 'd call religion an' knowin' God.
+Sure, when we sing together I'm absorbin' religion an' gettin'
+pretty close up to God.  An' it's big, I tell you.  Big as the
+earth an' ocean an' sky an' all the stars.  I just seem to get
+hold of a sense that we're all the same stuff after all--you, me,
+Killeny Boy, mountains, sand, salt water, worms, mosquitoes, suns,
+an' shootin' stars an' blazin comets . . . "
+
+Day Daughtry left his flight as beyond his own grasp of speech,
+and concluded, his half embarrassment masked by braggadocio over
+Michael:
+
+"Oh, believe me, they don't make dogs like him every day in the
+week.  Sure, I stole 'm.  He looked good to me.  An' if I had it
+over, knowin' as I do known 'm now, I'd steal 'm again if I lost a
+leg doin' it.  That's the kind of a dog HE is."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+
+The morning the Makambo entered Sydney harbour, Captain Duncan had
+another try for Michael.  The port doctor's launch was coming
+alongside, when he nodded up to Daughtry, who was passing along
+the deck:
+
+"Steward, I'll give you twenty pounds."
+
+"No, sir, thank you, sir," was Dag Daughtry's answer.  "I couldn't
+bear to part with him."
+
+"Twenty-five pounds, then.  I can't go beyond that.  Besides,
+there are plenty more Irish terriers in the world."
+
+"That's what I'm thinkin', sir.  An' I'll get one for you.  Right
+here in Sydney.  An' it won't cost you a penny, sir."
+
+"But I want Killeny Boy," the captain persisted.
+
+"An' so do I, which is the worst of it, sir.  Besides, I got him
+first."
+
+"Twenty-five sovereigns is a lot of money . . . for a dog,"
+Captain Duncan said.
+
+"An' Killeny Boy's a lot of dog . . . for the money," the steward
+retorted.  "Why, sir, cuttin' out all sentiment, his tricks is
+worth more 'n that.  Him not recognizing me when I don't want 'm
+to is worth fifty pounds of itself.  An' there's his countin' an'
+his singin', an' all the rest of his tricks.  Now, no matter how I
+got him, he didn't have them tricks.  Them tricks are mine.  I
+taught him them.  He ain't the dog he was when he come on board.
+He's a whole lot of me now, an' sellin' him would be like sellin'
+a piece of myself."
+
+"Thirty pounds," said the captain with finality.
+
+"No, sir, thankin' you just the same, sir," was Daughtry's
+refusal.
+
+And Captain Duncan was forced to turn away in order to greet the
+port doctor coming over the side.
+
+Scarcely had the Makambo passed quarantine, and while on her way
+up harbour to dock, when a trim man-of-war launch darted in to her
+side and a trim lieutenant mounted the Makambo's boarding-ladder.
+His mission was quickly explained.  The Albatross, British cruiser
+of the second class, of which he was fourth lieutenant, had called
+in at Tulagi with dispatches from the High Commissioner of the
+English South Seas.  A scant twelve hours having intervened
+between her arrival and the Makambo's departure, the Commissioner
+of the Solomons and Captain Kellar had been of the opinion that
+the missing dog had been carried away on the steamer.  Knowing
+that the Albatross would beat her to Sydney, the captain of the
+Albatross had undertaken to look up the dog.  Was the dog, an
+Irish terrier answering to the name of Michael, on board?
+
+Captain Duncan truthfully admitted that it was, though he most
+unveraciously shielded Dag Daughtry by repeating his yarn of the
+dog coming on board of itself.  How to return the dog to Captain
+Kellar?--was the next question; for the Albatross was bound on to
+New Zealand.  Captain Duncan settled the matter.
+
+"The Makambo will be back in Tulagi in eight weeks," he told the
+lieutenant, "and I'll undertake personally to deliver the dog to
+its owner.  In the meantime we'll take good care of it.  Our
+steward has sort of adopted it, so it will be in good hands."
+
+
+"Seems we don't either of us get the dog," Daughtry commented
+resignedly, when Captain Duncan had explained the situation.
+
+But when Daughtry turned his back and started off along the deck,
+his constitutional obstinacy tightened his brows so that the
+Shortlands planter, observing it, wondered what the captain had
+been rowing him about.
+
+
+Despite his six quarts a day and all his easy-goingness of
+disposition, Dag Daughtry possessed certain integrities.  Though
+he could steal a dog, or a cat, without a twinge of conscience, he
+could not but be faithful to his salt, being so made.  He could
+not draw wages for being a ship steward without faithfully
+performing the functions of ship steward.  Though his mind was
+firmly made up, during the several days of the Makambo in Sydney,
+lying alongside the Burns Philp Dock, he saw to every detail of
+the cleaning up after the last crowd of outgoing passengers, and
+to every detail of preparation for the next crowd of incoming
+passengers who had tickets bought for the passage far away to the
+coral seas and the cannibal isles.
+
+In the midst of this devotion to his duty, he took a night off and
+part of two afternoons.  The night off was devoted to the public-
+houses which sailors frequent, and where can be learned the latest
+gossip and news of ships and of men who sail upon the sea.  Such
+information did he gather, over many bottles of beer, that the
+next afternoon, hiring a small launch at a cost of ten shillings,
+he journeyed up the harbour to Jackson Bay, where lay the lofty-
+poled, sweet-lined, three-topmast American schooner, the Mary
+Turner.
+
+Once on board, explaining his errand, he was taken below into the
+main cabin, where he interviewed, and was interviewed by, a
+quartette of men whom Daughtry qualified to himself as "a rum
+bunch."
+
+It was because he had talked long with the steward who had left
+the ship, that Dag Daughtry recognized and identified each of the
+four men.  That, surely, was the "Ancient Mariner," sitting back
+and apart with washed eyes of such palest blue that they seemed a
+faded white.  Long thin wisps of silvery, unkempt hair framed his
+face like an aureole.  He was slender to emaciation, cavernously
+checked, roll after roll of skin, no longer encasing flesh or
+muscle, hanging grotesquely down his neck and swathing the Adam's
+apple so that only occasionally, with queer swallowing motions,
+did it peep out of the mummy-wrappings of skin and sink back again
+from view.
+
+A proper ancient mariner, thought Daughtry.  Might be seventy-
+five, might just as well be a hundred and five, or a hundred and
+seventy-five.
+
+Beginning at the right temple, a ghastly scar split the cheek-
+bone, sank into the depths of the hollow cheek, notched across the
+lower jaw, and plunged to disappearance among the prodigious skin-
+folds of the neck.  The withered lobes of both ears were
+perforated by tiny gypsy-like circles of gold.  On the skeleton
+fingers of his right hand were no less than five rings--not men's
+rings, nor women's, but foppish rings--"that would fetch a price,"
+Daughtry adjudged.  On the left hand were no rings, for there were
+no fingers to wear them.  Only was there a thumb; and, for that
+matter, most of the hand was missing as well, as if it had been
+cut off by the same slicing edge that had cleaved him from temple
+to jaw and heaven alone knew how far down that skin-draped neck.
+
+The Ancient Mariner's washed eyes seemed to bore right through
+Daughtry (or at least so Daughtry felt), and rendered him so
+uncomfortable as to make him casually step to the side for the
+matter of a yard.  This was possible, because, a servant seeking a
+servant's billet, he was expected to stand and face the four
+seated ones as if they were judges on the bench and he the felon
+in the dock.  Nevertheless, the gaze of the ancient one pursued
+him, until, studying it more closely, he decided that it did not
+reach to him at all.  He got the impression that those washed pale
+eyes were filmed with dreams, and that the intelligence, the
+THING, that dwelt within the skull, fluttered and beat against the
+dream-films and no farther.
+
+"How much would you expect?" the captain was asking,--a most
+unsealike captain, in Daughtry's opinion; rather, a spick-and-
+span, brisk little business-man or floor-walker just out of a
+bandbox.
+
+"He shall not share," spoke up another of the four, huge, raw-
+boned, middle-aged, whom Daughtry identified by his ham-like hands
+as the California wheat-farmer described by the departed steward.
+
+"Plenty for all," the Ancient Mariner startled Daughtry by
+cackling shrilly.  "Oodles and oodles of it, my gentlemen, in cask
+and chest, in cask and chest, a fathom under the sand."
+
+"Share--WHAT, sir?" Daughtry queried, though well he knew, the
+other steward having cursed to him the day he sailed from San
+Francisco on a blind lay instead of straight wages.  "Not that it
+matters, sir," he hastened to add.  "I spent a whalin' voyage
+once, three years of it, an' paid off with a dollar.  Wages for
+mine, an' sixty gold a month, seein' there's only four of you."
+
+"And a mate," the captain added.
+
+"And a mate," Daughtry repeated.  "Very good, sir.  An' no share."
+
+"But yourself?" spoke up the fourth man, a huge-bulking, colossal-
+bodied, greasy-seeming grossness of flesh--the Armenian Jew and
+San Francisco pawnbroker the previous steward had warned Daughtry
+about.  "Have you papers--letters of recommendation, the documents
+you receive when you are paid off before the shipping
+commissioners?"
+
+"I might ask, sir," Dag Daughtry brazened it, "for your own
+papers.  This ain't no regular cargo-carrier or passenger-carrier,
+no more than you gentlemen are a regular company of ship-owners,
+with regular offices, doin' business in a regular way.  How do I
+know if you own the ship even, or that the charter ain't busted
+long ago, or that you're being libelled ashore right now, or that
+you won't dump me on any old beach anywheres without a soo-markee
+of what's comin' to me?  Howsoever"--he anticipated by a bluff of
+his own the show of wrath from the Jew that he knew would be wind
+and bluff--"howsoever, here's my papers . . . "
+
+With a swift dip of his hand into his inside coat-pocket he
+scattered out in a wealth of profusion on the cabin table all the
+papers, sealed and stamped, that he had collected in forty-five
+years of voyaging, the latest date of which was five years back.
+
+"I don't ask your papers," he went on.  "What I ask is, cash
+payment in full the first of each month, sixty dollars a month
+gold--"
+
+"Oodles and oodles of it, gold and gold and better than gold, in
+cask and chest, in cask and chest, a fathom under the sand," the
+Ancient Mariner assured him in beneficent cackles.  "Kings,
+principalities and powers!--all of us, the least of us.  And
+plenty more, my gentlemen, plenty more.  The latitude and
+longitude are mine, and the bearings from the oak ribs on the
+shoal to Lion's Head, and the cross-bearings from the points
+unnamable, I only know.  I only still live of all that brave, mad,
+scallywag ship's company . . . "
+
+"Will you sign the articles to that?" the Jew demanded, cutting in
+on the ancient's maunderings.
+
+"What port do you wind up the cruise in?" Daughtry asked.
+
+"San Francisco."
+
+"I'll sign the articles that I'm to sign off in San Francisco
+then."
+
+The Jew, the captain, and the farmer nodded.
+
+"But there's several other things to be agreed upon," Daughtry
+continued.  "In the first place, I want my six quarts a day.  I'm
+used to it, and I'm too old a stager to change my habits."
+
+"Of spirits, I suppose?" the Jew asked sarcastically.
+
+"No; of beer, good English beer.  It must be understood
+beforehand, no matter what long stretches we may be at sea, that a
+sufficient supply is taken along."
+
+"Anything else?" the captain queried.
+
+"Yes, sir," Daughtry answered.  "I got a dog that must come
+along."
+
+"Anything else?--a wife or family maybe?" the farmer asked.
+
+"No wife or family, sir.  But I got a nigger, a perfectly good
+nigger, that's got to come along.  He can sign on for ten dollars
+a month if he works for the ship all his time.  But if he works
+for me all the time, I'll let him sign on for two an' a half a
+month."
+
+"Eighteen days in the longboat," the Ancient Mariner shrilled, to
+Daughtry's startlement.  "Eighteen days in the longboat, eighteen
+days of scorching hell."
+
+"My word," quoth Daughtry, "the old gentleman'd give one the
+jumps.  There'll sure have to be plenty of beer."
+
+"Sea stewards put on some style, I must say," commented the wheat-
+farmer, oblivious to the Ancient Mariner, who still declaimed of
+the heat of the longboat.
+
+"Suppose we don't see our way to signing on a steward who travels
+in such style?" the Jew asked, mopping the inside of his collar-
+band with a coloured silk handkerchief.
+
+"Then you'll never know what a good steward you've missed, sir,"
+Daughtry responded airily.
+
+"I guess there's plenty more stewards on Sydney beach," the
+captain said briskly.  "And I guess I haven't forgotten old days,
+when I hired them like so much dirt, yes, by Jinks, so much dirt,
+there were so many of them."
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Steward, for looking us up," the Jew took up the
+idea with insulting oiliness.  "We very much regret our inability
+to meet your wishes in the matter--"
+
+"And I saw it go under the sand, a fathom under the sand, on
+cross-bearings unnamable, where the mangroves fade away, and the
+coconuts grow, and the rise of land lifts from the beach to the
+Lion's Head."
+
+"Hold your horses," the wheat-farmer said, with a flare of
+irritation, directed, not at the Ancient Mariner, but at the
+captain and the Jew.  "Who's putting up for this expedition?
+Don't I get no say so?  Ain't my opinion ever to be asked?  I like
+this steward.  Strikes me he's the real goods.  I notice he's as
+polite as all get-out, and I can see he can take an order without
+arguing.  And he ain't no fool by a long shot."
+
+"That's the very point, Grimshaw," the Jew answered soothingly.
+"Considering the unusualness of our . . . of the expedition, we'd
+be better served by a steward who is more of a fool.  Another
+point, which I'd esteem a real favour from you, is not to forget
+that you haven't put a red copper more into this trip than I have-
+-"
+
+"And where'd either of you be, if it wasn't for me with my
+knowledge of the sea?" the captain demanded aggrievedly.  "To say
+nothing of the mortgage on my house and on the nicest little best
+paying flat building in San Francisco since the earthquake."
+
+"But who's still putting up?--all of you, I ask you."  The wheat-
+farmer leaned forward, resting the heels of his hands on his knees
+so that the fingers hung down his long shins, in Daughtry's
+appraisal, half-way to his feet.  "You, Captain Doane, can't raise
+another penny on your properties.  My land still grows the wheat
+that brings the ready.  You, Simon Nishikanta, won't put up
+another penny--yet your loan-shark offices are doing business at
+the same old stands at God knows what per cent. to drunken
+sailors.  And you hang the expedition up here in this hole-in-the-
+wall waiting for my agent to cable more wheat-money.  Well, I
+guess we'll just sign on this steward at sixty a month and all he
+asks, or I'll just naturally quit you cold on the next fast
+steamer to San Francisco."
+
+He stood up abruptly, towering to such height that Daughtry looked
+to see the crown of his head collide with the deck above.
+
+"I'm sick and tired of you all, yes, I am," he continued.  "Get
+busy!  Well, let's get busy.  My money's coming.  It'll be here by
+to-morrow.  Let's be ready to start by hiring a steward that is a
+steward.  I don't care if he brings two families along."
+
+"I guess you're right, Grimshaw," Simon Nishikanta said
+appeasingly.  "The trip is beginning to get on all our nerves.
+Forget it if I fly off the handle.  Of course we'll take this
+steward if you want him.  I thought he was too stylish for you."
+
+He turned to Daughtry.
+
+"Naturally, the least said ashore about us the better."
+
+"That's all right, sir.  I can keep my mouth shut, though I might
+as well tell you there's some pretty tales about you drifting
+around the beach right now."
+
+"The object of our expedition?" the Jew queried quickly.
+
+Daughtry nodded.
+
+"Is that why you want to come?" was demanded equally quickly.
+
+Daughtry shook his head.
+
+"As long as you give me my beer each day, sir, I ain't goin' to be
+interested in your treasure-huntin'.  It ain't no new tale to me.
+The South Seas is populous with treasure-hunters--"  Almost could
+Daughtry have sworn that he had seen a flash of anxiety break
+through the dream-films that bleared the Ancient Mariner's eyes.
+"And I must say, sir," he went on easily, though saying what he
+would not have said had it not been for what he was almost certain
+he sensed of the ancient's anxiousness, "that the South Seas is
+just naturally lousy with buried treasure.  There's Keeling-Cocos,
+millions 'n' millions of it, pounds sterling, I mean, waiting for
+the lucky one with the right steer."
+
+This time Daughtry could have sworn to having sensed a change
+toward relief in the Ancient Mariner, whose eyes were again filmy
+with dreams.
+
+"But I ain't interested in treasure, sir," Daughtry concluded.
+"It's beer I'm interested in.  You can chase your treasure, an' I
+don't care how long, just as long as I've got six quarts to open
+each day.  But I give you fair warning, sir, before I sign on:  if
+the beer dries up, I'm goin' to get interested in what you're
+after.  Fair play is my motto."
+
+"Do you expect us to pay for your beer in addition?" Simon
+Nishikanta demanded.
+
+To Daughtry it was too good to be true.  Here, with the Jew
+healing the breach with the wheat-farmer whose agents still cabled
+money, was the time to take advantage.
+
+"Sure, it's one of our agreements, sir.  What time would it suit
+you, sir, to-morrow afternoon, for me to sign on at the shipping
+commissioner's?"
+
+"Casks and chests of it, casks and chests of it, oodles and
+oodles, a fathom under the sand," chattered the Ancient Mariner.
+
+"You're all touched up under the roof," Daughtry grinned.  "Which
+ain't got nothing to do with me as long as you furnish the beer,
+pay me due an' proper what's comin' to me the first of each an'
+every month, an' pay me off final in San Francisco.  As long as
+you keep up your end, I'll sail with you to the Pit 'n' back an'
+watch you sweatin' the casks 'n' chests out of the sand.  What I
+want is to sail with you if you want me to sail with you enough to
+satisfy me."
+
+Simon Nishikanta glanced about.  Grimshaw and Captain Doane
+nodded.
+
+"At three o'clock to-morrow afternoon, at the shipping
+commissioner's," the Jew agreed.  "When will you report for duty?"
+
+"When will you sail, sir?" Daughtry countered.
+
+"Bright and early next morning."
+
+"Then I'll be on board and on duty some time to-morrow night,
+sir."
+
+And as he went up the cabin companion, he could hear the Ancient
+Mariner maundering:  "Eighteen days in the longboat, eighteen days
+of scorching hell . . . "
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+
+Michael left the Makambo as he had come on board, through a
+porthole.  Likewise, the affair occurred at night, and it was
+Kwaque's hands that received him.  It had been quick work, and
+daring, in the dark of early evening.  From the boat-deck, with a
+bowline under Kwaque's arms and a turn of the rope around a pin,
+Dag Daughtry had lowered his leprous servitor into the waiting
+launch.
+
+On his way below, he encountered Captain Duncan, who saw fit to
+warn him:
+
+"No shannigan with Killeny Boy, Steward.  He must go back to
+Tulagi with us."
+
+"Yes, sir," the steward agreed.  "An' I'm keepin' him tight in my
+room to make safe.  Want to see him, sir?"
+
+The very frankness of the invitation made the captain suspicious,
+and the thought flashed through his mind that perhaps Killeny Boy
+was already hidden ashore somewhere by the dog-stealing steward.
+
+"Yes, indeed I'd like to say how-do-you-do to him," Captain Duncan
+answered.
+
+And his was genuine surprise, on entering the steward's room, to
+behold Michael just rousing from his curled-up sleep on the floor.
+But when he left, his surprise would have been shocking could he
+have seen through the closed door what immediately began to take
+place.  Out through the open porthole, in a steady stream,
+Daughtry was passing the contents of the room.  Everything went
+that belonged to him, including the turtle-shell and the
+photographs and calendars on the wall.  Michael, with the command
+of silence laid upon him, went last.  Remained only a sea-chest
+and two suit-cases, themselves too large for the porthole but bare
+of contents.
+
+When Daughtry sauntered along the main deck a few minutes later
+and paused for a gossip with the customs officer and a
+quartermaster at the head of the gang-plank, Captain Duncan little
+dreamed that his casual glance was resting on his steward for the
+last time.  He watched him go down the gang-plank empty-handed,
+with no dog at his heels, and stroll off along the wharf under the
+electric lights.
+
+Ten minutes after Captain Duncan saw the last of his broad back,
+Daughtry, in the launch with his belongings and heading for
+Jackson Bay, was hunched over Michael and caressing him, while
+Kwaque, crooning with joy under his breath that he was with all
+that was precious to him in the world, felt once again in the
+side-pocket of his flimsy coat to make sure that his beloved jews'
+harp had not been left behind.
+
+Dag Daughtry was paying for Michael, and paying well.  Among other
+things, he had not cared to arouse suspicion by drawing his wages
+from Burns Philp.  The twenty pounds due him he had abandoned, and
+this was the very sum, that night on the beach at Tulagi, he had
+decided he could realize from the sale of Michael.  He had stolen
+him to sell.  He was paying for him the sales price that had
+tempted him.
+
+For, as one has well said:  the horse abases the base, ennobles
+the noble.  Likewise the dog.  The theft of a dog to sell for a
+price had been the abasement worked by Michael on Dag Daughtry.
+To pay the price out of sheer heart-love that could recognize no
+price too great to pay, had been the ennoblement of Dag Daughtry
+which Michael had worked.  And as the launch chug-chugged across
+the quiet harbour under the southern stars, Dag Daughtry would
+have risked and tossed his life into the bargain in a battle to
+continue to have and to hold the dog he had originally conceived
+of as being interchangeable for so many dozens of beer.
+
+
+The Mary Turner, towed out by a tug, sailed shortly after
+daybreak, and Daughtry, Kwaque, and Michael looked their last for
+ever on Sydney Harbour.
+
+"Once again these old eyes have seen this fair haven," the Ancient
+Mariner, beside them gazing, babbled; and Daughtry could not help
+but notice the way the wheat-farmer and the pawnbroker pricked
+their ears to listen and glanced each to the other with scant
+eyes.  "It was in '52, in 1852, on such a day as this, all
+drinking and singing along the decks, we cleared from Sydney in
+the Wide Awake.  A pretty craft, oh sirs, a most clever and pretty
+craft.  A crew, a brave crew, all youngsters, all of us, fore and
+aft, no man was forty, a mad, gay crew.  The captain was an
+elderly gentleman of twenty-eight, the third officer another of
+eighteen, the down, untouched of steel, like so much young velvet
+on his cheek.  He, too, died in the longboat.  And the captain
+gasped out his last under the palm trees of the isle unnamable
+while the brown maidens wept about him and fanned the air to his
+parching lungs."
+
+Dag Daughtry heard no more, for he turned below to take up his new
+routine of duty.  But while he made up bunks with fresh linen and
+directed Kwaque's efforts to cleaning long-neglected floors, he
+shook his head to himself and muttered, "He's a keen 'un.  He's a
+keen 'un.  All ain't fools that look it."
+
+The fine lines of the Mary Turner were explained by the fact that
+she had been built for seal-hunting; and for the same reason on
+board of her was room and to spare.  The forecastle with bunk-
+space for twelve, bedded but eight Scandinavian seamen.  The five
+staterooms of the cabin accommodated the three treasure-hunters,
+the Ancient Mariner, and the mate--the latter a large-bodied,
+gentle-souled Russian-Finn, known as Mr. Jackson through inability
+of his shipmates to pronounce the name he had signed on the ship's
+articles.
+
+Remained the steerage, just for'ard of the cabin, separated from
+it by a stout bulkhead and entered by a companionway on the main
+deck.  On this deck, between the break of the poop and the
+steerage companion, stood the galley.  In the steerage itself,
+which possessed a far larger living-space than the cabin, were six
+capacious bunks, each double the width of the forecastle bunks,
+and each curtained and with no bunk above it.
+
+"Some fella glory-hole, eh, Kwaque?" Daughtry told his seventeen-
+years-old brown-skinned Papuan with the withered ancient face of a
+centenarian, the legs of a living skeleton, and the huge-stomached
+torso of an elderly Japanese wrestler.  "Eh, Kwaque!  What you
+fella think?"
+
+And Kwaque, too awed by the spaciousness to speak, eloquently
+rolled his eyes in agreement.
+
+"You likee this piecee bunk?" the cook, a little old Chinaman,
+asked the steward with eager humility, inviting the white man's
+acceptance of his own bunk with a wave of arm.
+
+Daughtry shook his head.  He had early learned that it was wise to
+get along well with sea-cooks, since sea-cocks were notoriously
+given to going suddenly lunatic and slicing and hacking up their
+shipmates with butcher knives and meat cleavers on the slightest
+remembered provocation.  Besides, there was an equally good bunk
+all the way across the width of the steerage from the Chinaman's.
+The bunk next on the port side to the cook's and abaft of it
+Daughtry allotted to Kwaque.  Thus he retained for himself and
+Michael the entire starboard side with its three bunks.  The next
+one abaft of his own he named "Killeny Boy's," and called on
+Kwaque and the cook to take notice.  Daughtry had a sense that the
+cook, whose name had been quickly volunteered as Ah Moy, was not
+entirely satisfied with the arrangement; but it affected him no
+more than a momentary curiosity about a Chinaman who drew the line
+at a dog taking a bunk in the same apartment with him.
+
+Half an hour later, returning, from setting the cabin aright, to
+the steerage for Kwaque to serve him with a bottle of beer,
+Daughtry observed that Ah Moy had moved his entire bunk belongings
+across the steerage to the third bunk on the starboard side.  This
+had put him with Daughtry and Michael and left Kwaque with half
+the steerage to himself.  Daughtry's curiosity recrudesced.
+
+"What name along that fella Chink?" he demanded of Kwaque.  "He no
+like 'm you fella boy stop 'm along same fella side along him.
+What for?  My word!  What name?  That fella Chink make 'm me cross
+along him too much!"
+
+"Suppose 'm that fella Chink maybe he think 'm me kai-kai along
+him," Kwaque grinned in one of his rare jokes.
+
+"All right," the steward concluded.  "We find out.  You move 'm
+along my bunk, I move 'm along that fella Chink's bunk."
+
+This accomplished, so that Kwaque, Michael, and Ah Moy occupied
+the starboard side and Daughtry alone bunked on the port side, he
+went on deck and aft to his duties.  On his next return he found
+Ah Moy had transferred back to the port side, but this time into
+the last bunk aft.
+
+"Seems the beggar's taken a fancy to me," the steward smiled to
+himself.
+
+Nor was he capable of guessing Ah Moy's reason for bunking always
+on the opposite side from Kwaque.
+
+"I changee," the little old cook explained, with anxious eyes to
+please and placate, in response to Daughtry's direct question.
+"All the time like that, changee, plentee changee.  You savvee?"
+
+Daughtry did not savvee, and shook his head, while Ah Moy's slant
+eyes betrayed none of the anxiety and fear with which he privily
+gazed on Kwaque's two permanently bent fingers of the left hand
+and on Kwaque's forehead, between the eyes, where the skin
+appeared a shade darker, a trifle thicker, and was marked by the
+first beginning of three short vertical lines or creases that were
+already giving him the lion-like appearance, the leonine face so
+named by the experts and technicians of the fell disease.
+
+As the days passed, the steward took facetious occasions, when he
+had drunk five quarts of his daily allowance, to shift his and
+Kwaque's bunks about.  And invariably Ah Moy shifted, though
+Daughtry failed to notice that he never shifted into a bunk which
+Kwaque had occupied.  Nor did he notice that it was when the time
+came that Kwaque had variously occupied all the six bunks that Ah
+Moy made himself a canvas hammock, suspended it from the deck
+beams above and thereafter swung clear in space and unmolested.
+
+Daughtry dismissed the matter from his thoughts as no more than a
+thing in keeping with the general inscrutability of the Chinese
+mind.  He did notice, however, that Kwaque was never permitted to
+enter the galley.  Another thing he noticed, which, expressed in
+his own words, was:  "That's the all-dangdest cleanest Chink I've
+ever clapped my lamps on.  Clean in galley, clean in steerage,
+clean in everything.  He's always washing the dishes in boiling
+water, when he isn't washing himself or his clothes or bedding.
+My word, he actually boils his blankets once a week!"
+
+For there were other things to occupy the steward's mind.  Getting
+acquainted with the five men aft in the cabin, and lining up the
+whole situation and the relations of each of the five to that
+situation and to one another, consumed much time.  Then there was
+the path of the Mary Turner across the sea.  No old sailor
+breathes who does not desire to know the casual course of his ship
+and the next port-of-call.
+
+"We ought to be moving along a line that'll cross somewhere
+northard of New Zealand," Daughtry guessed to himself, after a
+hundred stolen glances into the binnacle.  But that was all the
+information concerning the ship's navigation he could steal; for
+Captain Doane took the observations and worked them out, to the
+exclusion of the mate, and Captain Doane always methodically
+locked up his chart and log.  That there were heated discussions
+in the cabin, in which terms of latitude and longitude were
+bandied back and forth, Daughtry did know; but more than that he
+could not know, because it was early impressed upon him that the
+one place for him never to be, at such times of council, was the
+cabin.  Also, he could not but conclude that these councils were
+real battles wherein Messrs. Doane, Nishikanta, and Grimahaw
+screamed at each other and pounded the table at each other, when
+they were not patiently and most politely interrogating the
+Ancient Mariner.
+
+"He's got their goat," the steward early concluded to himself;
+but, thereafter, try as he would, he failed to get the Ancient
+Mariner's goat.
+
+Charles Stough Greenleaf was the Ancient Mariner's name.  This,
+Daughtry got from him, and nothing else did he get save
+maunderings and ravings about the heat of the longboat and the
+treasure a fathom deep under the sand.
+
+"There's some of us plays games, an' some of us as looks on an'
+admires the games they see," the steward made his bid one day.
+"And I'm sure these days lookin' on at a pretty game.  The more I
+see it the more I got to admire."
+
+The Ancient Mariner dreamed back into the steward's eyes with a
+blank, unseeing gaze.
+
+"On the Wide Awake all the stewards were young, mere boys," he
+murmured.
+
+"Yes, sir," Daughtry agreed pleasantly.  "From all you say, the
+Wide Awake, with all its youngsters, was sure some craft.  Not
+like the crowd of old 'uns on this here hooker.  But I doubt, sir,
+that them youngsters ever played as clever games as is being
+played aboard us right now.  I just got to admire the fine way
+it's being done, sir."
+
+"I'll tell you something," the Ancient Mariner replied, with such
+confidential air that almost Daughtry leaned to hear.  "No steward
+on the Wide Awake could mix a high-ball in just the way I like, as
+well as you.  We didn't know cocktails in those days, but we had
+sherry and bitters.  A good appetizer, too, a most excellent
+appetizer."
+
+"I'll tell you something more," he continued, just as it seemed he
+had finished, and just in time to interrupt Daughtry away from his
+third attempt to ferret out the true inwardness of the situation
+on the Mary Turner and of the Ancient Mariner's part in it.  "It
+is mighty nigh five bells, and I should be very pleased to have
+one of your delicious cocktails ere I go down to dine."
+
+More suspicious than ever of him was Daughtry after this episode.
+But, as the days went by, he came more and more to the conclusion
+that Charles Stough Greenleaf was a senile old man who sincerely
+believed in the abiding of a buried treasure somewhere in the
+South Seas.
+
+Once, polishing the brasswork on the hand-rails of the cabin
+companionway, Daughtry overheard the ancient one explaining his
+terrible scar and missing fingers to Grimshaw and the Armenian
+Jew.  The pair of them had plied him with extra drinks in the hope
+of getting more out of him by way of his loosened tongue.
+
+"It was in the longboat," the aged voice cackled up the companion.
+"On the eleventh day it was that the mutiny broke.  We in the
+sternsheets stood together against them.  It was all a madness.
+We were starved sore, but we were mad for water.  It was over the
+water it began.  For, see you, it was our custom to lick the dew
+from the oar-blades, the gunwales, the thwarts, and the inside
+planking.  And each man of us had developed property in the dew-
+collecting surfaces.  Thus, the tiller and the rudder-head and
+half of the plank of the starboard stern-sheet had become the
+property of the second officer.  No one of us lacked the honour to
+respect his property.  The third officer was a lad, only eighteen,
+a brave and charming boy.  He shared with the second officer the
+starboard stern-sheet plank.  They drew a line to mark the
+division, and neither, lapping up what scant moisture fell during
+the night-hours, ever dreamed of trespassing across the line.
+They were too honourable.
+
+"But the sailors--no.  They squabbled amongst themselves over the
+dew-surfaces, and only the night before one of them was knifed
+because he so stole.  But on this night, waiting for the dew, a
+little of it, to become more, on the surfaces that were mine, I
+heard the noises of a dew-lapper moving aft along the port-
+gunwale--which was my property aft of the stroke-thwart clear to
+the stern.  I emerged from a nightmare dream of crystal springs
+and swollen rivers to listen to this night-drinker that I feared
+might encroach upon what was mine.
+
+"Nearer he came to the line of my property, and I could hear him
+making little moaning, whimpering noises as he licked the damp
+wood.  It was like listening to an animal grazing pasture-grass at
+night and ever grazing nearer.
+
+It chanced I was holding a boat-stretcher in my hand--to catch
+what little dew might fall upon it.  I did not know who it was,
+but when he lapped across the line and moaned and whimpered as he
+licked up my precious drops of dew, I struck out.  The boat-
+stretcher caught him fairly on the nose--it was the bo's'n--and
+the mutiny began.  It was the bo's'n's knife that sliced down my
+face and sliced away my fingers.  The third officer, the eighteen-
+year-old lad, fought well beside me, and saved me, so that, just
+before I fainted, he and I, between us, hove the bo's'n's carcass
+overside."
+
+A shifting of feet and changing of positions of those in the cabin
+plunged Daughtry back into his polishing, which he had for the
+time forgotten.  And, as he rubbed the brass-work, he told himself
+under his breath:  "The old party's sure been through the mill.
+Such things just got to happen."
+
+"No," the Ancient Mariner was continuing, in his thin falsetto, in
+reply to a query.  "It wasn't the wounds that made me faint.  It
+was the exertion I made in the struggle.  I was too weak.  No; so
+little moisture was there in my system that I didn't bleed much.
+And the amazing thing, under the circumstances, was the quickness
+with which I healed.  The second officer sewed me up next day with
+a needle he'd made out of an ivory toothpick and with twine he
+twisted out of the threads from a frayed tarpaulin."
+
+"Might I ask, Mr. Greenleaf, if there were rings at the time on
+the fingers that were cut off?" Daughtry heard Simon Nishikanta
+ask.
+
+"Yes, and one beauty.  I found it afterward in the boat bottom and
+presented it to the sandalwood trader who rescued me.  It was a
+large diamond.  I paid one hundred and eighty guineas for it to an
+English sailor in the Barbadoes.  He'd stolen it, and of course it
+was worth more.  It was a beautiful gem.  The sandalwood man did
+not merely save my life for it.  In addition, he spent fully a
+hundred pounds in outfitting me and buying me a passage from
+Thursday Island to Shanghai."
+
+
+"There's no getting away from them rings he wears," Daughtry
+overheard Simon Nishikanta that evening telling Grimshaw in the
+dark on the weather poop.  "You don't see that kind nowadays.
+They're old, real old.  They're not men's rings so much as what
+you'd call, in the old-fashioned days, gentlemen's rings.  Real
+gentlemen, I mean, grand gentlemen, wore rings like them.  I wish
+collateral like them came into my loan offices these days.
+They're worth big money."
+
+
+"I just want to tell you, Killeny Boy, that maybe I'll be wishin'
+before the voyage is over that I'd gone on a lay of the treasure
+instead of straight wages," Dag Daughtry confided to Michael that
+night at turning-in time as Kwaque removed his shoes and as he
+paused midway in the draining of his sixth bottle.  "Take it from
+me, Killeny, that old gentleman knows what he's talkin' about, an'
+has been some hummer in his days.  Men don't lose the fingers off
+their hands and get their faces chopped open just for nothing--nor
+sport rings that makes a Jew pawnbroker's mouth water."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+
+Before the voyage of the Mary Turner came to an end, Dag Daughtry,
+sitting down between the rows of water-casks in the main-hold,
+with a great laugh rechristened the schooner "the Ship of Fools."
+But that was some weeks after.  In the meantime he so fulfilled
+his duties that not even Captain Doane could conjure a shadow of
+complaint.
+
+Especially did the steward attend upon the Ancient Mariner, for
+whom he had come to conceive a strong admiration, if not
+affection.  The old fellow was different from his cabin-mates.
+They were money-lovers; everything in them had narrowed down to
+the pursuit of dollars.  Daughtry, himself moulded on generously
+careless lines, could not but appreciate the spaciousness of the
+Ancient Mariner, who had evidently lived spaciously and who was
+ever for sharing the treasure they sought.
+
+"You'll get your whack, steward, if it comes out of my share," he
+frequently assured Daughtry at times of special kindness on the
+latter's part.  "There's oodles of it, and oodles of it, and,
+without kith or kin, I have so little time longer to live that I
+shall not need it much or much of it."
+
+And so the Ship of Fools sailed on, all aft fooling and befouling,
+from the guileless-eyed, gentle-souled Finnish mate, who, with the
+scent of treasure pungent in his nostrils, with a duplicate key
+stole the ship's daily position from Captain Doane's locked desk,
+to Ah Moy, the cook, who kept Kwaque at a distance and never
+whispered warning to the others of the risk they ran from
+continual contact with the carrier of the terrible disease.
+
+Kwaque himself had neither thought nor worry of the matter.  He
+knew the thing as a thing that occasionally happened to human
+creatures.  It bothered him, from the pain standpoint, scarcely at
+all, and it never entered his kinky head that his master did not
+know about it.  For the same reason he never suspected why Ah Moy
+kept him so at a distance.  Nor had Kwaque other worries.  His
+god, over all gods of sea and jungle, he worshipped, and, himself
+ever intimately allowed in the presence, paradise was wherever he
+and his god, the steward, might be.
+
+And so Michael.  Much in the same way that Kwaque loved and
+worshipped did he love and worship the six-quart man.  To Michael
+and Kwaque, the daily, even hourly, recognition and consideration
+of Dag Daughtry was tantamount to resting continuously in the
+bosom of Abraham.  The god of Messrs. Doane, Nishikanta, and
+Grimshaw was a graven god whose name was Gold.  The god of Kwaque
+and Michael was a living god, whose voice could be always heard,
+whose arms could be always warm, the pulse of whose heart could be
+always felt throbbing in a myriad acts and touches.
+
+No greater joy was Michael's than to sit by the hour with Steward
+and sing with him all songs and tunes he sang or hummed.  With a
+quantity or pitch even more of genius or unusualness in him than
+in Jerry, Michael learned more quickly, and since the way of his
+education was singing, he came to sing far beyond the best Villa
+Kennan ever taught Jerry.
+
+Michael could howl, or sing, rather (because his howling was so
+mellow and so controlled), any air that was not beyond his
+register that Steward elected to sing with him.  In addition, he
+could sing by himself, and unmistakably, such simple airs as
+"Home, Sweet Home," "God save the King," and "The Sweet By and
+By."  Even alone, prompted by Steward a score of feet away from
+him, could he lift up his muzzle and sing "Shenandoah" and "Roll
+me down to Rio."
+
+Kwaque, on stolen occasions when Steward was not around, would get
+out his Jews' harp and by the sheer compellingness of the
+primitive instrument make Michael sing with him the barbaric and
+devil-devil rhythms of King William Island.  Another master of
+song, but one in whom Michael delighted, came to rule over him.
+This master's name was Cocky.  He so introduced himself to Michael
+at their first meeting.
+
+"Cocky," he said bravely, without a quiver of fear or flight, when
+Michael had charged upon him at sight to destroy him.  And the
+human voice, the voice of a god, issuing from the throat of the
+tiny, snow-white bird, had made Michael go back on his haunches,
+while, with eyes and nostrils, he quested the steerage for the
+human who had spoken.  And there was no human . . . only a small
+cockatoo that twisted his head impudently and sidewise at him and
+repeated, "Cocky."
+
+The taboo of the chicken Michael had been well taught in his
+earliest days at Meringe.  Chickens, esteemed by MISTER Haggin and
+his white-god fellows, were things that dogs must even defend
+instead of ever attack.  But this thing, itself no chicken, with
+the seeming of a wild feathered thing of the jungle that was fair
+game for any dog, talked to him with the voice of a god.
+
+"Get off your foot," it commanded so peremptorily, so humanly, as
+again to startle Michael and made him quest about the steerage for
+the god-throat that had uttered it.
+
+"Get off your foot, or I'll throw the leg of Moses at you," was
+the next command from the tiny feathered thing.
+
+After that came a farrago of Chinese, so like the voice of Ah Moy,
+that again, though for the last time, Michael sought about the
+steerage for the utterer.
+
+At this Cocky burst into such wild and fantastic shrieks of
+laughter that Michael, ears pricked, head cocked to one side,
+identified in the fibres of the laughter the fibres of the various
+voices he had just previously heard.
+
+And Cocky, only a few ounces in weight, less than half a pound, a
+tiny framework of fragile bone covered with a handful of feathers
+and incasing a heart that was as big in pluck as any heart on the
+Mary Turner, became almost immediately Michael's friend and
+comrade, as well as ruler.  Minute morsel of daring and courage
+that Cocky was, he commanded Michael's respect from the first.
+And Michael, who with a single careless paw-stroke could have
+broken Cocky's slender neck and put out for ever the brave
+brightness of Cocky's eyes, was careful of him from the first.
+And he permitted him a myriad liberties that he would never have
+permitted Kwaque.
+
+Ingrained in Michael's heredity, from the very beginning of four-
+legged dogs on earth, was the DEFENCE OF THE MEAT.  He never
+reasoned it.  Automatic and involuntary as his heart-beating and
+air-breathing, was his defence of his meat once he had his paw on
+it, his teeth in it.  Only to Steward, by an extreme effort of
+will and control, could he accord the right to touch his meat once
+he had himself touched it.  Even Kwaque, who most usually fed him
+under Steward's instructions, knew that the safety of fingers and
+flesh resided in having nothing further whatever to do with
+anything of food once in Michael's possession.  But Cocky, a bit
+of feathery down, a morsel-flash of light and life with the throat
+of a god, violated with sheer impudence and daring Michael's
+taboo, the defence of the meat.
+
+Perched on the rim of Michael's pannikin, this inconsiderable
+adventurer from out of the dark into the sun of life, a mere spark
+and mote between the darks, by a ruffing of his salmon-pink crest,
+a swift and enormous dilation of his bead-black pupils, and a
+raucous imperative cry, as of all the gods, in his throat, could
+make Michael give back and permit the fastidious selection of the
+choicest tidbits of his dish.
+
+For Cocky had a way with him, and ways and ways.  He, who was
+sheer bladed steel in the imperious flashing of his will, could
+swashbuckle and bully like any over-seas roisterer, or wheedle as
+wickedly winningly as the first woman out of Eden or the last
+woman of that descent.  When Cocky, balanced on one leg, the other
+leg in the air as the foot of it held the scruff of Michael's
+neck, leaned to Michael's ear and wheedled, Michael could only lay
+down silkily the bristly hair-waves of his neck, and with silly
+half-idiotic eyes of bliss agree to whatever was Cocky's will or
+whimsey so delivered.
+
+Cocky became more intimately Michael's because, very early, Ah Moy
+washed his hands of the bird.  Ah Moy had bought him in Sydney
+from a sailor for eighteen shillings and chaffered an hour over
+the bargain.  And when he saw Cocky, one day, perched and voluble,
+on the twisted fingers of Kwaque's left hand, Ah Moy discovered
+such instant distaste for the bird that not even eighteen
+shillings, coupled with possession of Cocky and possible contact,
+had any value to him.
+
+"You likee him?  You wanchee?" he proffered.
+
+"Changee for changee!" Kwaque queried back, taking for granted
+that it was an offer to exchange and wondering whether the little
+old cook had become enamoured of his precious jews' harp.
+
+"No changee for changee," Ah Moy answered.  "You wanchee him, all
+right, can do."
+
+"How fashion can do?" Kwaque demanded, who to his beche-de-mer
+English was already adding pidgin English.  "Suppose 'm me fella
+no got 'm what 'you fella likee?"
+
+"No fashion changee," Ah Moy reiterated.  "You wanchee, you likee
+he stop along you fella all right, my word."
+
+And so did pass the brave bit of feathered life with the heart of
+pluck, called of men, and of himself, "Cocky," who had been
+birthed in the jungle roof of the island of Santo, in the New
+Hebrides, who had been netted by a two-legged black man-eater and
+sold for six sticks of tobacco and a shingle hatchet to a Scotch
+trader dying of malaria, and in turn had been traded from hand to
+hand, for four shillings to a blackbirder, for a turtle-shell comb
+made by an English coal-passer after an old Spanish design, for
+the appraised value of six shillings and sixpence in a poker game
+in the firemen's forecastle, for a secondhand accordion worth at
+least twenty shillings, and on for eighteen shillings cash to a
+little old withered Chinaman--so did pass Cocky, as mortal or as
+immortal as any brave sparkle of life on the planet, from the
+possession of one, Ah Moy, a sea-cock who, forty years before, had
+slain his young wife in Macao for cause and fled away to sea, to
+Kwaque, a leprous Black Papuan who was slave to one, Dag Daughtry,
+himself a servant of other men to whom he humbly admitted "Yes,
+sir," and "No, sir," and "Thank you, sir."
+
+One other comrade Michael found, although Cocky was no party to
+the friendship.  This was Scraps, the awkward young Newfoundland
+puppy, who was the property of no one, unless of the schooner Mary
+Turner herself, for no man, fore or aft, claimed ownership, while
+every man disclaimed having brought him on board.  So he was
+called Scraps, and, since he was nobody's dog, was everybody's
+dog--so much so, that Mr. Jackson promised to knock Ah Moy's block
+off if he did not feed the puppy well, while Sigurd Halvorsen, in
+the forecastle, did his best to knock off Henrik Gjertsen's block
+when the latter was guilty of kicking Scraps out of his way.  Yea,
+even more.  When Simon Nishikanta, huge and gross as in the flesh
+he was and for ever painting delicate, insipid, feministic water-
+colours, when he threw his deck-chair at Scraps for clumsily
+knocking over his easel, he found the ham-like hand of Grimshaw so
+instant and heavy on his shoulder as to whirl him half about,
+almost fling him to the deck, and leave him lame-muscled and
+black-and-blued for days.
+
+Michael, full grown, mature, was so merry-hearted an individual
+that he found all delight in interminable romps with Scraps.  So
+strong was the play-instinct in him, as well as was his
+constitution strong, that he continually outplayed Scraps to
+abject weariness, so that he could only lie on the deck and pant
+and laugh through air-draughty lips and dab futilely in the air
+with weak forepaws at Michael's continued ferocious-acted
+onslaughts.  And this, despite the fact that Scraps out-bullied
+him and out-scaled him at least three times, and was as careless
+and unwitting of the weight of his legs or shoulders as a baby
+elephant on a lawn of daisies.  Given his breath back again,
+Scraps was as ripe as ever for another frolic, and Michael was
+just as ripe to meet him.  All of which was splendid training for
+Michael, keeping him in the tiptop of physical condition and
+mental wholesomeness.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+
+So sailed the Ship of Fools--Michael playing with Scraps,
+respecting Cocky and by Cocky being bullied and wheedled, singing
+with Steward and worshipping him; Daughtry drinking his six quarts
+of beer each day, collecting his wages the first of each month,
+and admiring Charles Stough Greenleaf as the finest man on board;
+Kwaque serving and loving his master and thickening and darkening
+and creasing his brow with the growing leprous infiltration; Ah
+Moy avoiding the Black Papuan as the very plague, washing himself
+continuously and boiling his blankets once a week; Captain Doane
+doing the navigating and worrying about his flat-building in San
+Francisco; Grimshaw resting his ham-hands on his colossal knees
+and girding at the pawnbroker to contribute as much to the
+adventure as he was contributing from his wheat-ranches; Simon
+Nishikanta wiping his sweaty neck with the greasy silk
+handkerchief and painting endless water-colours; the mate
+patiently stealing the ship's latitude and longitude with his
+duplicate key; and the Ancient Mariner, solacing himself with
+Scotch highballs, smoking fragrant three-for-a-dollar Havanas that
+were charged to the adventure, and for ever maundering about the
+hell of the longboat, the cross-bearings unnamable, and the
+treasure a fathom under the sand.
+
+Came a stretch of ocean that to Daughtry was like all other
+stretches of ocean and unidentifiable from them.  No land broke
+the sea-rim.  The ship the centre, the horizon was the invariable
+and eternal circle of the world.  The magnetic needle in the
+binnacle was the point on which the Mary Turner ever pivoted.  The
+sun rose in the undoubted east and set in the undoubted west,
+corrected and proved, of course, by declination, deviation, and
+variation; and the nightly march of the stars and constellations
+proceeded across the sky.
+
+And in this stretch of ocean, lookouts were mastheaded at day-dawn
+and kept mastheaded until twilight of evening, when the Mary
+Turner was hove-to, to hold her position through the night.  As
+time went by, and the scent, according to the Ancient Mariner,
+grow hotter, all three of the investors in the adventure came to
+going aloft.  Grimshaw contented himself with standing on the main
+cross-trees.  Captain Doane climbed even higher, seating himself
+on the stump of the foremast with legs a-straddle of the butt of
+the foretopmast.  And Simon Nishikanta tore himself away from his
+everlasting painting of all colour-delicacies of sea and sky such
+as are painted by seminary maidens, to be helped and hoisted up
+the ratlines of the mizzen rigging, the huge bulk of him, by two
+grinning, slim-waisted sailors, until they lashed him squarely on
+the crosstrees and left him to stare with eyes of golden desire,
+across the sun-washed sea through the finest pair of unredeemed
+binoculars that had ever been pledged in his pawnshops.
+
+"Strange," the Ancient Mariner would mutter, "strange, and most
+strange.  This is the very place.  There can be no mistake.  I'd
+have trusted that youngster of a third officer anywhere.  He was
+only eighteen, but he could navigate better than the captain.
+Didn't he fetch the atoll after eighteen days in the longboat?  No
+standard compasses, and you know what a small-boat horizon is,
+with a big sea, for a sextant.  He died, but the dying course he
+gave me held good, so that I fetched the atoll the very next day
+after I hove his body overboard."
+
+Captain Doane would shrug his shoulders and defiantly meet the
+mistrustful eyes of the Armenian Jew.
+
+"It cannot have sunk, surely," the Ancient Mariner would tactfully
+carry across the forbidding pause.  "The island was no mere shoal
+or reef.  The Lion's Head was thirty-eight hundred and thirty-five
+feet.  I saw the captain and the third officer triangulate it."
+
+"I've raked and combed the sea," Captain Doane would then break
+out, "and the teeth of my comb are not so wide apart as to let
+slip through a four-thousand-foot peak."
+
+"Strange, strange," the Ancient Mariner would next mutter, half to
+his cogitating soul, half aloud to the treasure-seekers.  Then,
+with a sudden brightening, he would add:
+
+"But, of course, the variation has changed, Captain Doane.  Have
+you allowed for the change in variation for half a century!  That
+should make a grave difference.  Why, as I understand it, who am
+no navigator, the variation was not so definitely and accurately
+known in those days as now."
+
+"Latitude was latitude, and longitude was longitude," would be the
+captain's retort.  "Variation and deviation are used in setting
+courses and estimating dead reckoning."
+
+All of which was Greek to Simon Nishikanta, who would promptly
+take the Ancient Mariner's side of the discussion.
+
+But the Ancient Mariner was fair-minded.  What advantage he gave
+the Jew one moment, he balanced the next moment with an advantage
+to the skipper.
+
+"It's a pity," he would suggest to Captain Doane, "that you have
+only one chronometer.  The entire fault may be with the
+chronometer.  Why did you sail with only one chronometer?"
+
+"But I WAS willing for two," the Jew would defend.  "You know
+that, Grimshaw?"
+
+The wheat-farmer would nod reluctantly and Captain would snap:
+
+"But not for three chronometers."
+
+"But if two was no better than one, as you said so yourself and as
+Grimshaw will bear witness, then three was no better than two
+except for an expense."
+
+"But if you only have two chronometers, how can you tell which has
+gone wrong?" Captain Doane would demand.
+
+"Search me," would come the pawnbroker's retort, accompanied by an
+incredulous shrug of the shoulders.  "If you can't tell which is
+wrong of two, then how much harder must it be to tell which is
+wrong of two dozen?  With only two, it's a fifty-fifty split that
+one or the other is wrong."
+
+"But don't you realize--"
+
+"I realize that it's all a great foolishness, all this highbrow
+stuff about navigation.  I've got clerks fourteen years old in my
+offices that can figure circles all around you and your
+navigation.  Ask them that if two chronometers ain't better than
+one, then how can two thousand be better than one?  And they'd
+answer quick, snap, like that, that if two dollars ain't any
+better than one dollar, then two thousand dollars ain't any better
+than one dollar.  That's common sense."
+
+"Just the same, you're wrong on general principle," Grimshaw would
+oar in.  "I said at the time that the only reason we took Captain
+Doane in with us on the deal was because we needed a navigator and
+because you and me didn't know the first thing about it.  You
+said, 'Yes, sure'; and right away knew more about it than him when
+you wouldn't stand for buying three chronometers.  What was the
+matter with you was that the expense hurt you.  That's about as
+big an idea as your mind ever had room for.  You go around looking
+for to dig out ten million dollars with a second-hand spade you
+call buy for sixty-eight cents."
+
+Dag Daughtry could not fail to overhear some of these
+conversations, which were altercations rather than councils.  The
+invariable ending, for Simon Nishikanta, would be what sailors
+name "the sea-grouch."  For hours afterward the sulky Jew would
+speak to no one nor acknowledge speech from any one.  Vainly
+striving to paint, he would suddenly burst into violent rage, tear
+up his attempt, stamp it into the deck, then get out his large-
+calibred automatic rifle, perch himself on the forecastle-head,
+and try to shoot any stray porpoise, albacore, or dolphin.  It
+seemed to give him great relief to send a bullet home into the
+body of some surging, gorgeous-hued fish, arrest its glorious
+flashing motion for ever, and turn it on its side slowly to sink
+down into the death and depth of the sea.
+
+On occasion, when a school of blackfish disported by, each one of
+them a whale of respectable size, Nishikanta would be beside
+himself in the ecstasy of inflicting pain.  Out of the school
+perhaps he would reach a score of the leviathans, his bullets
+biting into them like whip-lashes, so that each, like a colt
+surprised by the stock-whip, would leap in the air, or with a
+flirt of tail dive under the surface, and then charge madly across
+the ocean and away from sight in a foam-churn of speed.
+
+The Ancient Mariner would shake his head sadly; and Daughtry, who
+likewise was hurt by the infliction of hurt on unoffending
+animals, would sympathize with him and fetch him unbidden another
+of the expensive three-for-a-dollar cigars so that his feelings
+might be soothed.  Grimshaw would curl his lip in a sneer and
+mutter:  "The cheap skate.  The skunk.  No man with half the
+backbone of a man would take it out of the harmless creatures.
+He's that kind that if he didn't like you, or if you criticised
+his grammar or arithmetic, he'd kick your dog to get even . . . or
+poison it.  In the good old days up in Colusa we used to hang men
+like him just to keep the air we breathed clean and wholesome."
+
+But it was Captain Doane who protested outright.
+
+"Look at here, Nishikanta," he would say, his face white and his
+lips trembling with anger.  "That's rough stuff, and all you can
+get back for it is rough stuff.  I know what I'm talking about.
+You've got no right to risk our lives that way.  Wasn't the pilot
+boat Annie Mine sunk by a whale right in the Golden Gate?  Didn't
+I sail in as a youngster, second mate on the brig Berncastle, into
+Hakodate, pumping double watches to keep afloat just because a
+whale took a smash at us?  Didn't the full-rigged ship, the whaler
+Essex, sink off the west coast of South America, twelve hundred
+miles from the nearest land for the small boats to cover, and all
+because of a big cow whale that butted her into kindling-wood?"
+
+And Simon Nishikanta, in his grouch, disdaining to reply, would
+continue to pepper the last whale into flight beyond the circle of
+the sea their vision commanded.
+
+"I remember the whaleship Essex," the Ancient Mariner told Dag
+Daughtry.  "It was a cow with a calf that did for her.  Her
+barrels were two-thirds full, too.  She went down in less than an
+hour.  One of the boats never was heard of."
+
+"And didn't another one of her boats get to Hawaii, sir?" Daughtry
+queried with all due humility of respect.  "Leastwise, thirty
+years ago, when I was in Honolulu, I met a man, an old geezer, who
+claimed he'd been a harpooner on a whaleship sunk by a whale off
+the coast of South America.  That was the first and last I heard
+of it, until right now you speaking of it, sir.  It must a-been
+the same ship, sir, don't you think?"
+
+"Unless two different ships were whale-sunk off the west coast,"
+the Ancient Mariner replied.  "And of the one ship, the Essex,
+there is no discussion.  It is historical.  The chance is likely,
+steward, that the man you mentioned was from the Essex."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+
+Captain Doane worked hard, pursuing the sun in its daily course
+through the sky, by the equation of time correcting its
+aberrations due to the earth's swinging around the great circle of
+its orbit, and charting Sumner lines innumerable, working assumed
+latitudes for position until his head grew dizzy.
+
+Simon Nishikanta sneered openly at what he considered the
+captain's inefficient navigation, and continued to paint water-
+colours when he was serene, and to shoot at whales, sea-birds, and
+all things hurtable when he was downhearted and sea-sore with
+disappointment at not sighting the Lion's Head peak of the Ancient
+Mariner's treasure island
+
+"I'll show I ain't a pincher," Nishikanta announced one day, after
+having broiled at the mast-head for five hours of sea-searching.
+"Captain Doane, how much could we have bought extra chronometers
+for in San Francisco--good second-hand ones, I mean?"
+
+"Say a hundred dollars," the captain answered.
+
+"Very well.  And this ain't a piker's proposition.  The cost of
+such a chronometer would have been divided between the three of
+us.  I stand for its total cost.  You just tell the sailors that
+I, Simon Nishikanta, will pay one hundred dollars gold money for
+the first one that sights land on Mr. Greenleaf's latitude and
+longitude."
+
+But the sailors who swarmed the mast-heads were doomed to
+disappointment, in that for only two days did they have
+opportunity to stare the ocean surface for the reward.  Nor was
+this due entirely to Dag Daughtry, despite the fact that his own
+intention and act would have been sufficient to spoil their chance
+for longer staring.
+
+Down in the lazarette, under the main-cabin floor, it chanced that
+he took toll of the cases of beer which had been shipped for his
+especial benefit.  He counted the cases, doubted the verdict of
+his senses, lighted more matches, counted again, then vainly
+searched the entire lazarette in the hope of finding more cases of
+beer stored elsewhere.
+
+He sat down under the trap door of the main-cabin floor and
+thought for a solid hour.  It was the Jew again, he concluded--the
+Jew who had been willing to equip the Mary Turner with two
+chronometers, but not with three; the Jew who had ratified the
+agreement of a sufficient supply to permit Daughtry his daily six
+quarts.  Once again the steward counted the cases to make sure.
+There were three.  And since each case contained two dozen quarts,
+and since his whack each day was half a dozen quarts, it was
+patent that, the supply that stared him in the face would last him
+only twelve days.  And twelve days were none too long to sail from
+this unidentifiable naked sea-stretch to the nearest possible port
+where beer could be purchased.
+
+The steward, once his mind was made up, wasted no time.  The clock
+marked a quarter before twelve when he climbed up out of the
+lazarette, replaced the trapdoor, and hurried to set the table.
+He served the company through the noon meal, although it was all
+he could do to refrain from capsizing the big tureen of split-pea
+soup over the head of Simon Nishikanta.  What did effectually
+withstrain him was the knowledge of the act which in the lazarette
+he had already determined to perform that afternoon down in the
+main hold where the water-casks were stored.
+
+At three o'clock, while the Ancient Mariner supposedly drowned in
+his room, and while Captain Doane, Grimshaw, and half the watch on
+deck clustered at the mast-heads to try to raise the Lion's Head
+from out the sapphire sea, Dag Daughtry dropped down the ladder of
+the open hatchway into the main hold.  Here, in long tiers, with
+alleyways between, the water-casks were chocked safely on their
+sides.
+
+From inside his shirt the steward drew a brace, and to it fitted a
+half-inch bit from his hip-pocket.  On his knees, he bored through
+the head of the first cask until the water rushed out upon the
+deck and flowed down into the bilge.  He worked quickly, boring
+cask after cask down the alleyway that led to deeper twilight.
+When he had reached the end of the first row of casks he paused a
+moment to listen to the gurglings of the many half-inch streams
+running to waste.  His quick ears caught a similar gurgling from
+the right in the direction of the next alleyway.  Listening
+closely, he could have sworn he heard the sounds of a bit biting
+into hard wood.
+
+A minute later, his own brace and bit carefully secreted, his hand
+was descending on the shoulder of a man he could not recognize in
+the gloom, but who, on his knees and wheezing, was steadily boring
+into the head of a cask.  The culprit made no effort to escape,
+and when Daughtry struck a match he gazed down into the upturned
+face of the Ancient Mariner.
+
+"My word!" the steward muttered his amazement softly.  "What in
+hell are you running water out for?"
+
+He could feel the old man's form trembling with violent
+nervousness, and his own heart smote him for gentleness.
+
+"It's all right," he whispered.  "Don't mind me.  How many have
+you bored?"
+
+"All in this tier," came the whispered answer.  "You will not
+inform on me to the . . . the others?"
+
+"Inform?" Daughtry laughed softly.  "I don't mind telling you that
+we're playing the same game, though I don't know why you should
+play it.  I've just finished boring all of the starboard row.  Now
+I tell you, sir, you skin out right now, quietly, while the goin'
+is good.  Everybody's aloft, and you won't be noticed.  I'll go
+ahead and finish this job . . . all but enough water to last us
+say a dozen days."
+
+"I should like to talk with you . . . to explain matters," the
+Ancient Mariner whispered.
+
+"Sure, sir, an' I don't mind sayin', sir, that I'm just plain mad
+curious to hear.  I'll join you down in the cabin, say in ten
+minutes, and we can have a real gam.  But anyway, whatever your
+game is, I'm with you.  Because it happens to be my game to get
+quick into port, and because, sir, I have a great liking and
+respect for you.  Now shoot along.  I'll be with you inside ten
+minutes."
+
+"I like you, steward, very much," the old man quavered.
+
+"And I like you, sir--and a damn sight more than them money-sharks
+aft.  But we'll just postpone this.  You beat it out of here,
+while I finish scuppering the rest of the water."
+
+A quarter of an hour later, with the three money-sharks still at
+the mast-heads, Charles Stough Green-leaf was seated in the cabin
+and sipping a highball, and Dag Daughtry was standing across the
+table from him, drinking directly from a quart bottle of beer.
+
+"Maybe you haven't guessed it," the Ancient Mariner said; "but
+this is my fourth voyage after this treasure."
+
+"You mean . . . ?" Daughtry asked.
+
+"Just that.  There isn't any treasure.  There never was one--any
+more than the Lion's Head, the longboat, or the bearings
+unnamable."'
+
+Daughtry rumpled his grizzled thatch of hair in his perplexity, as
+he admitted:
+
+"Well, you got me, sir.  You sure got me to believin' in that
+treasure."
+
+"And I acknowledge, steward, that I am pleased to hear it.  It
+shows that I have not lost my cunning when I can deceive a man
+like you.  It is easy to deceive men whose souls know only money.
+But you are different.  You don't live and breathe for money.
+I've watched you with your dog.  I've watched you with your nigger
+boy.  I've watched you with your beer.  And just because your
+heart isn't set on a great buried treasure of gold, you are harder
+to deceive.  Those whose hearts are set, are most astonishingly
+easy to fool.  They are of cheap kidney.  Offer them a proposition
+of one hundred dollars for one, and they are like hungry pike
+snapping at the bait.  Offer a thousand dollars for one, or ten
+thousand for one, and they become sheer lunatic.  I am an old man,
+a very old man.  I like to live until I die--I mean, to live
+decently, comfortably, respectably."
+
+"And you like the voyages long?  I begin to see, sir.  Just as
+they're getting near to where the treasure ain't, a little
+accident like the loss of their water-supply sends them into port
+and out again to start hunting all over."
+
+The Ancient Mariner nodded, and his sun-washed eyes twinkled.
+
+"There was the Emma Louisa.  I kept her on the long voyage over
+eighteen months with water accidents and similar accidents.  And,
+besides, they kept me in one of the best hotels in New Orleans for
+over four months before the voyage began, and advanced to me
+handsomely, yes, bravely, handsomely."
+
+"But tell me more, sir; I am most interested," Dag Daughtry
+concluded his simple matter of the beer.   "It's a good game.  I
+might learn it for my old age, though I give you my word, sir, I
+won't butt in on your game.  I wouldn't tackle it until you are
+gone, sir, good game that it is."
+
+"First of all, you must pick out men with money--with plenty of
+money, so that any loss will not hurt them.  Also, they are easier
+to interest--"
+
+"Because they are more hoggish," the steward interrupted.  "The
+more money they've got the more they want."
+
+"Precisely," the Ancient Mariner continued.  "And, at least, they
+are repaid.  Such sea-voyages are excellent for their health.
+After all, I do them neither hurt nor harm, but only good, and add
+to their health."
+
+"But them scars--that gouge out of your face--all them fingers
+missing on your hand?  You never got them in the fight in the
+longboat when the bo's'n carved you up.  Then where in Sam Hill
+did you get the them?  Wait a minute, sir.  Let me fill your glass
+first."  And with a fresh-brimmed glass, Charles Stough Greanleaf
+narrated the history of his scars.
+
+"First, you must know, steward, that I am--well, a gentleman.  My
+name has its place in the pages of the history of the United
+States, even back before the time when they were the United
+States.  I graduated second in my class in a university that it is
+not necessary to name.  For that matter, the name I am known by is
+not my name.  I carefully compounded it out of names of other
+families.  I have had misfortunes.  I trod the quarter-deck when I
+was a young man, though never the deck of the Wide Awake, which is
+the ship of my fancy--and of my livelihood in these latter days.
+
+"The scars you asked about, and the missing fingers?  Thus it
+chanced.  It was the morning, at late getting-up times in a
+Pullman, when the accident happened.  The car being crowded, I had
+been forced to accept an upper berth.  It was only the other day.
+A few years ago.  I was an old man then.  We were coming up from
+Florida.  It was a collision on a high trestle.  The train
+crumpled up, and some of the cars fell over sideways and fell off,
+ninety feet into the bottom of a dry creek.  It was dry, though
+there was a pool of water just ten feet in diameter and eighteen
+inches deep.  All the rest was dry boulders, and I bull's-eyed
+that pool.
+
+"This is the way it was.  I had just got on my shoes and pants and
+shirt, and had started to get out of the bunk.  There I was,
+sitting on the edge of the bunk, my legs dangling down, when the
+locomotives came together.  The berths, upper and lower, on the
+opposite side had already been made up by the porter.
+
+"And there I was, sitting, legs dangling, not knowing where I was,
+on a trestle or a flat, when the thing happened.  I just naturally
+left that upper berth, soared like a bird across the aisle, went
+through the glass of the window on the opposite side clean head-
+first, turned over and over through the ninety feet of fall more
+times than I like to remember, and by some sort of miracle was
+mostly flat-out in the air when I bull's-eyed that pool of water.
+It was only eighteen inches deep.  But I hit it flat, and I hit it
+so hard that it must have cushioned me.  I was the only survivor
+of my car.  It struck forty feet away from me, off to the side.
+And they took only the dead out of it.  When they took me out of
+the pool I wasn't dead by any means.  And when the surgeons got
+done with me, there were the fingers gone from my hand, that scar
+down the side of my face . . . and, though you'd never guess it,
+I've been three ribs short of the regular complement ever since.
+
+"Oh, I had no complaint coming.  Think of the others in that car--
+all dead.  Unfortunately, I was riding on a pass, and so could not
+sue the railroad company.  But here I am, the only man who ever
+dived ninety feet into eighteen inches of water and lived to tell
+the tale.--Steward, if you don't mind replenishing my glass . . .
+"
+
+Dag Daughtry complied and in his excitement of interest pulled off
+the top of another quart of beer for himself.
+
+"Go on, go on, sir," he murmured huskily, wiping his lips, "and
+the treasure-hunting graft.  I'm straight dying to hear.  Sir, I
+salute you."
+
+"I may say, steward," the Ancient Mariner resumed, "that I was
+born with a silver spoon that melted in my mouth and left me a
+proper prodigal son.  Also, that I was born with a back-bone of
+pride that would not melt.  Not for a paltry railroad accident,
+but for things long before as well as after, my family let me die,
+and I . . . I let it live.  That is the story.  I let my family
+live.  Furthermore, it was not my family's fault.  I never
+whimpered.  I never let on.  I melted the last of my silver spoon-
+-South Sea cotton, an' it please you, cacao in Tonga, rubber and
+mahogany in Yucatan.  And do you know, at the end, I slept in
+Bowery lodging-houses and ate scrapple in East-Side feeding-dens,
+and, on more than one occasion, stood in the bread-line at
+midnight and pondered whether or not I should faint before I fed."
+
+"And you never squealed to your family," Dag Daughtry murmured
+admiringly in the pause.
+
+The Ancient Mariner straightened up his shoulders, threw his head
+back, then bowed it and repeated, "No, I never squealed.  I went
+into the poor-house, or the county poor-farm as they call it.  I
+lived sordidly.  I lived like a beast.  For six months I lived
+like a beast, and then I saw my way out.  I set about building the
+Wide Awake.  I built her plank by plank, and copper-fastened her,
+selected her masts and every timber of her, and personally signed
+on her full ship's complement fore-and-aft, and outfitted her
+amongst the Jews, and sailed with her to the South Seas and the
+treasure buried a fathom under the sand.
+
+"You see," he explained, "all this I did in my mind, for all the
+time I was a hostage in the poor-farm of broken men."
+
+The Ancient Mariner's face grew suddenly bleak and fierce, and his
+right hand flashed out to Daughtry's wrist, prisoning it in
+withered fingers of steel.
+
+"It was a long, hard way to get out of the poor-farm and finance
+my miserable little, pitiful little, adventure of the Wide Awake.
+Do you know that I worked in the poor-farm laundry for two years,
+for one dollar and a half a week, with my one available hand and
+what little I could do with the other, sorting dirty clothes and
+folding sheets and pillow-slips until I thought a thousand times
+my poor old back would break in two, and until I knew a million
+times the location in my chest of every fraction of an inch of my
+missing ribs."
+
+"You are a young man yet--"
+
+Daughtry grinned denial as he rubbed his grizzled mat of hair.
+
+"You are a young man yet, steward," the Ancient Mariner insisted
+with a show of irritation.  "You have never been shut out from
+life.  In the poor-farm one is shut out from life.  There is no
+respect--no, not for age alone, but for human life in the poor-
+house.  How shall I say it?  One is not dead.  Nor is one alive.
+One is what once was alive and is in process of becoming dead.
+Lepers are treated that way.  So are the insane.  I know it.  When
+I was young and on the sea, a brother-lieutenant went mad.
+Sometimes he was violent, and we struggled with him, twisting his
+arms, bruising his flesh, tying him helpless while we sat and
+panted on him that he might not do harm to us, himself, or the
+ship.  And he, who still lived, died to us.  Don't you understand?
+He was no longer of us, like us.  He was something other.  That is
+it--OTHER.  And so, in the poor-farm, we, who are yet unburied,
+are OTHER.  You have heard me chatter about the hell of the
+longboat.  That is a pleasant diversion in life compared with the
+poor-farm.  The food, the filth, the abuse, the bullying, the--the
+sheer animalness of it!
+
+"For two years I worked for a dollar and a half a week in the
+laundry.  And imagine me, who had melted a silver spoon in my
+mouth--a sizable silver spoon steward--imagine me, my old sore
+bones, my old belly reminiscent of youth's delights, my old palate
+ticklish yet and not all withered of the deviltries of taste
+learned in younger days--as I say, steward, imagine me, who had
+ever been free-handed, lavish, saving that dollar and a half
+intact like a miser, never spending a penny of it on tobacco,
+never mitigating by purchase of any little delicacy the sad
+condition of my stomach that protested against the harshness and
+indigestibility of our poor fare.  I cadged tobacco, poor cheap
+tobacco, from poor doddering old chaps trembling on the edge of
+dissolution.  Ay, and when Samuel Merrivale I found dead in the
+morning, next cot to mine, I first rummaged his poor old trousers'
+pocket for the half-plug of tobacco I knew was the total estate he
+left, then announced the news.
+
+"Oh, steward, I was careful of that dollar and a half.  Don't you
+see?--I was a prisoner sawing my way out with a tiny steel saw.
+And I sawed out!"  His voice rose in a shrill cackle of triumph.
+"Steward, I sawed out!"
+
+Dag Daughtry held forth and up his beer-bottle as he said gravely
+and sincerely:
+
+"Sir, I salute you."
+
+"And I thank you, sir--you understand," the Ancient Mariner
+replied with simple dignity to the toast, touching his glass to
+the bottle and drinking with the steward eyes to eyes.
+
+"I should have had one hundred and fifty-six dollars when I left
+the poor-farm," the ancient one continued.  "But there were the
+two weeks I lost, with influenza, and the one week from a
+confounded pleurisy, so that I emerged from that place of the
+living dead with but one hundred and fifty-one dollars and fifty
+cents."
+
+"I see, sir," Daughtry interrupted with honest admiration.  "The
+tiny saw had become a crow-bar, and with it you were going back to
+break into life again."
+
+All the scarred face and washed eyes of Charles Stough Greenleaf
+beamed as he held his glass up.
+
+"Steward, I salute you.  You understand.  And you have said it
+well.  I was going back to break into the house of life.  It was a
+crowbar, that pitiful sum of money accumulated by two years of
+crucifixion.  Think of it!  A sum that in the days ere the silver
+spoon had melted, I staked in careless moods of an instant on a
+turn of the cards.  But as you say, a burglar, I came back to
+break into life, and I came to Boston.  You have a fine turn for a
+figure of speech, steward, and I salute you."
+
+Again bottle and glass tinkled together, and both men drank eyes
+to eyes and each was aware that the eyes he gazed into were honest
+and understanding.
+
+"But it was a thin crow-bar, steward.  I dared not put my weight
+on it for a proper pry.  I took a room in a small but respectable
+hotel, European plan.  It was in Boston, I think I said.  Oh, how
+careful I was of my crowbar!  I scarcely ate enough to keep my
+frame inhabited.  But I bought drinks for others, most carefully
+selected--bought drinks with an air of prosperity that was as a
+credential to my story; and in my cups (my apparent cups,
+steward), spun an old man's yarn of the Wide Awake, the longboat,
+the bearings unnamable, and the treasure under the sand.--A fathom
+under the sand; that was literary; it was psychological; it
+smacked of the salt sea, and daring rovers, and the loot of the
+Spanish Main.
+
+"You have noticed this nugget I wear on my watch-chain, steward?
+I could not afford it at that time, but I talked golden instead,
+California gold, nuggets and nuggets, oodles and oodles, from the
+diggings of forty-nine and fifty.  That was literary.  That was
+colour.  Later, after my first voyage out of Boston I was
+financially able to buy a nugget.  It was so much bait to which
+men rose like fishes.  And like fishes they nibbled.  These rings,
+also--bait.  You never see such rings now.  After I got in funds,
+I purchased them, too.  Take this nugget:  I am talking.  I toy
+with it absently as I am telling of the great gold treasure we
+buried under the sand.  Suddenly the nugget flashes fresh
+recollection into my mind.  I speak of the longboat, of our thirst
+and hunger, and of the third officer, the fair lad with cheeks
+virgin of the razor, and that he it was who used it as a sinker
+when we strove to catch fish.
+
+"But back in Boston.  Yarns and yarns, when seemingly I was gone
+in drink, I told my apparent cronies--men whom I despised, stupid
+dolts of creatures that they were.  But the word spread, until one
+day, a young man, a reporter, tried to interview me about the
+treasure and the Wide Awake.  I was indignant, angry.--Oh, softly,
+steward, softly; in my heart was great joy as I denied that young
+reporter, knowing that from my cronies he already had a
+sufficiency of the details.
+
+"And the morning paper gave two whole columns and headlines to the
+tale.  I began to have callers.  I studied them out well.  Many
+were for adventuring after the treasure who themselves had no
+money.  I baffled and avoided them, and waited on, eating even
+less as my little capital dwindled away.
+
+"And then he came, my gay young doctor--doctor of philosophy he
+was, for he was very wealthy.  My heart sang when I saw him.  But
+twenty-eight dollars remained to me--after it was gone, the poor-
+house, or death.  I had already resolved upon death as my choice
+rather than go back to be of that dolorous company, the living
+dead of the poor-farm.  But I did not go back, nor did I die.  The
+gay young doctor's blood ran warm at thought of the South Seas,
+and in his nostrils I distilled all the scents of the flower-
+drenched air of that far-off land, and in his eyes I builded him
+the fairy visions of the tradewind clouds, the monsoon skies, the
+palm isles and the coral seas.
+
+"He was a gay, mad young dog, grandly careless of his largess,
+fearless as a lion's whelp, lithe and beautiful as a leopard, and
+mad, a trifle mad of the deviltries and whimsies that tickled in
+that fine brain of his.  Look you, steward.  Before we sailed in
+the Gloucester fishing-schooner, purchased by the doctor, and that
+was like a yacht and showed her heels to most yachts, he had me to
+his house to advise about personal equipment.  We were overhauling
+in a gear-room, when suddenly he spoke:
+
+"'I wonder how my lady will take my long absence.  What say you?
+Shall she go along?'
+
+"And I had not known that he had any wife or lady.  And I looked
+my surprise and incredulity.
+
+"'Just that you do not believe I shall take her on the cruise,' he
+laughed, wickedly, madly, in my astonished face.  'Come, you shall
+meet her.'
+
+"Straight to his bedroom and his bed he led me, and, turning down
+the covers, showed there to me, asleep as she had slept for many a
+thousand years, the mummy of a slender Egyptian maid.
+
+"And she sailed with us on the long vain voyage to the South Seas
+and back again, and, steward, on my honour, I grew quite fond of
+the dear maid myself.
+
+The Ancient Mariner gazed dreamily into his glass, and Dag
+Daughtry took advantage of the pause to ask:
+
+"But the young doctor?  How did he take the failure to find the
+treasure?"
+
+The Ancient Mariner's face lighted with joy.
+
+"He called me a delectable old fraud, with his arm on my shoulder
+while he did it.  Why, steward, I had come to love that young man
+like a splendid son.  And with his arm on my shoulder, and I know
+there was more than mere kindness in it, he told me we had barely
+reached the River Plate when he discovered me.  With laughter, and
+with more than one slap of his hand on my shoulder that was more
+caress than jollity, he pointed out the discrepancies in my tale
+(which I have since amended, steward, thanks to him, and amended
+well), and told me that the voyage had been a grand success,
+making him eternally my debtor.
+
+"What could I do?  I told him the truth.  To him even did I tell
+my family name, and the shame I had saved it from by forswearing
+it.
+
+"He put his arm on my shoulder, I tell you, and . . . "
+
+The Ancient Mariner ceased talking because of a huskiness in his
+throat, and a moisture from his eyes trickled down both cheeks.
+
+Dag Daughtry pledged him silently, and in the draught from his
+glass he recovered himself.
+
+"He told me that I should come and live with him, and, to his
+great lonely house he took me the very day we landed in Boston.
+Also, he told me he would make arrangements with his lawyers--the
+idea tickled his fancy--'I shall adopt you,' he said.  'I shall
+adopt you along with Isthar'--Isthar was the little maid's name,
+the little mummy's name.
+
+"Here was I, back in life, steward, and legally to be adopted.
+But life is a fond betrayer.  Eighteen hours afterward, in the
+morning, we found him dead in his bed, the little mummy maid
+beside him.  Heart-failure, the burst of some blood-vessel in the
+brain--I never learned.
+
+"I prayed and pleaded with them for the pair to be buried
+together.  But they were a hard, cold, New England lot, his
+cousins and his aunts, and they presented Isthar to the museum,
+and me they gave a week to be quit of the house.  I left in an
+hour, and they searched my small baggage before they would let me
+depart.
+
+"I went to New York.  It was the same game there, only that I had
+more money and could play it properly.  It was the same in New
+Orleans, in Galveston.  I came to California.  This is my fifth
+voyage.  I had a hard time getting these three interested, and
+spent all my little store of money before they signed the
+agreement.  They were very mean.  Advance any money to me!  The
+very idea of it was preposterous.  Though I bided my time, ran up
+a comfortable hotel bill, and, at the very last, ordered my own
+generous assortment of liquors and cigars and charged the bill to
+the schooner.  Such a to-do!  All three of them raged and all but
+tore their hair . . . and mime.  They said it could not be.  I
+fell promptly sick.  I told them they got on my nerves and made me
+sick.  The more they raged, the sicker I got.  Then they gave in.
+As promptly I grew better.  And here we are, out of water and
+heading soon most likely for the Marquesas to fill our barrels.
+Then they will return and try for it again!"
+
+"You think so, sir?"
+
+"I shall remember even more important data, steward," the Ancient
+Mariner smiled.  "Without doubt they will return.  Oh, I know them
+well.  They are meagre, narrow, grasping fools."
+
+"Fools! all fools! a ship of fools!" Dag Daughtry exulted;
+repeating what he had expressed in the hold, as he bored the last
+barrel, listened to the good water gurgling away into the bilge,
+and chuckled over his discovery of the Ancient Mariner on the same
+lay as his own.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+
+Early next morning, the morning watch of sailors, whose custom was
+to fetch the day's supply of water for the galley and cabin,
+discovered that the barrels were empty.  Mr. Jackson was so
+alarmed that he immediately called Captain Doane, and not many
+minutes elapsed ere Captain Doane had routed out Grimshaw and
+Nishikanta to tell them the disaster.
+
+Breakfast was an excitement shared in peculiarly by the Ancient
+Mariner and Dag Daughtry, while the trio of partners raged and
+bewailed.  Captain Doane particularly wailed.  Simon Nishikanta
+was fiendish in his descriptions of whatever miscreant had done
+the deed and of how he should be made to suffer for it, while
+Grimshaw clenched and repeatedly clenched his great hands as if
+throttling some throat.
+
+"I remember, it was in forty-seven--nay, forty-six--yes, forty-
+six," the Ancient Mariner chattered.  "It was a similar and worse
+predicament.  It was in the longboat, sixteen of us.  We ran on
+Glister Reef.  So named it was after our pretty little craft
+discovered it one dark night and left her bones upon it.  The reef
+is on the Admiralty charts.  Captain Doane will verify me . . . "
+
+No one listened, save Dag Daughtry, serving hot cakes and
+admiring.  But Simon Nishikanta, becoming suddenly aware that the
+old man was babbling, bellowed out ferociously:
+
+"Oh, shut up!  Close your jaw!  You make me tired with your
+everlasting 'I remember.'"
+
+The Ancient Mariner was guilelessly surprised, as if he had
+slipped somewhere in his narrative.
+
+"No, I assure you," he continued.  "It must have been some error
+of my poor old tongue.  It was not the Wide Awake, but the brig
+Glister.  Did I say Wide Awake?  It was the Glister, a smart
+little brig, almost a toy brig in fact, copper-bottomed, lines
+like a dolphin, a sea-cutter and a wind-eater.  Handled like a
+top.  On my honour, gentlemen, it was lively work for both watches
+when she went about.  I was supercargo.  We sailed out of New
+York, ostensibly for the north-west coast, with sealed orders--"
+
+"In the name of God, peace, peace!  You drive me mad with your
+drivel!"  So Nishikanta cried out in nervous pain that was real
+and quivering.  "Old man, have a heart.  What do I care to know of
+your Glister and your sealed orders!"
+
+"Ah, sealed orders," the Ancient Mariner went on beamingly.  "A
+magic phrase, sealed orders."  He rolled it off his tongue with
+unction.  "Those were the days, gentlemen, when ships did sail
+with sealed orders.  And as supercargo, with my trifle invested in
+the adventure and my share in the gains, I commanded the captain.
+Not in him, but in me were reposed the sealed orders.  I assure
+you I did not know myself what they were.  Not until we were
+around old Cape Stiff, fifty to fifty, and in fifty in the
+Pacific, did I break the seal and learn we were bound for Van
+Dieman's Land.  They called it Van Dieman's Land in those days . .
+. "
+
+It was a day of discoveries.  Captain Doane caught the mate
+stealing the ship's position from his desk with the duplicate key.
+There was a scene, but no more, for the Finn was too huge a man to
+invite personal encounter, and Captain Dome could only stigmatize
+his conduct to a running reiteration of "Yes, sir," and "No, sir,"
+and "Sorry, sir."
+
+Perhaps the most important discovery, although he did not know it
+at the time, was that of Dag Daughtry.  It was after the course
+had been changed and all sail set, and after the Ancient Mariner
+had privily informed him that Taiohae, in the Marquesas, was their
+objective, that Daughtry gaily proceeded to shave.  But one
+trouble was on his mind.  He was not quite sure, in such an out-
+of-the-way place as Taiohae, that good beer could be procured.
+
+As he prepared to make the first stroke of the razor, most of his
+face white with lather, he noticed a dark patch of skin on his
+forehead just between the eye-brows and above.  When he had
+finished shaving he touched the dark patch, wondering how he had
+been sunburned in such a spot.  But he did not know he had touched
+it in so far as there was any response of sensation.  The dark
+place was numb.
+
+"Curious," he thought, wiped his face, and forgot all about it.
+
+No more than he knew what horror that dark spot represented, did
+he know that Ah Moy's slant eyes had long since noticed it and
+were continuing to notice it, day by day, with secret growing
+terror.
+
+Close-hauled on the south-east trades, the Mary Turner began her
+long slant toward the Marquesas.  For'ard, all were happy.  Being
+only seamen, on seamen's wages, they hailed with delight the news
+that they were bound in for a tropic isle to fill their water-
+barrels.  Aft, the three partners were in bad temper, and
+Nishikanta openly sneered at Captain Doane and doubted his ability
+to find the Marquesas.  In the steerage everybody was happy--Dag
+Daughtry because his wages were running on and a further supply of
+beer was certain; Kwaque because he was happy whenever his master
+was happy; and Ah Moy because he would soon have opportunity to
+desert away from the schooner and the two lepers with whom he was
+domiciled.
+
+Michael shared in the general happiness of the steerage, and
+joined eagerly with Steward in learning by heart a fifth song.
+This was "Lead, kindly Light."  In his singing, which was no more
+than trained howling after all, Michael sought for something he
+knew not what.  In truth, it was the LOST PACK, the pack of the
+primeval world before the dog ever came in to the fires of men,
+and, for that matter, before men built fires and before men were
+men.
+
+He had been born only the other day and had lived but two years in
+the world, so that, of himself, he had no knowledge of the lost
+pack.  For many thousands of generations he had been away from it;
+yet, deep down in the crypts of being, tied about and wrapped up
+in every muscle and nerve of him, was the indelible record of the
+days in the wild when dim ancestors had run with the pack and at
+the same time developed the pack and themselves.  When Michael was
+asleep, then it was that pack-memories sometimes arose to the
+surface of his subconscious mind.  These dreams were real while
+they lasted, but when he was awake he remembered them little if at
+all.  But asleep, or singing with Steward, he sensed and yearned
+for the lost pack and was impelled to seek the forgotten way to
+it.
+
+Waking, Michael had another and real pack.  This was composed of
+Steward, Kwaque, Cocky, and Scraps, and he ran with it as ancient
+forbears had ran with their own kind in the hunting.  The steerage
+was the lair of this pack, and, out of the steerage, it ranged the
+whole world, which was the Mary Turner ever rocking, heeling,
+reeling on the surface of the unstable sea.
+
+But the steerage and its company meant more to Michael than the
+mere pack.  It was heaven as well, where dwelt God.  Man early
+invented God, often of stone, or clod, or fire, and placed him in
+trees and mountains and among the stars.  This was because man
+observed that man passed and was lost out of the tribe, or family,
+or whatever name he gave to his group, which was, after all, the
+human pack.  And man did not want to be lost out of the pack.  So,
+of his imagination, he devised a new pack that would be eternal
+and with which he might for ever run.  Fearing the dark, into
+which he observed all men passed, he built beyond the dark a
+fairer region, a happier hunting-ground, a jollier and robuster
+feasting-hall and wassailing-place, and called it variously
+"heaven."
+
+Like some of the earliest and lowest of primitive men, Michael
+never dreamed of throwing the shadow of himself across his mind
+and worshipping it as God.  He did not worship shadows.  He
+worshipped a real and indubitable god, not fashioned in his own
+four-legged, hair-covered image, but in the flesh-and-blood image,
+two-legged, hairless, upstanding, of Steward.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+
+Had the trade wind not failed on the second day after laying the
+course for the Marquesas; had Captain Doane, at the mid-day meal,
+not grumbled once again at being equipped with only one
+chronometer; had Simon Nishikanta not become viciously angry
+thereat and gone on deck with his rifle to find some sea-denizen
+to kill; and had the sea-denizen that appeared close alongside
+been a bonita, a dolphin, a porpoise, an albacore, or anything
+else than a great, eighty-foot cow whale accompanied by her
+nursing calf--had any link been missing from this chain of events,
+the Mary Turner would have undoubtedly reached the Marquesas,
+filled her water-barrels, and returned to the treasure-hunting;
+and the destinies of Michael, Daughtry, Kwaque, and Cocky would
+have been quite different and possibly less terrible.
+
+But every link was present for the occasion.  The schooner, in a
+dead calm, was rolling over the huge, smooth seas, her boom sheets
+and tackles crashing to the hollow thunder of her great sails,
+when Simon Nishikanta put a bullet into the body of the little
+whale calf.  By an almost miracle of chance, the shot killed the
+calf.  It was equivalent to killing an elephant with a pea-rifle.
+Not at once did the calf die.  It merely immediately ceased its
+gambols and for a while lay quivering on the surface of the ocean.
+The mother was beside it the moment after it was struck, and to
+those on board, looking almost directly down upon her, her dismay
+and alarm were very patent.  She would nudge the calf with her
+huge shoulder, circle around and around it, then range up
+alongside and repeat her nudgings and shoulderings.
+
+All on the Mary Turner, fore and aft, lined the rail and stared
+down apprehensively at the leviathan that was as long as the
+schooner.
+
+"If she should do to us, sir, what that other one did to the
+Essex," Dag Daughtry observed to the Ancient Mariner.
+
+"It would be no more than we deserve," was the response.  "It was
+uncalled-for--a wanton, cruel act."
+
+Michael, aware of the excitement overside but unable to see
+because of the rail, leaped on top of the cabin and at sight of
+the monster barked defiantly.  Every eye turned on him in
+startlement and fear, and Steward hushed him with a whispered
+command.
+
+"This is the last time," Grimshaw muttered in a low voice, tense
+with anger, to Nishikanta.  "If ever again, on this voyage, you
+take a shot at a whale, I'll wring your dirty neck for you.  Get
+me.  I mean it.  I'll choke your eye-balls out of you."
+
+The Jew smiled in a sickly way and whined, "There ain't nothing
+going to happen.  I don't believe that Essex ever was sunk by a
+whale."
+
+Urged on by its mother, the dying calf made spasmodic efforts to
+swim that were futile and caused it to veer and wallow from side
+to side.
+
+In the course of circling about it, the mother accidentally
+brushed her shoulder under the port quarter of the Mary Turner,
+and the Mary Turner listed to starboard as her stern was lifted a
+yard or more.  Nor was this unintentional, gentle impact all.  The
+instant after her shoulder had touched, startled by the contact,
+she flailed out with her tail.  The blow smote the rail just
+for'ard of the fore-shrouds, splintering a gap through it as if it
+were no more than a cigar-box and cracking the covering board.
+
+That was all, and an entire ship's company stared down in silence
+and fear at a sea-monster grief-stricken over its dying progeny.
+
+Several times, in the course of an hour, during which the schooner
+and the two whales drifted farther and farther apart, the calf
+strove vainly to swim.  Then it set up a great quivering, which
+culminated in a wild wallowing and lashing about of its tail.
+
+"It is the death-flurry," said the Ancient Mariner softly.
+
+"By damn, it's dead," was Captain Doane's comment five minutes
+later.  "Who'd believe it?  A rifle bullet!  I wish to heaven we
+could get half an hour's breeze of wind to get us out of this
+neighbourhood."
+
+"A close squeak," said Grimshaw,
+
+Captain Doane shook his head, as his anxious eyes cast aloft to
+the empty canvas and quested on over the sea in the hope of wind-
+ruffles on the water.  But all was glassy calm, each great sea, of
+all the orderly procession of great seas, heaving up, round-topped
+and mountainous, like so much quicksilver.
+
+"It's all right," Grimahaw encouraged.  "There she goes now,
+beating it away from us."
+
+"Of course it's all right, always was all right," Nishikanta
+bragged, as he wiped the sweat from his face and neck and looked
+with the others after the departing whale.  "You're a fine brave
+lot, you are, losing your goat to a fish."
+
+"I noticed your face was less yellow than usual," Grimshaw
+sneered.  "It must have gone to your heart."
+
+Captain Doane breathed a great sigh.  His relief was too strong to
+permit him to join in the squabbling.
+
+"You're yellow," Grimshaw went on, "yellow clean through."  He
+nodded his head toward the Ancient Mariner.  "Now there's the real
+thing as a man.  No yellow in him.  He never batted an eye, and I
+reckon he knew more about the danger than you did.  If I was to
+choose being wrecked on a desert island with him or you, I'd take
+him a thousand times first.  If--"
+
+But a cry from the sailors interrupted him.
+
+"Merciful God!" Captain Doane breathed aloud.
+
+The great cow whale had turned about, and, on the surface, was
+charging straight back at them.  Such was her speed that a bore
+was raised by her nose like that which a Dreadnought or an
+Atlantic liner raises on the sea.
+
+"Hold fast, all!" Captain Doane roared.
+
+Every man braced himself for the shock.  Henrik Gjertsen, the
+sailor at the wheel, spread his legs, crouched down, and stiffened
+his shoulders and arms to hand-grips on opposite spokes of the
+wheel.  Several of the crew fled from the waist to the poop, and
+others of them sprang into the main-rigging.  Daughtry, one hand
+on the rail, with his free arm clasped the Ancient Mariner around
+the waist.
+
+All held.  The whale struck the Mary Turner just aft of the fore-
+shroud.  A score of things, which no eye could take in
+simultaneously, happened.  A sailor, in the main rigging, carried
+away a ratline in both hands, fell head-downward, and was clutched
+by an ankle and saved head-downward by a comrade, as the schooner
+cracked and shuddered, uplifted on the port side, and was flung
+down on her starboard side till the ocean poured level over her
+rail.  Michael, on the smooth roof of the cabin, slithered down
+the steep slope to starboard and disappeared, clawing and
+snarling, into the runway.  The port shrouds of the foremast
+carried away at the chain-plates, and the fore-topmast leaned over
+drunkenly to starboard.
+
+"My word," quoth the Ancient Mariner.  "We certainly felt that."
+
+"Mr. Jackson," Captain Doane commanded the mate, "will you sound
+the well."
+
+The mate obeyed, although he kept an anxious eye on the whale,
+which had gone off at a tangent and was smoking away to the
+eastward.
+
+"You see, that's what you get," Grimshaw snarled at Nishikanta.
+
+Nishikanta nodded, as he wiped the sweat away, and muttered, "And
+I'm satisfied.  I got all I want.  I didn't think a whale had it
+in it.  I'll never do it again."
+
+"Maybe you'll never have the chance," the captain retorted.
+"We're not done with this one yet.  The one that charged the Essex
+made charge after charge, and I guess whale nature hasn't changed
+any in the last few years."
+
+"Dry as a bone, sir," Mr. Jackson reported the result of his
+sounding.
+
+"There she turns," Daughtry called out.
+
+Half a mile away, the whale circled about sharply and charged
+back.
+
+"Stand from under for'ard there!" Captain Doane shouted to one of
+the sailors who had just emerged from the forecastle scuttle, sea-
+bag in hand, and over whom the fore-topmast was swaying giddily.
+
+"He's packed for the get-away," Daughtry murmured to the Ancient
+Mariner.  "Like a rat leaving a ship."
+
+"We're all rats," was the reply.  "I learned just that when I was
+a rat among the mangy rats of the poor-farm."
+
+By this time, all men on board had communicated to Michael their
+contagion of excitement and fear.  Back on top of the cabin so
+that he might see, he snarled at the cow whale when the men seized
+fresh grips against the impending shock and when he saw her close
+at hand and oncoming.
+
+The Mary Turner was struck aft of the mizzen shrouds.  As she was
+hurled down to starboard, whither Michael was ignominiously flung,
+the crack of shattered timbers was plainly heard.  Henrik
+Gjertsen, at the wheel, clutching the wheel with all his strength,
+was spun through the air as the wheel was spun by the fling of the
+rudder.  He fetched up against Captain Doane, whose grip had been
+torn loose from the rail.  Both men crumpled down on deck with the
+wind knocked out of them.  Nishikanta leaned cursing against the
+side of the cabin, the nails of both hands torn off at the quick
+by the breaking of his grip on the rail.
+
+While Daughtry was passing a turn of rope around the Ancient
+Mariner and the mizzen rigging and giving the turn to him to hold,
+Captain Doane crawled gasping to the rail and dragged himself
+erect.
+
+"That fetched her," he whispered huskily to the mate, hand pressed
+to his side to control his pain.  "Sound the well again, and keep
+on sounding."
+
+More of the sailors took advantage of the interval to rush for'ard
+under the toppling fore-topmast, dive into the forecastle, and
+hastily pack their sea-bags.  As Ah Moy emerged from the steerage
+with his own rotund sea-bag, Daughtry dispatched Kwaque to pack
+the belongings of both of them.
+
+"Dry as a bone, sir," came the mate's report.
+
+"Keep on sounding, Mr. Jackson," the captain ordered, his voice
+already stronger as he recovered from the shock of his collision
+with the helmsman.  "Keep right on sounding.  Here she comes
+again, and the schooner ain't built that'd stand such hammering."
+
+By this time Daughtry had Michael tucked under one arm, his free
+arm ready to anticipate the next crash by swinging on to the
+rigging.
+
+In making its circle to come back, the cow lost her bearings
+sufficiently to miss the stern of the Mary Turner by twenty feet.
+Nevertheless, the bore of her displacement lifted the schooner's
+stern gently and made her dip her bow to the sea in a stately
+curtsey.
+
+"If she'd a-hit . . . " Captain Doane murmured and ceased.
+
+"It'd a-ben good night," Daughtry concluded for him.  "She's a-
+knocked our stern clean off of us, sir."
+
+Again wheeling, this time at no more than two hundred yards, the
+whale charged back, not completing her semi-circle sufficiently,
+so that she bore down upon the schooner's bow from starboard.  Her
+back hit the stem and seemed just barely to scrape the martingale,
+yet the Mary Turner sat down till the sea washed level with her
+stern-rail.  Nor was this all.  Martingale, bob-stays and all
+parted, as well as all starboard stays to the bowsprit, so that
+the bowsprit swung out to port at right angles and uplifted to the
+drag of the remaining topmast stays.  The topmast anticked high in
+the air for a space, then crashed down to deck, permitting the
+bowsprit to dip into the sea, go clear with the butt of it of the
+forecastle head, and drag alongside.
+
+"Shut up that dog!" Nishikanta ordered Daughtry savagery.  "If you
+don't . . . "
+
+Michael, in Steward's arms, was snarling and growling
+intimidatingly, not merely at the cow whale but at all the hostile
+and menacing universe that had thrown panic into the two-legged
+gods of his floating world.
+
+"Just for that," Daughtry snarled back, "I'll let 'm sing.  You
+made this mess, and if you lift a hand to my dog you'll miss
+seeing the end of the mess you started, you dirty pawnbroker,
+you."
+
+"Perfectly right, perfectly right," the Ancient Mariner nodded
+approbation.  "Do you think, steward, you could get a width of
+canvas, or a blanket, or something soft and broad with which to
+replace this rope?  It cuts me too sharply in the spot where my
+three ribs are missing."
+
+Daughtry thrust Michael into the old man's arm.
+
+"Hold him, sir," the steward said.  "If that pawnbroker makes a
+move against Killeny Boy, spit in his face, bite him, anything.
+I'll be back in a jiffy, sir, before he can hurt you and before
+the whale can hit us again.  And let Killeny Boy make all the
+noise he wants.  One hair of him's worth more than a world-full of
+skunks of money-lenders."
+
+Daughtry dashed into the cabin, came back with a pillow and three
+sheets, and, using the first as a pad and knotting the last
+together in swift weaver's knots, he left the Ancient Mariner safe
+and soft and took Michael back into his own arms.
+
+"She's making water, sir," the mate called.  "Six inches--no,
+seven inches, sir."
+
+There was a rush of sailors across the wreckage of the fore-
+topmast to the forecastle to pack their bags.
+
+"Swing out that starboard boat, Mr. Jackson," the captain
+commanded, staring after the foaming course of the cow as she
+surged away for a fresh onslaught.  "But don't lower it.  Hold it
+overside in the falls, or that damned fish'll smash it.  Just
+swing it out, ready and waiting, let the men get their bags, then
+stow food and water aboard of her."
+
+Lashings were cast off the boat and the falls attached, when the
+men fled to holding-vantage just ere the whale arrived.  She
+struck the Mary Turner squarely amidships on the port beam, so
+that, from the poop, one saw, as well as heard, her long side bend
+and spring back like a limber fabric.  The starboard rail buried
+under the sea as the schooner heeled to the blow, and, as she
+righted with a violent lurch, the water swashed across the deck to
+the knees of the sailors about the boat and spouted out of the
+port scuppers.
+
+"Heave away!" Captain Doane ordered from the poop.  "Up with her!
+Swing her out!  Hold your turns!  Make fast!"
+
+The boat was outboard, its gunwale resting against the Mary
+Turner's rail.
+
+"Ten inches, sir, and making fast," was the mate's information, as
+he gauged the sounding-rod.
+
+"I'm going after my tools," Captain Doane announced, as he started
+for the cabin.  Half into the scuttle, he paused to add with a
+sneer for Nishikanta's benefit, "And for my one chronometer."
+
+"A foot and a half, and making," the mate shouted aft to him.
+
+"We'd better do some packing ourselves," Grimshaw, following on
+the captain, said to Nishikanta.
+
+"Steward," Nishikanta said, "go below and pack my bedding.  I'll
+take care of the rest."
+
+"Mr. Nishikanta, you can go to hell, sir, and all the rest as
+well," was Daughtry's quiet response, although in the same breath
+he was saying, respectfully and assuringly, to the Ancient
+Mariner:  "You hold Killeny, sir.  I'll take care of your dunnage.
+Is there anything special you want to save, sir?"
+
+Jackson joined the four men below, and as the five of them, in
+haste and trepidation, packed articles of worth and comfort, the
+Mary Turner was struck again.  Caught below without warning, all
+were flung fiercely to port and from Simon Nishikanta's room came
+wailing curses of announcement of the hurt to his ribs against his
+bunk-rail.  But this was drowned by a prodigious smashing and
+crashing on deck.
+
+"Kindling wood--there won't be anything else left of her," Captain
+Doane commented in the ensuing calm, as he crept gingerly up the
+companionway with his chronometer cuddled on an even keel to his
+breast.
+
+Placing it in the custody of a sailor, he returned below and was
+helped up with his sea-chest by the steward.  In turn, he helped
+the steward up with the Ancient Mariner's sea-chest.  Next, aided
+by anxious sailors, he and Daughtry dropped into the lazarette
+through the cabin floor, and began breaking out and passing up a
+stream of supplies--cases of salmon and beef, of marmalade and
+biscuit, of butter and preserved milk, and of all sorts of the
+tinned, desiccated, evaporated, and condensed stuff that of modern
+times goes down to the sea in ships for the nourishment of men.
+
+Daughtry and the captain emerged last from the cabin, and both
+stared upward for a moment at the gaps in the slender, sky-
+scraping top-hamper, where, only minutes before, the main- and
+mizzen-topmasts had been.  A second moment they devoted to the
+wreckage of the same on deck--the mizzen-topmast, thrust through
+the spanker and supported vertically by the stout canvas,
+thrashing back and forth with each thrash of the sail, the main-
+topmast squarely across the ruined companionway to the steerage.
+
+While the mother-whale expressing her bereavement in terms of
+violence and destruction, was withdrawing the necessary distance
+for another charge, all hands of the Mary Turner gathered about
+the starboard boat swung outboard ready for lowering.  A
+respectable hill of case goods, water-kegs, and personal dunnage
+was piled on the deck alongside.  A glance at this, and at the
+many men of fore and aft, demonstrated that it was to be a
+perilously overloaded boat.
+
+"We want the sailors with us, at any rate--they can row," said
+Simon Nishikanta.
+
+"But do we want you?" Grimshaw queried gloomily.  "You take up too
+much room, for your size, and you're a beast anyway."
+
+"I guess I'll be wanted," the pawnbroker observed, as he jerked
+open his shirt, tearing out the four buttons in his impetuousness
+and showing a Colt's .44 automatic, strapped in its holster
+against the bare skin of his side under his left arm, the butt of
+the weapon most readily accessible to any hasty dip of his right
+hand.  "I guess I'll be wanted.  But just the same we can dispense
+with the undesirables."
+
+"If you will have your will," the wheat-farmer conceded
+sardonically, although his big hand clenched involuntarily as if
+throttling a throat.  "Besides, if we should run short of food you
+will prove desirable--for the quantity of you, I mean, and not
+otherwise.  Now just who would you consider undesirable?--the
+black nigger?  He ain't got a gun."
+
+But his pleasantries were cut short by the whale's next attack--
+another smash at the stern that carried away the rudder and
+destroyed the steering gear.
+
+"How much water?" Captain Doane queried of the mate.
+
+"Three feet, sir--I just sounded," came the answer.  "I think,
+sir, it would be advisable to part-load the boat; then, right
+after the next time the whale hits us, lower away on the run,
+chuck the rest of the dunnage in, and ourselves, and get clear."
+
+Captain Doane nodded.
+
+"It will be lively work," he said.  "Stand ready, all of you.
+Steward, you jump aboard first and I'll pass the chronometer to
+you."
+
+Nishikanta bellicosely shouldered his vast bulk up to the captain,
+opened his shirt, and exposed his revolver.
+
+"There's too many for the boat," he said, "and the steward's one
+of 'em that don't go along.  Get that.  Hold it in your head.  The
+steward's one of 'em that don't go along."
+
+Captain Doane coolly surveyed the big automatic, while at the fore
+of his consciousness burned a vision of his flat buildings in San
+Francisco.
+
+He shrugged his shoulders.  "The boat would be overloaded, with
+all this truck, anyway.  Go ahead, if you want to make it your
+party, but just bear in mind that I'm the navigator, and that, if
+you ever want to lay eyes on your string of pawnshops, you'd
+better see that gentle care is taken of me.--Steward!"
+
+Daughtry stepped close.
+
+"There won't be room for you . . . and for one or two others, I'm
+sorry to say."
+
+"Glory be!" said Daughtry.  "I was just fearin' you'd be wantin'
+me along, sir.--Kwaque, you take 'm my fella dunnage belong me,
+put 'm in other fella boat along other side."
+
+While Kwaque obeyed, the mate sounded the well for the last time,
+reporting three feet and a half, and the lighter freightage of the
+starboard boat was tossed in by the sailors.
+
+A rangy, gangly, Scandinavian youth of a sailor, droop-shouldered,
+six feet six and slender as a lath, with pallid eyes of palest
+blue and skin and hair attuned to the same colour scheme, joined
+Kwaque in his work.
+
+"Here, you Big John," the mate interfered.  "This is your boat.
+You work here."
+
+The lanky one smiled in embarrassment as he haltingly explained:
+"I tank I lak go along cooky."
+
+"Sure, let him go, the more the easier," Nishikanta took charge of
+the situation.  "Anybody else?"
+
+"Sure," Dag Daughtry sneered to his face.  "I reckon what's left
+of the beer goes with my boat . . . unless you want to argue the
+matter."
+
+"For two cents--" Nishikanta spluttered in affected rage.
+
+"Not for two billion cents would you risk a scrap with me, you
+money-sweater, you," was Daughtry's retort.  "You've got their
+goats, but I've got your number.  Not for two billion billion
+cents would you excite me into callin' it right now.--Big John!
+Just carry that case of beer across, an' that half case, and store
+in my boat.--Nishikanta, just start something, if you've got the
+nerve."
+
+Simon Nishikanta did not dare, nor did he know what to do; but he
+was saved from his perplexity by the shout:
+
+"Here she comes!"
+
+All rushed to holding-ground, and held, while the whale broke more
+timbers and the Mary Turner rolled sluggishly down and back again.
+
+"Lower away!  On the run!  Lively!"
+
+Captain Doane's orders were swiftly obeyed.  The starboard boat,
+fended off by sailors, rose and fell in the water alongside while
+the remainder of the dunnage and provisions showered into her.
+
+"Might as well lend a hand, sir, seein' you're bent on leaving in
+such a hurry," said Daughtry, taking the chronometer from Captain
+Doane's hand and standing ready to pass it down to him as soon as
+he was in the boat.
+
+"Come on, Greenleaf," Grimshaw called up to the Ancient Mariner.
+
+"No, thanking you very kindly, sir," came the reply.  "I think
+there'll be more room in the other boat."
+
+"We want the cook!" Nishikanta cried out from the stern sheets.
+"Come on, you yellow monkey!  Jump in!"
+
+Little old shrivelled Ah Moy debated.  He visibly thought,
+although none knew the intrinsicness of his thinking as he stared
+at the gun of the fat pawnbroker and at the leprosy of Kwaque and
+Daughtry, and weighed the one against the other and tossed the
+light and heavy loads of the two boats into the balance.
+
+"Me go other boat," said Ah Moy, starting to drag his bag away
+across the deck.
+
+"Cast off," Captain Doane commanded.
+
+Scraps, the big Newfoundland puppy, who had played and pranced
+about through all the excitement, seeing so many of the Mary
+Turner's humans in the boat alongside, sprang over the rail, low
+and close to the water, and landed sprawling on the mass of sea-
+bags and goods cases.
+
+The boot rocked, and Nishikanta, his automatic in his hand, cried
+out:
+
+"Back with him!  Throw him on board!"
+
+The sailors obeyed, and the astounded Scraps, after a brief flight
+through the air, found himself arriving on his back on the Mary
+Turner's deck.  At any rate, he took it for no more than a rough
+joke, and rolled about ecstatically, squirming vermicularly, in
+anticipation of what new delights of play were to be visited upon
+him.  He reached out, with an enticing growl of good fellowship,
+for Michael, who was now free on deck, and received in return a
+forbidding and crusty snarl.
+
+"Guess we'll have to add him to our collection, eh, sir?" Daughtry
+observed, sparing a moment to pat reassurance on the big puppy's
+head and being rewarded with a caressing lick on his hand from the
+puppy's blissful tongue.
+
+No first-class ship's steward can exist without possessing a more
+than average measure of executive ability.  Dag Daughtry was a
+first-class ship's steward.  Placing the Ancient Mariner in a nook
+of safety, and setting Big John to unlashing the remaining boat
+and hooking on the falls, he sent Kwaque into the hold to fill
+kegs of water from the scant remnant of supply, and Ah Moy to
+clear out the food in the galley.
+
+The starboard boat, cluttered with men, provisions, and property
+and being rapidly rowed away from the danger centre, which was the
+Mary Turner, was scarcely a hundred yards away, when the whale,
+missing the schooner clean, turned at full speed and close range,
+churning the water, and all but collided with the boat.  So near
+did she come that the rowers on the side next to her pulled in
+their oars.  The surge she raised, heeled the loaded boat gunwale
+under, so that a degree of water was shipped ere it righted.
+Nishikanta, automatic still in hand, standing up in the
+sternsheets by the comfortable seat he had selected for himself,
+was staggered by the lurch of the boat.  In his instinctive,
+spasmodic effort to maintain balance, he relaxed his clutch on the
+pistol, which fell into the sea.
+
+"HA-AH!" Daughtry girded.  "What price Nishikanta?  I got his
+number, and he's lost you fellows' goats.  He's your meat now.
+Easy meat?  I should say!  And when it comes to the eating, eat
+him first.  Sure, he's a skunk, and will taste like one, but
+many's the honest man that's eaten skunk and pulled through a
+tight place.  But you'd better soak 'im all night in salt water,
+first."
+
+Grimshaw, whose seat in the sternsheets was none of the best,
+grasped the situation simultaneously with Daughtry, and, with a
+quick upstanding, and hooking out-reach of hand, caught the fat
+pawn-broker around the back of the neck, and with anything but
+gentle suasion jerked him half into the air and flung him face
+downward on the bottom boards.
+
+"Ha-ah!" said Daughtry across the hundred yards of ocean.
+
+Next, and without hurry, Grimshaw took the more comfortable seat
+for himself.
+
+"Want to come along?" he called to Daughtry.
+
+"No, thank you, sir," was the latter's reply.  "There's too many
+of us, an' we'll make out better in the other boat."
+
+With some bailing, and with others bending to the oars, the boat
+rowed frantically away, while Daughtry took Ah Moy with him down
+into the lazarette beneath the cabin floor and broke out and
+passed up more provisions.
+
+It was when he was thus below that the cow grazed the schooner
+just for'ard of amidships on the port side, lashed out with her
+mighty tail as she sounded, and ripped clean away the chain plates
+and rail of the mizzen-shrouds.  In the next roll of the huge,
+glassy sea, the mizzen-mast fell overside.
+
+"My word, some whale," Daughtry said to Ah Moy, as they emerged
+from the cabin companionway and gazed at this latest wreckage.
+
+Ah Moy found need to get more food from the galley, when Daughtry,
+Kwaque, and Big John swung their weight on the falls, one at a
+time, and hoisted the port boat, one end at a time, over the rail
+and swung her out.
+
+"We'll wait till the next smash, then lower away, throw everything
+in, an' get outa this," the steward told the Ancient Mariner.
+"Lots of time.  The schooner'll sink no faster when she's awash
+than she's sinkin' now."
+
+Even as he spoke, the scuppers were nearly level with the ocean,
+and her rolling in the big sea was sluggish.
+
+"Hey!" he called with sudden forethought across the widening
+stretch of sea to Captain Doane.  "What's the course to the
+Marquesas?  Right now?  And how far away, sir?"
+
+"Nor'-nor'-east-quarter-east!" came the faint reply.  "Will fetch
+Nuka-Hiva!  About two hundred miles!  Haul on the south-east trade
+with a good full and you'll make it!"
+
+"Thank you, sir," was the steward's acknowledgment, ere he ran
+aft, disrupted the binnacle, and carried the steering compass back
+to the boat.
+
+Almost, from the whale's delay in renewing her charging, did they
+think she had given over.  And while they waited and watched her
+rolling on the sea an eighth of a mile away, the Mary Turner
+steadily sank.
+
+"We might almost chance it," Daughtry was debating aloud to Big
+John, when a new voice entered the discussion.
+
+"Cocky! --Cocky!" came plaintive tones from below out of the
+steerage companion.
+
+"Devil be damned!" was the next, uttered in irritation and anger.
+"Devil be damned!  Devil be damned!"
+
+"Of course not," was Daughtry's judgment, as he dashed across the
+deck, crawled through the confusion of the main-topmast and its
+many stays that blocked the way, and found the tiny, white morsel
+of life perched on a bunk-edge, ruffling its feathers, erecting
+and flattening its rosy crest, and cursing in honest human speech
+the waywardness of the world and of ships and humans upon the sea.
+
+The cockatoo stepped upon Daughtry's inviting index finger,
+swiftly ascended his shirt sleeve, and, on his shoulder, claws
+sunk into the flimsy shirt fabric till they hurt the flesh
+beneath, leaned head to ear and uttered in gratitude and relief,
+and in self-identification:  "Cocky.  Cocky."
+
+"You son of a gun," Daughtry crooned.
+
+"Glory be!" Cooky replied, in tones so like Daughtry's as to
+startle him.
+
+"You son of a gun," Daughtry repeated, cuddling his cheek and ear
+against the cockatoo's feathered and crested head.  "And some
+folks thinks it's only folks that count in this world."
+
+Still the whale delayed, and, with the ocean washing their toes on
+the level deck, Daughtry ordered the boat lowered away.  Ah Moy
+was eager in his haste to leap into the bow.  Nor was Daughtry's
+judgment correct that the little Chinaman's haste was due to fear
+of the sinking ship.  What Ah Moy sought was the place in the boat
+remotest from Kwaque and the steward.
+
+Shoving clear, they roughly stored the supplies and dunnage out of
+the way of the thwarts and took their places, Ah Moy pulling bow-
+oar, next in order Big John and Kwaque, with Daughtry (Cocky still
+perched on his shoulder) at stroke.  On top of the dunnage, in the
+stern-sheets, Michael gazed wistfully at the Mary Turner and
+continued to snarl crustily at Scraps who idiotically wanted to
+start a romp.  The Ancient Mariner stood up at the steering sweep
+and gave the order, when all was ready, for the first dip of the
+oars.
+
+A growl and a bristle from Michael warned them that the whale was
+not only coming but was close upon them.  But it was not charging.
+Instead, it circled slowly about the schooner as if examining its
+antagonist.
+
+"I'll bet it's head's sore from all that banging, an' it's
+beginnin' to feel it," Daughtry grinned, chiefly for the purpose
+of keeping his comrades unafraid.
+
+Barely had they rowed a dozen strokes, when an exclamation from
+Big John led them to follow his gaze to the schooners forecastle-
+head, where the forecastle cat flashed across in pursuit of a big
+rat.  Other rats they saw, evidently driven out of their lairs by
+the rising water.
+
+"We just can't leave that cat behind," Daughtry soliloquized in
+suggestive tones.
+
+"Certainly not," the Ancient Mariner responded swinging his weight
+on the steering-sweep and heading the boat back.
+
+Twice the whale gently rolled them in the course of its leisurely
+circling, ere they bent to their oars again and pulled away.  Of
+them the whale seemed to take no notice.  It was from the huge
+thing, the schooner, that death had been wreaked upon her calf;
+and it was upon the schooner that she vented the wrath of her
+grief.
+
+Even as they pulled away, the whale turned and headed across the
+ocean.  At a half-mile distance she curved about and charged back.
+
+"With all that water in her, the schooner'll have a real kick-back
+in her when she's hit," Daughtry said.  "Lordy me, rest on your
+oars an' watch."
+
+Delivered squarely amidships, it was the hardest blow the Mary
+Turner had received.  Stays and splinters of rail flew in the air
+as she rolled so far over as to expose half her copper wet-
+glistening in the sun.  As she righted sluggishly, the mainmast
+swayed drunkenly in the air but did not fall.
+
+"A knock-out!" Daughtry cried, at sight of the whale flurrying the
+water with aimless, gigantic splashings.  "It must a-smashed both
+of 'em."
+
+"Schooner he finish close up altogether," Kwaque observed, as the
+Mary Turner's rail disappeared.
+
+Swiftly she sank, and no more than a matter of moments was it when
+the stump of her mainmast was gone.  Remained only the whale,
+floating and floundering, on the surface of the sea.
+
+"It's nothing to brag about," Daughtry delivered himself of the
+Mary Turner's epitaph.  "Nobody'd believe us.  A stout little
+craft like that sunk, deliberately sunk, by an old cow-whale!  No,
+sir.  I never believed that old moss-back in Honolulu, when he
+claimed he was a survivor of the sinkin' of the Essex, an' no more
+will anybody believe me."
+
+"The pretty schooner, the pretty clever craft," mourned the
+Ancient Mariner.  "Never were there more dainty and lovable
+topmasts on a three-masted schooner, and never was there a three-
+masted schooner that worked like the witch she was to windward."
+
+Dag Daughtry, who had kept always foot-loose and never married,
+surveyed the boat-load of his responsibilities to which he was
+anchored--Kwaque, the Black Papuan monstrosity whom he had saved
+from the bellies of his fellows; Ah Moy, the little old sea-cook
+whose age was problematical only by decades; the Ancient Mariner,
+the dignified, the beloved, and the respected; gangly Big John,
+the youthful Scandinavian with the inches of a giant and the mind
+of a child; Killeny Boy, the wonder of dogs; Scraps, the
+outrageously silly and fat-rolling puppy; Cocky, the white-
+feathered mite of life, imperious as a steel-blade and wheedlingly
+seductive as a charming child; and even the forecastle cat, the
+lithe and tawny slayer of rats, sheltering between the legs of Ah
+Moy.  And the Marquesas were two hundred miles distant full-hauled
+on the tradewind which had ceased but which was as sure to live
+again as the morning sun in the sky.
+
+The steward heaved a sigh, and whimsically shot into his mind the
+memory-picture in his nursery-book of the old woman who lived in a
+shoe.  He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his
+hand, and was dimly aware of the area of the numbness that
+bordered the centre that was sensationless between his eyebrows,
+as he said:
+
+"Well, children, rowing won't fetch us to the Marquesas.  We'll
+need a stretch of wind for that.  But it's up to us, right now, to
+put a mile or so between us an' that peevish old cow.  Maybe
+she'll revive, and maybe she won't, but just the same I can't help
+feelin' leary about her."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+
+Two days later, as the steamer Mariposa plied her customary route
+between Tahiti and San Francisco, the passengers ceased playing
+deck quoits, abandoned their card games in the smoker, their
+novels and deck chairs, and crowded the rail to stare at the small
+boat that skimmed to them across the sea before a light following
+breeze.  When Big John, aided by Ah Moy and Kwaque, lowered the
+sail and unstepped the mast, titters and laughter arose from the
+passengers.  It was contrary to all their preconceptions of mid-
+ocean rescue of ship-wrecked mariners from the open boat.
+
+It caught their fancy that this boat was the Ark, what of its
+freightage of bedding, dry goods boxes, beer-cases, a cat, two
+dogs, a white cockatoo, a Chinaman, a kinky-headed black, a gangly
+pallid-haired giant, a grizzled Dag Daughtry, and an Ancient
+Mariner who looked every inch the part.  Him a facetious,
+vacationing architect's clerk dubbed Noah, and so greeted him.
+
+"I say, Noah," he called.  "Some flood, eh?  Located Ararat yet?"
+
+"Catch any fish?" bawled another youngster down over the rail.
+
+"Gracious!  Look at the beer!  Good English beer!  Put me down for
+a case!"
+
+Never was a more popular wrecked crew more merrily rescued at sea.
+The young blades would have it that none other than old Noah
+himself had come on board with the remnants of the Lost Tribes,
+and to elderly female passengers spun hair-raising accounts of the
+sinking of an entire tropic island by volcanic and earthquake
+action.
+
+"I'm a steward," Dag Daughtry told the Mariposa's captain, "and
+I'll be glad and grateful to berth along with your stewards in the
+glory-hole.  Big John there's a sailorman, an' the fo'c's'le 'll
+do him.  The Chink is a ship's cook, and the nigger belongs to me.
+But Mr. Greenleaf, sir, is a gentleman, and the best of cabin fare
+and staterooms'll be none too good for him, sir."
+
+And when the news went around that these were part of the
+survivors of the three-masted schooner, Mary Turner, smashed into
+kindling wood and sunk by a whale, the elderly females no more
+believed than had they the yarn of the sunken island.
+
+"Captain Hayward," one of them demanded of the steamer's skipper,
+"could a whale sink the Mariposa?"
+
+"She has never been so sunk," was his reply.
+
+"I knew it!" she declared emphatically.  "It's not the way of
+ships to go around being sunk by whales, is it, captain?"
+
+"No, madam, I assure you it is not," was his response.
+"Nevertheless, all the five men insist upon it."
+
+"Sailors are notorious for their unveracity, are they not?" the
+lady voiced her flat conclusion in the form of a tentative query.
+
+"Worst liars I ever saw, madam.  Do you know, after forty years at
+sea, I couldn't believe myself under oath."
+
+
+Nine days later the Mariposa threaded the Golden Gate and docked
+at San Francisco.  Humorous half-columns in the local papers,
+written in the customary silly way by unlicked cub reporters just
+out of grammar school, tickled the fancy of San Francisco for a
+fleeting moment in that the steamship Mariposa had rescued some
+sea-waifs possessed of a cock-and-bull story that not even the
+reporters believed.  Thus, silly reportorial unveracity usually
+proves extraordinary truth a liar.  It is the way of cub
+reporters, city newspapers, and flat-floor populations which get
+their thrills from moving pictures and for which the real world
+and all its spaciousness does not exist.
+
+"Sunk by a whale!" demanded the average flat-floor person.
+"Nonsense, that's all.  Just plain rotten nonsense.  Now, in the
+'Adventures of Eleanor,' which is some film, believe me, I'll tell
+you what I saw happen . . . "
+
+So Daughtry and his crew went ashore into 'Frisco Town uheralded
+and unsung, the second following morning's lucubrations of the sea
+reporters being varied disportations upon the attack on an Italian
+crab fisherman by an enormous jellyfish.  Big John promptly sank
+out of sight in a sailors' boarding-house, and, within the week,
+joined the Sailors' Union and shipped on a steam schooner to load
+redwood ties at Bandon, Oregon.  Ah Moy got no farther ashore than
+the detention sheds of the Federal Immigration Board, whence he
+was deported to China on the next Pacific Mail steamer.  The Mary
+Turner's cat was adopted by the sailors' forecastle of the
+Mariposa, and on the Mariposa sailed away on the back trip to
+Tahiti.  Scraps was taken ashore by a quartermaster and left in
+the bosom of his family.
+
+And ashore went Dag Daughtry, with his small savings, to rent two
+cheap rooms for himself and his remaining responsibilities,
+namely, Charles Stough Greenleaf, Kwaque, Michael, and, not least,
+Cocky.  But not for long did he permit the Ancient Mariner to live
+with him.
+
+"It's not playing the game, sir," he told him.  "What we need is
+capital.  We've got to interest capital, and you've got to do the
+interesting.  Now this very day you've got to buy a couple of
+suitcases, hire a taxicab, go sailing up to the front door of the
+Bronx Hotel like good pay and be damned.  She's a real stylish
+hotel, but reasonable if you want to make it so.  A little room,
+an inside room, European plan, of course, and then you can
+economise by eatin' out."
+
+"But, steward, I have no money," the Ancient Mariner protested.
+
+"That's all right, sir; I'll back you for all I can."
+
+"But, my dear man, you know I'm an old impostor.  I can't stick
+you up like the others.  You . . . why . . . why, you're a friend,
+don't you see?"
+
+"Sure I do, and I thank you for sayin' it, sir.  And that's why
+I'm with you.  And when you've nailed another crowd of treasure-
+hunters and got the ship ready, you'll just ship me along as
+steward, with Kwaque, and Killeny Boy, and the rest of our family.
+You've adopted me, now, an' I'm your grown-up son, an' you've got
+to listen to me.  The Bronx is the hotel for you--fine-soundin'
+name, ain't it?  That's atmosphere.  Folk'll listen half to you
+an' more to your hotel.  I tell you, you leaning back in a big
+leather chair talkin' treasure with a two-bit cigar in your mouth
+an' a twenty-cent drink beside you, why that's like treasure.
+They just got to believe.  An' if you'll come along now, sir,
+we'll trot out an' buy them suit-cases."
+
+Right bravely the Ancient Mariner drove to the Bronx in a taxi,
+registered his "Charles Stough Greenleaf" in an old-fashioned
+hand, and took up anew the activities which for years had kept him
+free of the poor-farm.  No less bravely did Dag Daughtry set out
+to seek work.  This was most necessary, because he was a man of
+expensive luxuries.  His family of Kwaque, Michael, and Cocky
+required food and shelter; more costly than that was maintenance
+of the Ancient Mariner in the high-class hotel; and, in addition,
+was his six-quart thirst.
+
+But it was a time of industrial depression.  The unemployed
+problem was bulking bigger than usual to the citizens of San
+Francisco.  And, as regarded steamships and sailing vessels, there
+were three stewards for every Steward's position.  Nothing steady
+could Daughtry procure, while his occasional odd jobs did not
+balance his various running expenses.  Even did he do pick-and-
+shovel work, for the municipality, for three days, when he had to
+give way, according to the impartial procedure, to another needy
+one whom three days' work would keep afloat a little longer.
+
+Daughtry would have put Kwaque to work, except that Kwaque was
+impossible.  The black, who had only seen Sydney from steamers'
+decks, had never been in a city in his life.  All he knew of the
+world was steamers, far-outlying south-sea isles, and his own
+island of King William in Melanesia.  So Kwaque remained in the
+two rooms, cooking and housekeeping for his master and caring for
+Michael and Cocky.  All of which was prison for Michael, who had
+been used to the run of ships, of coral beaches and plantations.
+
+But in the evenings, sometimes accompanied a few steps in the rear
+by Kwaque, Michael strolled out with Steward.  The multiplicity of
+man-gods on the teeming sidewalks became a real bore to Michael,
+so that man-gods, in general, underwent a sharp depreciation.  But
+Steward, the particular god of his fealty and worship,
+appreciated.  Amongst so many gods Michael felt bewildered, while
+Steward's Abrahamic bosom became more than ever the one sure haven
+where harshness and danger never troubled.
+
+"Mind your step," is the last word and warning of twentieth-
+century city life.  Michael was not slow to learn it, as he
+conserved his own feet among the countless thousands of leather-
+shod feet of men, ever hurrying, always unregarding of the
+existence and right of way of a lowly, four-legged Irish terrier.
+
+The evening outings with Steward invariably led from saloon to
+saloon, where, at long bars, standing on sawdust floors, or seated
+at tables, men drank and talked.  Much of both did men do, and
+also did Steward do, ere, his daily six-quart stint accomplished,
+he turned homeward for bed.  Many were the acquaintances he made,
+and Michael with him.  Coasting seamen and bay sailors they mostly
+were, although there were many 'longshoremen and waterfront
+workmen among them.
+
+From one of these, a scow-schooner captain who plied up and down
+the bay and the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers, Daughtry had
+the promise of being engaged as cook and sailor on the schooner
+Howard.  Eighty tons of freight, including deckload, she carried,
+and in all democracy Captain Jorgensen, the cook, and the two
+other sailors, loaded and unloaded her at all hours, and sailed
+her night and day on all times and tides, one man steering while
+three slept and recuperated.  It was time, and double-time, and
+over-time beyond that, but the feeding was generous and the wages
+ran from forty-five to sixty dollars a month.
+
+"Sure, you bet," said Captain Jorgensen.  "This cook-feller,
+Hanson, pretty quick I smash him up an' fire him, then you can
+come along . . . and the bow-wow, too."  Here he dropped a hearty,
+wholesome hand of toil down to a caress of Michael's head.
+"That's one fine bow-wow.  A bow-wow is good on a scow when all
+hands sleep alongside the dock or in an anchor watch."
+
+"Fire Hanson now," Dag Daughtry urged.
+
+But Captain Jorgensen shook his slow head slowly.  "First I smash
+him up."
+
+"Then smash him now and fire him," Daughtry persisted.  "There he
+is right now at the corner of the bar."
+
+"No.  He must give me reason.  I got plenty of reason.  But I want
+reason all hands can see.  I want him make me smash him, so that
+all hands say, 'Hurrah, Captain, you done right.'  Then you get
+the job, Daughtry."
+
+Had Captain Jorgensen not been dilatory in his contemplated
+smashing, and had not Hanson delayed in giving sufficient
+provocation for a smashing, Michael would have accompanied Steward
+upon the schooner, Howard, and all Michael's subsequent
+experiences would have been totally different from what they were
+destined to be.  But destined they were, by chance and by
+combinations of chance events over which Michael had no control
+and of which he had no more awareness than had Steward himself.
+At that period, the subsequent stage career and nightmare of
+cruelty for Michael was beyond any wildest forecast or
+apprehension.  And as to forecasting Dag Daughtry's fate, along
+with Kwaque, no maddest drug-dream could have approximated it.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+
+One night Dag Daughtry sat at a table in the saloon called the
+Pile-drivers' Home.  He was in a parlous predicament.  Harder than
+ever had it been to secure odd jobs, and he had reached the end of
+his savings.  Earlier in the evening he had had a telephone
+conference with the Ancient Mariner, who had reported only
+progress with an exceptionally strong nibble that very day from a
+retired quack doctor.
+
+"Let me pawn my rings," the Ancient Mariner had urged, not for the
+first time, over the telephone.
+
+"No, sir," had been Daughtry's reply.  "We need them in the
+business.  They're stock in trade.  They're atmosphere.  They're
+what you call a figure of speech.  I'll do some thinking to-night
+an' see you in the morning, sir.  Hold on to them rings an' don't
+be no more than casual in playin' that doctor.  Make 'm come to
+you.  It's the only way.  Now you're all right, an' everything's
+hunkydory an' the goose hangs high.  Don't you worry, sir.  Dag
+Daughtry never fell down yet."
+
+But, as he sat in the Pile-drivers' Home, it looked as if his
+fall-down was very near.  In his pocket was precisely the room-
+rent for the following week, the advance payment of which was
+already three days overdue and clamorously demanded by the hard-
+faced landlady.  In the rooms, with care, was enough food with
+which to pinch through for another day.  The Ancient Mariner's
+modest hotel bill had not been paid for two weeks--a prodigious
+sum under the circumstances, being a first-class hotel; while the
+Ancient Mariner had no more than a couple of dollars in his pocket
+with which to make a sound like prosperity in the ears of the
+retired doctor who wanted to go a-treasuring.
+
+Most catastrophic of all, however, was the fact that Dag Daughtry
+was three quarts short of his daily allowance and did not dare
+break into the rent money which was all that stood between him and
+his family and the street.  This was why he sat at the beer table
+with Captain Jorgensen, who was just returned with a schooner-load
+of hay from the Petaluma Flats.  He had already bought beer twice,
+and evinced no further show of thirst.  Instead, he was yawning
+from long hours of work and waking and looking at his watch.  And
+Daughtry was three quarts short!  Besides, Hanson had not yet been
+smashed, so that the cook-job on the schooner still lay ahead an
+unknown distance in the future.
+
+In his desperation, Daughtry hit upon an idea with which to get
+another schooner of steam beer.  He did not like steam beer, but
+it was cheaper than lager.
+
+"Look here, Captain," he said.  "You don't know how smart that
+Killeny Boy is.  Why, he can count just like you and me."
+
+"Hoh!" rumbled Captain Jorgensen.  "I seen 'em do it in side
+shows.  It's all tricks.  Dogs an' horses can't count."
+
+"This dog can," Daughtry continued quietly.  "You can't fool 'm.
+I bet you, right now, I can order two beers, loud so he can hear
+and notice, and then whisper to the waiter to bring one, an', when
+the one comes, Killeny Boy'll raise a roar with the waiter."
+
+"Hoh!  Hoh!  How much will you bet?"
+
+The steward fingered a dime in his pocket.  If Killeny failed him
+it meant that the rent-money would be broken in upon.  But Killeny
+couldn't and wouldn't fail him, he reasoned, as he answered:
+
+"I'll bet you the price of two beers."
+
+The waiter was summoned, and, when he had received his secret
+instructions, Michael was called over from where he lay at
+Kwaque's feet in a corner.  When Steward placed a chair for him at
+the table and invited him into it, he began to key up.  Steward
+expected something of him, wanted him to show off.  And it was not
+because of the showing off that he was eager, but because of his
+love for Steward.  Love and service were one in the simple
+processes of Michael's mind.  Just as he would have leaped into
+fire for Steward's sake, so would he now serve Steward in any way
+Steward desired.  That was what love meant to him.  It was all
+love meant to him--service.
+
+"Waiter!" Steward called; and, when the waiter stood close at
+hand:  "Two beers.--Did you get that, Killeny?  TWO beers."
+
+Michael squirmed in his chair, placed an impulsive paw on the
+table, and impulsively flashed out his ribbon of tongue to
+Steward's close-bending face.
+
+"He will remember," Daughtry told the scow-schooner captain.
+
+"Not if we talk," was the reply.  "Now we will fool your bow-wow.
+I will say that the job is yours when I smash Hanson.  And you
+will say it is for me to smash Hanson now.  And I will say Hanson
+must give me reason first to smash him.  And then we will argue
+like two fools with mouths full of much noise.  Are you ready?"
+
+Daughtry nodded, and thereupon ensued a loud-voiced discussion
+that drew Michael's earnest attention from one talker to the
+other.
+
+"I got you," Captain Jorgensen announced, as he saw the waiter
+approaching with but a single schooner of beer.  "The bow-wow has
+forgot, if he ever remembered.  He thinks you 'an me is fighting.
+The place in his mind for ONE beer, and TWO, is wiped out, like a
+wave on the beach wipes out the writing in the sand."
+
+"I guess he ain't goin' to forget arithmetic no matter how much
+noise you shouts," Daughtry argued aloud against his sinking
+spirits.  "An' I ain't goin' to butt in," he added hopefully.
+"You just watch 'm for himself."
+
+The tall, schooner-glass of beer was placed before the captain,
+who laid a swift, containing hand around it.  And Michael, strung
+as a taut string, knowing that something was expected of him, on
+his toes to serve, remembered his ancient lessons on the Makambo,
+vainly looked into the impassive face of Steward for a sign, then
+looked about and saw, not TWO glasses, but ONE glass.  So well had
+he learned the difference between one and two that it came to him-
+-how the profoundest psychologist can no more state than can he
+state what thought is in itself--that there was one glass only
+when two glasses had been commanded.  With an abrupt upspring, his
+throat half harsh with anger, he placed both fore-paws on the
+table and barked at the waiter.
+
+Captain Jorgensen crashed his fist down.
+
+"You win!" he roared.  "I pay for the beer! Waiter, bring one
+more."
+
+Michael looked to Steward for verification, and Steward's hand on
+his head gave adequate reply.
+
+"We try again," said the captain, very much awake and interested,
+with the back of his hand wiping the beer-foam from his moustache.
+"Maybe he knows one an' two.  How about three?  And four?"
+
+"Just the same, Skipper.  He counts up to five, and knows more
+than five when it is more than five, though he don't know the
+figures by name after five."
+
+"Oh, Hanson!" Captain Jorgensen bellowed across the bar-room to
+the cook of the Howard.  "Hey, you square-head!  Come and have a
+drink!"
+
+Hanson came over and pulled up a chair.
+
+"I pay for the drinks," said the captain; "but you order,
+Daughtry.  See, now, Hanson, this is a trick bow-wow.  He can
+count better than you.  We are three.  Daughtry is ordering three
+beers.  The bow-wow hears three.  I hold up two fingers like this
+to the waiter.  He brings two.  The bow-wow raises hell with the
+waiter.  You see."
+
+All of which came to pass, Michael blissfully unappeasable until
+the order was filled properly.
+
+"He can't count," was Hanson's conclusion.  "He sees one man
+without beer.  That's all.  He knows every man should ought to
+have a glass.  That's why he barks."
+
+"Better than that," Daughtry boasted.  "There are three of us.  We
+will order four.  Then each man will have his glass, but Killeny
+will talk to the waiter just the same."
+
+True enough, now thoroughly aware of the game, Michael made outcry
+to the waiter till the fourth glass was brought.  By this time
+many men were about the table, all wanting to buy beer and test
+Michael.
+
+"Glory be," Dag Daughtry solloquized.  "A funny world.  Thirsty
+one moment.  The next moment they'd fair drown you in beer."
+
+Several even wanted to buy Michael, offering ridiculous sums like
+fifteen and twenty dollars.
+
+"I tell you what," Captain Jorgensen muttered to Daughtry, whom he
+had drawn away into a corner.  "You give me that bow-wow, and I'll
+smash Hanson right now, and you got the job right away--come to
+work in the morning."
+
+Into another corner the proprietor of the Pile-drivers' Home drew
+Daughtry to whisper to him:
+
+"You stick around here every night with that dog of yourn.  It
+makes trade.  I'll give you free beer any time and fifty cents
+cash money a night."
+
+It was this proposition that started the big idea in Daughtry's
+mind.  As he told Michael, back in the room, while Kwaque was
+unlacing his shoes:
+
+"It's this way Killeny.  If you're worth fifty cents a night and
+free beer to that saloon keeper, then you're worth that to me . .
+. and more, my son, more.  'Cause he's lookin' for a profit.
+That's why he sells beer instead of buyin' it.  An', Killeny, you
+won't mind workin' for me, I know.  We need the money.  There's
+Kwaque, an' Mr. Greenleaf, an' Cocky, not even mentioning you an'
+me, an' we eat an awful lot.  An' room-rent's hard to get, an'
+jobs is harder.  What d'ye say, son, to-morrow night you an' me
+hustle around an' see how much coin we can gather?"
+
+And Michael, seated on Steward's knees, eyes to eyes and nose to
+nose, his jowls held in Steward's hand's wriggled and squirmed
+with delight, flipping out his tongue and bobbing his tail in the
+air.  Whatever it was, it was good, for it was Steward who spoke.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+
+The grizzled ship's steward and the rough-coated Irish terrier
+quickly became conspicuous figures in the night life of the
+Barbary Coast of San Francisco.  Daughtry elaborated on the
+counting trick by bringing Cocky along.  Thus, when a waiter did
+not fetch the right number of glasses, Michael would remain quite
+still, until Cocky, at a privy signal from Steward, standing on
+one leg, with the free claw would clutch Michael's neck and
+apparently talk into Michael's ear.  Whereupon Michael would look
+about the glasses on the table and begin his usual expostulation
+with the waiter.
+
+But it was when Daughtry and Michael first sang "Roll me Down to
+Rio" together, that the ten-strike was made.  It occurred in a
+sailors' dance-hall on Pacific Street, and all dancing stopped
+while the sailors clamoured for more of the singing dog.  Nor did
+the place lose money, for no one left, and the crowd increased to
+standing room as Michael went through his repertoire of "God Save
+the King," "Sweet Bye and Bye," "Lead, Kindly Light," "Home, Sweet
+Home," and "Shenandoah."
+
+It meant more than free beer to Daughtry, for, when he started to
+leave, the proprietor of the place thrust three silver dollars
+into his hand and begged him to come around with the dog next
+night.
+
+"For that?" Daughtry demanded, looking at the money as if it were
+contemptible.
+
+Hastily the proprietor added two more dollars, and Daughtry
+promised.
+
+"Just the same, Killeny, my son," he told Michael as they went to
+bed, "I think you an' me are worth more than five dollars a turn.
+Why, the like of you has never been seen before.  A real singing
+dog that can carry 'most any air with me, and that can carry half
+a dozen by himself.  An' they say Caruso gets a thousand a night.
+Well, you ain't Caruso, but you're the dog-Caruso of the entire
+world.  Son, I'm goin' to be your business manager.  If we can't
+make a twenty-dollar gold-piece a night--say, son, we're goin' to
+move into better quarters.  An' the old gent up at the Hotel de
+Bronx is goin' to move into an outside room.  An' Kwaque's goin'
+to get a real outfit of clothes.  Killeny, my boy, we're goin' to
+get so rich that if he can't snare a sucker we'll put up the cash
+ourselves 'n' buy a schooner for 'm, 'n' send him out a-treasure-
+huntin' on his own.  We'll be the suckers, eh, just you an' me,
+an' love to."
+
+
+The Barbary Coast of San Francisco, once the old-time sailor-town
+in the days when San Francisco was reckoned the toughest port of
+the Seven Seas, had evolved with the city until it depended for at
+least half of its earnings on the slumming parties that visited it
+and spent liberally.  It was quite the custom, after dinner, for
+many of the better classes of society, especially when
+entertaining curious Easterners, to spend an hour or several in
+motoring from dance-hall to dance-hall and cheap cabaret to cheap
+cabaret.  In short, the "Coast" was as much a sight-seeing place
+as was Chinatown and the Cliff House.
+
+It was not long before Dag Daughtry was getting his twenty dollars
+a night for two twenty-minute turns, and was declining more beer
+than a dozen men with thirsts equal to his could have
+accommodated.  Never had he been so prosperous; nor can it be
+denied that Michael enjoyed it.  Enjoy it he did, but principally
+for Steward's sake.  He was serving Steward, and so to serve was
+his highest heart's desire.
+
+In truth, Michael was the bread-winner for quite a family, each
+member of which fared well.  Kwaque blossomed out resplendent in
+russet-brown shoes, a derby hat, and a gray suit with trousers
+immaculately creased.  Also, he became a devotee of the moving-
+picture shows, spending as much as twenty and thirty cents a day
+and resolutely sitting out every repetition of programme.  Little
+time was required of him in caring for Daughtry, for they had come
+to eating in restaurants.  Not only had the Ancient Mariner moved
+into a more expensive outside room at the Bronx; but Daughtry
+insisted on thrusting upon him more spending money, so that, on
+occasion, he could invite a likely acquaintance to the theatre or
+a concert and bring him home in a taxi.
+
+"We won't keep this up for ever, Killeny," Steward told Michael.
+"For just as long as it takes the old gent to land another bunch
+of gold-pouched, retriever-snouted treasure-hunters, and no
+longer.  Then it's hey for the ocean blue, my son, an' the roll of
+a good craft under our feet, an' smash of wet on the deck, an' a
+spout now an' again of the scuppers.
+
+"We got to go rollin' down to Rio as well as sing about it to a
+lot of cheap skates.  They can take their rotten cities.  The
+sea's the life for us--you an' me, Killeny, son, an' the old gent
+an' Kwaque, an' Cocky, too.  We ain't made for city ways.  It
+ain't healthy.  Why, son, though you maybe won't believe it, I'm
+losin' my spring.  The rubber's goin' outa me.  I'm kind o'
+languid, with all night in an' nothin' to do but sit around.  It
+makes me fair sick at the thought of hearin' the old gent say once
+again, 'I think, steward, one of those prime cocktails would be
+just the thing before dinner.'  We'll take a little ice-machine
+along next voyage, an' give 'm the best.
+
+"An' look at Kwaque, Killeny, my boy.  This ain't his climate.
+He's positively ailin'.  If he sits around them picture-shows much
+more he'll develop the T.B.  For the good of his health, an' mine
+an' yours, an' all of us, we got to get up anchor pretty soon an'
+hit out for the home of the trade winds that kiss you through an'
+through with the salt an' the life of the sea."
+
+
+In truth, Kwaque, who never complained, was ailing fast.  A
+swelling, slow and sensationless at first, under his right arm-
+pit, had become a mild and unceasing pain.  No longer could he
+sleep a night through.  Although he lay on his left side, never
+less than twice, and often three and four times, the hurt of the
+swelling woke him.  Ah Moy, had he not long since been delivered
+back to China by the immigration authorities, could have told him
+the meaning of that swelling, just as he could have told Dag
+Daughtry the meaning of the increasing area of numbness between
+his eyes where the tiny, vertical, lion-lines were cutting more
+conspicuously.  Also, could he have told him what was wrong with
+the little finger on his left hand.  Daughtry had first diagnosed
+it as a sprain of a tendon.  Later, he had decided it was chronic
+rheumatism brought on by the damp and foggy Sun Francisco climate.
+It was one of his reasons for desiring to get away again to sea
+where the tropic sun would warm the rheumatism out of him.
+
+As a steward, Daughtry had been accustomed to contact with men and
+women of the upper world.  But for the first time in his life,
+here in the underworld of San Francisco, in all equality he met
+such persons from above.  Nay, more, they were eager to meet him.
+They sought him.  They fawned upon him for an invitation to sit at
+his table and buy beer for him in whatever garish cabaret Michael
+was performing.  They would have bought wine for him, at enormous
+expense, had he not stubbornly stuck to his beer.  They were, some
+of them, for inviting him to their homes--"An' bring the wonderful
+dog along for a sing-song"; but Daughtry, proud of Michael for
+being the cause of such invitations, explained that the
+professional life was too arduous to permit of such diversions.
+To Michael he explained that when they proffered a fee of fifty
+dollars, the pair of them would "come a-runnin'."
+
+Among the host of acquaintances made in their cabaret-life, two
+were destined, very immediately, to play important parts in the
+lives of Daughtry and Michael.  The first, a politician and a
+doctor, by name Emory--Walter Merritt Emory--was several times at
+Daughtry's table, where Michael sat with them on a chair according
+to custom.  Among other things, in gratitude for such kindnesses
+from Daughtry, Doctor Emory gave his office card and begged for
+the privilege of treating, free of charge, either master or dog
+should they ever become sick.  In Daughtry's opinion, Dr. Walter
+Merritt Emory was a keen, clever man, undoubtedly able in his
+profession, but passionately selfish as a hungry tiger.  As he
+told him, in the brutal candour he could afford under such changed
+conditions:  "Doc, you're a wonder.  Anybody can see it with half
+an eye.  What you want you just go and get.  Nothing'd stop you
+except . . . "
+
+"Except?"
+
+"Oh, except that it was nailed down, or locked up, or had a
+policeman standing guard over it.  I'd sure hate to have anything
+you wanted."
+
+"Well, you have," Doctor assured him, with a significant nod at
+Michael on the chair between them.
+
+"Br-r-r!" Daughtry shivered.  "You give me the creeps.  If I
+thought you really meant it, San Francisco couldn't hold me two
+minutes."  He meditated into his beer-glass a moment, then laughed
+with reassurance.  "No man could get that dog away from me.  You
+see, I'd kill the man first.  I'd just up an' tell 'm, as I'm
+tellin' you now, I'd kill 'm first.  An' he'd believe me, as
+you're believin' me now.  You know I mean it.  So'd he know I
+meant it.  Why, that dog . . . "
+
+In sheer inability to express the profundity of his emotion, Dag
+Daughtry broke off the sentence and drowned it in his beer-glass.
+
+Of quite different type was the other person of destiny.  Harry
+Del Mar, he called himself; and Harry Del Mar was the name that
+appeared on the programmes when he was doing Orpheum "time."
+Although Daughtry did not know it, because Del Mar was laying off
+for a vacation, the man did trained-animal turns for a living.
+He, too, bought drinks at Daughtry's table.  Young, not over
+thirty, dark of complexion with large, long-lashed brown eyes that
+he fondly believed were magnetic, cherubic of lip and feature, he
+belied all his appearance by talking business in direct business
+fashion.
+
+"But you ain't got the money to buy 'm," Daughtry replied, when
+the other had increased his first offer of five hundred dollars
+for Michael to a thousand.
+
+"I've got the thousand, if that's what you mean."
+
+"No," Daughtry shook his head.  "I mean he ain't for sale at any
+price.  Besides, what do you want 'm for?"
+
+"I like him," Del Mar answered.  "Why do I come to this joint?
+Why does the crowd come here?  Why do men buy wine, run horses,
+sport actresses, become priests or bookworms?  Because they like
+to.  That's the answer.  We all do what we like when we can, go
+after the thing we want whether we can get it or not.  Now I like
+your dog, I want him.  I want him a thousand dollars' worth.  See
+that big diamond on that woman's hand over there.  I guess she
+just liked it, and wanted it, and got it, never mind the price.
+The price didn't mean as much to her as the diamond.  Now that dog
+of yours--"
+
+"Don't like you," Dag Daughtry broke in.  "Which is strange.  He
+likes most everybody without fussin' about it.  But he bristled at
+you from the first.  No man'd want a dog that don't like him."
+
+"Which isn't the question," Del Mar stated quietly.  "I like him.
+As for him liking or not liking me, that's my look-out, and I
+guess I can attend to that all right."
+
+It seemed to Daughtry that he glimpsed or sensed under the other's
+unfaltering cherubicness of expression a steelness of cruelty that
+was abysmal in that it was of controlled intelligence.  Not in
+such terms did Daughtry think his impression.  At the most, it was
+a feeling, and feelings do not require words in order to be
+experienced or comprehended.
+
+"There's an all-night bank," the other went on.  "We can stroll
+over, I'll cash a cheque, and in half an hour the cash will be in
+your hand."
+
+Daughtry shook his head.
+
+"Even as a business proposition, nothing doing," he said.  "Look
+you.  Here's the dog earnin' twenty dollars a night.  Say he works
+twenty-five days in the month.  That's five hundred a month, or
+six thousand a year.  Now say that's five per cent., because it's
+easier to count, it represents the interest on a capital value of
+one hundred an' twenty thousand-dollars.  Then we'll suppose
+expenses and salary for me is twenty thousand.  That leaves the
+dog worth a hundred thousand.  Just to be fair, cut it in half--a
+fifty-thousand dog.  And you're offerin' a thousand for him."
+
+"I suppose you think he'll last for ever, like so much land'," Del
+Mar smiled quietly.
+
+Daughtry saw the point instantly.
+
+"Give 'm five years of work--that's thirty thousand.  Give 'm one
+year of work--it's six thousand.  An' you're offerin' me one
+thousand for six thousand.  That ain't no kind of business--for me
+. . . an' him.  Besides, when he can't work any more, an' ain't
+worth a cent, he'll be worth just a plumb million to me, an' if
+anybody offered it, I'd raise the price."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+
+"I'll see you again," Harry Del Mar told Daughtry, at the end of
+his fourth conversation on the matter of Michael's sale.
+
+Wherein Harry Del Mar was mistaken.  He never saw Daughtry again,
+because Daughtry saw Doctor Emory first.
+
+Kwaque's increasing restlessness at night, due to the swelling
+under his right arm-pit, had began to wake Daughtry up.  After
+several such experiences, he had investigated and decided that
+Kwaque was sufficiently sick to require a doctor.  For which
+reason, one morning at eleven, taking Kwaque along, he called at
+Walter Merritt Emory's office and waited his turn in the crowded
+reception-room.
+
+"I think he's got cancer, Doc.," Daughtry said, while Kwaque was
+pulling off his shirt and undershirt.  "He never squealed, you
+know, never peeped.  That's the way of niggers.  I didn't find our
+till he got to wakin' me up nights with his tossin' about an'
+groanin' in his sleep.--There!  What'd you call it?  Cancer or
+tumour--no two ways about it, eh?"
+
+But the quick eye of Walter Merritt Emory had not missed, in
+passing, the twisted fingers of Kwaque's left hand.  Not only was
+his eye quick, but it was a "leper eye."  A volunteer surgeon in
+the first days out in the Philippines, he had made a particular
+study of leprosy, and had observed so many lepers that infallibly,
+except in the incipient beginnings of the disease, he could pick
+out a leper at a glance.  From the twisted fingers, which was the
+anaesthetic form, produced by nerve-disintegration, to the
+corrugated lion forehead (again anaesthetic), his eyes flashed to
+the swelling under the right arm-pit and his brain diagnosed it as
+the tubercular form.
+
+Just as swiftly flashed through his brain two thoughts:  the
+first, the axiom, WHENEVER AND WHEREVER YOU FIND A LEPER, LOOK FOR
+THE OTHER LEPER; the second, the desired Irish terrier, who was
+owned by Daughtry, with whom Kwaque had been long associated.  And
+here all swiftness of eye-flashing ceased on the part of Walter
+Merritt Emory.  He did not know how much, if anything, the steward
+knew about leprosy, and he did not care to arouse any suspicions.
+Casually drawing his watch to see the time, he turned and
+addressed Daughtry.
+
+"I should say his blood is out of order.  He's run down.  He's not
+used to the recent life he's been living, nor to the food.  To
+make certain, I shall examine for cancer and tumour, although
+there's little chance of anything like that."
+
+And as he talked, with just a waver for a moment, his gaze lifted
+above Daughtry's eyes to the area of forehead just above and
+between the eyes.  It was sufficient.  His "leper-eye" had seen
+the "lion" mark of the leper.
+
+"You're run down yourself," he continued smoothly.  "You're not up
+to snuff, I'll wager.  Eh?"
+
+"Can't say that I am," Daughtry agreed.  "I guess I got to get
+back to the sea an' the tropics and warm the rheumatics outa me."
+
+"Where?" queried Doctor Emory, almost absently, so well did he
+feign it, as if apparently on the verge of returning to a closer
+examination, of Kwaque's swelling.
+
+Daughtry extended his left hand, with a little wiggle of the
+little finger advertising the seat of the affliction.  Walter
+Merritt Emory saw, with seeming careless look out from under
+careless-drooping eyelids, the little finger slightly swollen,
+slightly twisted, with a smooth, almost shiny, silkiness of skin-
+texture.  Again, in the course of turning to look at Kwaque, his
+eyes rested an instant on the lion-lines of Daughtry's brow.
+
+"Rheumatism is still the great mystery," Doctor Emory said,
+returning to Daughtry as if deflected by the thought.  "It's
+almost individual, there are so many varieties of it.  Each man
+has a kind of his own.  Any numbness?"
+
+Daughtry laboriously wiggled his little finger.
+
+"Yes, sir," he answered.  "It ain't as lively as it used to was."
+
+"Ah," Walter Merritt Emory murmured, with a vastitude of
+confidence and assurance.  "Please sit down in that chair there.
+Maybe I won't be able to cure you, but I promise you I can direct
+you to the best place to live for what's the matter with you.--
+Miss Judson!"
+
+And while the trained-nurse-apparelled young woman seated Dag
+Daughtry in the enamelled surgeon's chair and leaned him back
+under direction, and while Doctor Emory dipped his finger-tips
+into the strongest antiseptic his office possessed, behind Doctor
+Emory's eyes, in the midst of his brain, burned the image of a
+desired Irish terrier who did turns in sailor-town cabarets, was
+rough-coated, and answered to the full name of Killeny Boy.
+
+"You've got rheumatism in more places than your little finger," he
+assured Daughtry.  "There's a touch right here, I'll wager, on
+your forehead.  One moment, please.  Move if I hurt you, Otherwise
+sit still, because I don't intend to hurt you.  I merely want to
+see if my diagnosis is correct.--There, that's it.  Move when you
+feel anything.  Rheumatism has strange freaks.--Watch this, Miss
+Judson, and I'll wager this form of rheumatism is new to you.
+See.  He does not resent.  He thinks I have not begun yet . . . "
+
+And as he talked, steadily, interestingly, he was doing what Dag
+Daughtry never dreamed he was doing, and what made Kwaque, looking
+on, almost dream he was seeing because of the unrealness and
+impossibleness of it.  For, with a large needle, Doctor Emory was
+probing the dark spot in the midst of the vertical lion-lines.
+Nor did he merely probe the area.  Thrusting into it from one
+side, under the skin and parallel to it, he buried the length of
+the needle from sight through the insensate infiltration.  This
+Kwaque beheld with bulging eyes; for his master betrayed no sign
+that the thing was being done.
+
+"Why don't you begin?" Dag Daughtry questioned impatiently.
+"Besides, my rheumatism don't count.  It's the nigger-boy's
+swelling."
+
+"You need a course of treatment," Doctor Emory assured him.
+"Rheumatism is a tough proposition.  It should never be let grow
+chronic.  I'll fix up a course of treatment for you.  Now, if
+you'll get out of the chair, we'll look at your black servant."
+
+But first, before Kwaque was leaned back, Doctor Emory threw over
+the chair a sheet that smelled of having been roasted almost to
+the scorching point.  As he was about to examine Kwaque, he looked
+with a slight start of recollection at his watch.  When he saw the
+time he startled more, and turned a reproachful face upon his
+assistant.
+
+"Miss Judson," he said, coldly emphatic, "you have failed me.
+Here it is, twenty before twelve, and you knew I was to confer
+with Doctor Hadley over that case at eleven-thirty sharp.  How he
+must be cursing me!  You know how peevish he is."
+
+Miss Judson nodded, with a perfect expression of contrition and
+humility, as if she knew all about it, although, in reality, she
+knew only all about her employer and had never heard till that
+moment of his engagement at eleven-thirty.
+
+"Doctor Hadley's just across the hall," Doctor Emory explained to
+Daughtry.  "It won't take me five minutes.  He and I have a
+disagreement.  He has diagnosed the case as chronic appendicitis
+and wants to operate.  I have diagnosed it as pyorrhea which has
+infected the stomach from the mouth, and have suggested emetine
+treatment of the mouth as a cure for the stomach disorder.  Of
+course, you don't understand, but the point is that I've persuaded
+Doctor Hadley to bring in Doctor Granville, who is a dentist and a
+pyorrhea expert.  And they're all waiting for me these ten
+minutes!  I must run.
+
+"I'll return inside five minutes," he called back as the door to
+the hall was closing upon him.--"Miss Judson, please tell those
+people in the reception-room to be patient."
+
+He did enter Doctor Hadley's office, although no sufferer from
+pyorrhea or appendicitis awaited him.  Instead, he used the
+telephone for two calls:  one to the president of the board of
+health; the other to the chief of police.  Fortunately, he caught
+both at their offices, addressing them familiarly by their first
+names and talking to them most emphatically and confidentially.
+
+Back in his own quarters, he was patently elated.
+
+"I told him so," he assured Miss Judson, but embracing Daughtry in
+the happy confidence.  "Doctor Granville backed me up.  Straight
+pyorrhea, of course.  That knocks the operation.  And right now
+they're jolting his gums and the pus-sacs with emetine.  Whew!  A
+fellow likes to be right.  I deserve a smoke.  Do you mind, Mr.
+Daughtry?"
+
+And while the steward shook his head, Doctor Emory lighted a big
+Havana and continued audibly to luxuriate in his fictitious
+triumph over the other doctor.  As he talked, he forgot to smoke,
+and, leaning quite casually against the chair, with arrant
+carelessness allowed the live coal at the end of his cigar to rest
+against the tip of one of Kwaque's twisted fingers.  A privy wink
+to Miss Judson, who was the only one who observed his action,
+warned her against anything that might happen.
+
+"You know, Mr. Daughtry," Walter Merritt Emory went on
+enthusiastically, while he held the steward's eyes with his and
+while all the time the live end of the cigar continued to rest
+against Kwaque's finger, "the older I get the more convinced I am
+that there are too many ill-advised and hasty operations."
+
+Still fire and flesh pressed together, and a tiny spiral of smoke
+began to arise from Kwaque's finger-end that was different in
+colour from the smoke of a cigar-end.
+
+"Now take that patient of Doctor Hadley's.  I've saved him, not
+merely the risk of an operation for appendicitis, but the cost of
+it, and the hospital expenses.  I shall charge him nothing for
+what I did.  Hadley's charge will be merely nominal.  Doctor
+Granville, at the outside, will cure his pyorrhea with emetine for
+no more than a paltry fifty dollars.  Yes, by George, besides the
+risk to his life, and the discomfort, I've saved that man, all
+told, a cold thousand dollars to surgeon, hospital, and nurses."
+
+And while he talked on, holding Daughtry's eyes, a smell of roast
+meat began to pervade the air.  Doctor Emory smelled it eagerly.
+So did Miss Judson smell it, but she had been warned and gave no
+notice.  Nor did she look at the juxtaposition of cigar and
+finger, although she knew by the evidence of her nose that it
+still obtained.
+
+"What's burning?" Daughtry demanded suddenly, sniffing the air and
+glancing around.
+
+"Pretty rotten cigar," Doctor Emory observed, having removed it
+from contact with Kwaque's finger and now examining it with
+critical disapproval.  He held it close to his nose, and his face
+portrayed disgust.  "I won't say cabbage leaves.  I'll merely say
+it's something I don't know and don't care to know.  That's the
+trouble.  They get out a good, new brand of cigar, advertise it,
+put the best of tobacco into it, and, when it has taken with the
+public, put in inferior tobacco and ride the popularity of it.  No
+more in mine, thank you.  This day I change my brand."
+
+So speaking, he tossed the cigar into a cuspidor.  And Kwaque,
+leaning back in the queerest chair in which he had ever sat, was
+unaware that the end of his finger had been burned and roasted
+half an inch deep, and merely wondered when the medicine doctor
+would cease talking and begin looking at the swelling that hurt
+his side under his arm.
+
+And for the first time in his life, and for the ultimate time, Dag
+Daughtry fell down.  It was an irretrievable fall-down.  Life, in
+its freedom of come and go, by heaving sea and reeling deck,
+through the home of the trade-winds, back and forth between the
+ports, ceased there for him in Walter Merritt Emory's office,
+while the calm-browed Miss Judson looked on and marvelled that a
+man's flesh should roast and the man wince not from the roasting
+of it.
+
+Doctor Emory continued to talk, and tried a fresh cigar, and,
+despite the fact that his reception-room was overflowing,
+delivered, not merely a long, but a live and interesting,
+dissertation on the subject of cigars and of the tobacco leaf and
+filler as grown and prepared for cigars in the tobacco-favoured
+regions of the earth.
+
+"Now, as regards this swelling," he was saying, as he began a
+belated and distant examination of Kwaque's affliction, "I should
+say, at a glance, that it is neither tumour nor cancer, nor is it
+even a boil.  I should say . . . "
+
+A knock at the private door into the hall made him straighten up
+with an eagerness that he did not attempt to mask.  A nod to Miss
+Judson sent her to open the door, and entered two policemen, a
+police sergeant, and a professionally whiskered person in a
+business suit with a carnation in his button-hole.
+
+"Good morning, Doctor Masters," Emory greeted the professional
+one, and, to the others:  "Howdy, Sergeant;" "Hello, Tim;" "Hello,
+Johnson--when did they shift you off the Chinatown squad?"
+
+And then, continuing his suspended sentence, Walter Merritt Emory
+held on, looking intently at Kwaque's swelling:
+
+"I should say, as I was saying, that it is the finest, ripest,
+perforating ulcer of the bacillus leprae order, that any San
+Francisco doctor has had the honour of presenting to the board of
+health."
+
+"Leprosy!" exclaimed Doctor Masters.
+
+And all started at his pronouncement of the word.  The sergeant
+and the two policemen shied away from Kwaque; Miss Judson, with a
+smothered cry, clapped her two hands over her heart; and Dag
+Daughtry, shocked but sceptical, demanded:
+
+"What are you givin' us, Doc.?"
+
+"Stand still! don't move!" Walter Merritt Emory said peremptorily
+to Daughtry.  "I want you to take notice," he added to the others,
+as he gently touched the live-end of his fresh cigar to the area
+of dark skin above and between the steward's eyes.  "Don't move,"
+he commanded Daughtry.  "Wait a moment.  I am not ready yet."
+
+And while Daughtry waited, perplexed, confused, wondering why
+Doctor Emory did not proceed, the coal of fire burned his skin and
+flesh, till the smoke of it was apparent to all, as was the smell
+of it.  With a sharp laugh of triumph, Doctor Emory stepped back.
+
+"Well, go ahead with what you was goin' to do," Daughtry grumbled,
+the rush of events too swift and too hidden for him to comprehend.
+"An' when you're done with that, I just want you to explain what
+you said about leprosy an' that nigger-boy there.  He's my boy,
+an' you can't pull anything like that off on him . . . or me."
+
+"Gentlemen, you have seen," Doctor Emory said.  "Two undoubted
+cases of it, master and man, the man more advanced, with the
+combination of both forms, the master with only the anaesthetic
+form--he has a touch of it, too, on his little finger.  Take them
+away.  I strongly advise, Doctor Masters, a thorough fumigation of
+the ambulance afterward."
+
+"Look here . . . " Dag Daughtry began belligerently.
+
+Doctor Emory glanced warningly to Doctor Masters, and Doctor
+Masters glanced authoritatively at the sergeant who glanced
+commandingly at his two policemen.  But they did not spring upon
+Daughtry.  Instead, they backed farther away, drew their clubs,
+and glared intimidatingly at him.  More convincing than anything
+else to Daughtry was the conduct of the policemen.  They were
+manifestly afraid of contact with him.  As he started forward,
+they poked the ends of their extended clubs towards his ribs to
+ward him off.
+
+"Don't you come any closer," one warned him, flourishing his club
+with the advertisement of braining him.  "You stay right where you
+are until you get your orders."
+
+"Put on your shirt and stand over there alongside your master,"
+Doctor Emory commanded Kwaque, having suddenly elevated the chair
+and spilled him out on his feet on the floor.
+
+"But what under the sun . . . " Daughtry began, but was ignored by
+his quondam friend, who was saying to Doctor Masters:
+
+"The pest-house has been vacant since that Japanese died.  I know
+the gang of cowards in your department so I'd advise you to give
+the dope to these here so that they can disinfect the premises
+when they go in."
+
+"For the love of Mike," Daughtry pleaded, all of stunned
+belligerence gone from him in his state of stunned conviction that
+the dread disease possessed him.  He touched his finger to his
+sensationless forehead, then smelled it and recognized the burnt
+flesh he had not felt burning.  "For the love of Mike, don't be in
+such a rush.  If I've got it, I've got it.  But that ain't no
+reason we can't deal with each other like white men.  Give me two
+hours an' I'll get outa the city.  An' in twenty-four I'll be outa
+the country.  I'll take ship--"
+
+"And continue to be a menace to the public health wherever you
+are," Doctor Masters broke in, already visioning a column in the
+evening papers, with scare-heads, in which he would appear the
+hero, the St. George of San Francisco standing with poised lance
+between the people and the dragon of leprosy.
+
+"Take them away," said Waiter Merritt Emory, avoiding looking
+Daughtry in the eyes.
+
+"Ready!  March!" commanded the sergeant.
+
+The two policemen advanced on Daughtry and Kwaque with extended
+clubs.
+
+"Keep away, an' keep movin'," one of the policemen growled
+fiercely.  "An' do what we say, or get your head cracked.  Out you
+go, now.  Out the door with you.  Better tell that coon to stick
+right alongside you."
+
+"Doc., won't you let me talk a moment?" Daughtry begged of Emory.
+
+"The time for talking is past," was the reply.  "This is the time
+for segregation.--Doctor Masters, don't forget that ambulance when
+you're quit of the load."
+
+So the procession, led by the board-of-heath doctor and the
+sergeant, and brought up in the rear by the policemen with their
+protectively extended clubs, started through the doorway.
+
+Whirling about on the threshold, at the imminent risk of having
+his skull cracked, Dag Daughtry called back:
+
+"Doc!  My dog!  You know 'm."
+
+"I'll get him for you," Doctor Emory consented quickly.  "What's
+the address?"
+
+"Room eight-seven, Clay street, the Bowhead Lodging House, you
+know the place, entrance just around the corner from the Bowhead
+Saloon.  Have 'm sent out to me wherever they put me--will you?"
+
+"Certainly I will," said Doctor Emory, "and you've got a cockatoo,
+too?"
+
+"You bet, Cocky!  Send 'm both along, please, sir."
+
+
+"My!" said Miss Judson, that evening, at dinner with a certain
+young interne of St. Joseph's Hospital.  "That Doctor Emory is a
+wizard.  No wonder he's successful.  Think of it!  Two filthy
+lepers in our office to-day!  One was a coon.  And he knew what
+was the matter the moment he laid eyes on them.  He's a caution.
+When I tell you what he did to them with his cigar!  And he was
+cute about it!  He gave me the wink first.  And they never dreamed
+what he was doing.  He took his cigar and . . . "
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+
+The dog, like the horse, abases the base.  Being base, Waiter
+Merritt Emory was abased by his desire for the possession of
+Michael.  Had there been no Michael, his conduct would have been
+quite different.  He would have dealt with Daughtry as Daughtry
+had described, as between white men.  He would have warned
+Daughtry of his disease and enabled him to take ship to the South
+Seas or to Japan, or to other countries where lepers are not
+segregated.  This would have worked no hardship on those
+countries, since such was their law and procedure, while it would
+have enabled Daughtry and Kwaque to escape the hell of the San
+Francisco pest-house, to which, because of his baseness, he
+condemned them for the rest of their lives.
+
+Furthermore, when the expense of the maintenance of armed guards
+over the pest-house, day and night, throughout the years, is
+considered, Walter Merritt Emory could have saved many thousands
+of dollars to the tax-payers of the city and county of San
+Francisco, which thousands of dollars, had they been spent
+otherwise, could have been diverted to the reduction of the
+notorious crowding in school-rooms, to purer milk for the babies
+of the poor, or to an increase of breathing-space in the park
+system for the people of the stifling ghetto.  But had Walter
+Merritt Emory been thus considerate, not only would Daughtry and
+Kwaque have sailed out and away over the sea, but with them would
+have sailed Michael.
+
+Never was a reception-roomful of patients rushed through more
+expeditiously than was Doctor Emory's the moment the door had
+closed upon the two policemen who brought up Daughtry's rear.  And
+before he went to his late lunch, Doctor Emory was away in his
+machine and down into the Barbary Coast to the door of the Bowhead
+Lodging House.  On the way, by virtue of his political
+affiliations, he had been able to pick up a captain of detectives.
+The addition of the captain proved necessary, for the landlady put
+up a stout argument against the taking of the dog of her lodger.
+But Milliken, captain of detectives, was too well known to her,
+and she yielded to the law of which he was the symbol and of which
+she was credulously ignorant.
+
+As Michael started out of the room on the end of a rope, a
+plaintive call of reminder came from the window-sill, where
+perched a tiny, snow-white cockatoo.
+
+"Cocky," he called.  "Cocky."
+
+Walter Merritt Emory glanced back and for no more than a moment
+hesitated.  "We'll send for the bird later," he told the landlady,
+who, still mildly expostulating as she followed them downstairs,
+failed to notice that the captain of the detectives had carelessly
+left the door to Daughtry's rooms ajar.
+
+
+But Walter Merritt Emory was not the only base one abased by
+desire of possession of Michael.  In a deep leather chair, his
+feet resting in another deep leather chair, at the Indoor Yacht
+Club, Harry Del Mar yielded to the somniferous digestion of lunch,
+which was for him breakfast as well, and glanced through the first
+of the early editions of the afternoon papers.  His eyes lighted
+on a big headline, with a brief five lines under it.  His feet
+were instantly drawn down off the chair and under him as he stood
+up erect upon them.  On swift second thought, he sat down again,
+pressed the electric button, and, while waiting for the club
+steward, reread the headline and the brief five lines.
+
+In a taxi, and away, heading for the Barbary Coast, Harry Del Mar
+saw visions that were golden.  They took on the semblance of
+yellow, twenty-dollar gold pieces, of yellow-backed paper bills of
+the government stamping of the United States, of bank books, and
+of rich coupons ripe for the clipping--and all shot through the
+flashings of the form of a rough-coated Irish terrier, on a galaxy
+of brilliantly-lighted stages, mouth open, nose upward to the
+drops, singing, ever singing, as no dog had ever been known to
+sing in the world before.
+
+
+Cocky himself was the first to discover that the door was ajar,
+and was looking at it with speculation (if by "speculation" may be
+described the mental processes of a bird, in some mysterious way
+absorbing into its consciousness a fresh impression of its
+environment and preparing to act, or not act, according to which
+way the fresh impression modifies its conduct).  Humans do this
+very thing, and some of them call it "free will."  Cocky, staring
+at the open door, was in just the stage of determining whether or
+not he should more closely inspect that crack of exit to the wider
+world, which inspection, in turn, would determine whether or not
+he should venture out through the crack, when his eyes beheld the
+eyes of the second discoverer staring in.
+
+The eyes were bestial, yellow-green, the pupils dilating and
+narrowing with sharp swiftness as they sought about among the
+lights and glooms of the room.  Cocky knew danger at the first
+glimpse--danger to the uttermost of violent death.  Yet Cocky did
+nothing.  No panic stirred his heart.  Motionless, one eye only
+turned upon the crack, he focused that one eye upon the head and
+eyes of the gaunt gutter-cat whose head had erupted into the crack
+like an apparition.
+
+Alert, dilating and contracting, as swift as cautious, and
+infinitely apprehensive, the pupils vertically slitted in jet into
+the midmost of amazing opals of greenish yellow, the eyes roved
+the room.  They alighted on Cocky.  Instantly the head portrayed
+that the cat had stiffened, crouched, and frozen.  Almost
+imperceptibly the eyes settled into a watching that was like to
+the stony stare of a sphinx across aching and eternal desert
+sands.  The eyes were as if they had so stared for centuries and
+millenniums.
+
+No less frozen was Cocky.  He drew no film across his one eye that
+showed his head cocked sideways, nor did the passion of
+apprehension that whelmed him manifest itself in the quiver of a
+single feather.  Both creatures were petrified into the mutual
+stare that is of the hunter and the hunted, the preyer and the
+prey, the meat-eater and the meat.
+
+It was a matter of long minutes, that stare, until the head in the
+doorway, with a slight turn, disappeared.  Could a bird sigh,
+Cocky would have sighed.  But he made no movement as he listened
+to the slow, dragging steps of a man go by and fade away down the
+hall.
+
+Several minutes passed, and, just as abruptly the apparition
+reappeared--not alone the head this time, but the entire sinuous
+form as it glided into the room and came to rest in the middle of
+the floor.  The eyes brooded on Cocky, and the entire body was
+still save for the long tail, which lashed from one side to the
+other and back again in an abrupt, angry, but monotonous manner.
+
+Never removing its eyes from Cocky, the cat advanced slowly until
+it paused not six feet away.  Only the tail lashed back and forth,
+and only the eyes gleamed like jewels in the full light of the
+window they faced, the vertical pupils contracting to scarcely
+perceptible black slits.
+
+And Cocky, who could not know death with the clearness of concept
+of a human, nevertheless was not altogether unaware that the end
+of all things was terribly impending.  As he watched the cat
+deliberately crouch for the spring, Cocky, gallant mote of life
+that he was, betrayed his one and forgivable panic.
+
+"Cocky!  Cocky!" he called plaintively to the blind, insensate
+walls.
+
+It was his call to all the world, and all powers and things and
+two-legged men-creatures, and Steward in particular, and Kwaque,
+and Michael.  The burden of his call was:  "It is I, Cocky.  I am
+very small and very frail, and this is a monster to destroy me,
+and I love the light, bright world, and I want to live and to
+continue to live in the brightness, and I am so very small, and
+I'm a good little fellow, with a good little heart, and I cannot
+battle with this huge, furry, hungry thing that is going to devour
+me, and I want help, help, help.  I am Cocky.  Everybody knows me.
+I am Cocky."
+
+This, and much more, was contained in his two calls of:  "Cocky!
+Cocky!"
+
+And there was no answer from the blind walls, from the hall
+outside, nor from all the world, and, his moment of panic over,
+Cocky was his brave little self again.  He sat motionless on the
+windowsill, his head cocked to the side, with one unwavering eye
+regarding on the floor, so perilously near, the eternal enemy of
+all his kind.
+
+The human quality of his voice had startled the gutter-cat,
+causing her to forgo her spring as she flattened down her ears and
+bellied closer to the floor.
+
+And in the silence that followed, a blue-bottle fly buzzed rowdily
+against an adjacent window-pane, with occasional loud bumps
+against the glass tokening that he too had his tragedy, a prisoner
+pent by baffling transparency from the bright world that blazed so
+immediately beyond.
+
+Nor was the gutter-cat without her ill and hurt of life.  Hunger
+hurt her, and hurt her meagre breasts that should have been full
+for the seven feeble and mewing little ones, replicas of her save
+that their eyes were not yet open and that they were grotesquely
+unsteady on their soft, young legs.  She remembered them by the
+hurt of her breasts and the prod of her instinct; also she
+remembered them by vision, so that, by the subtle chemistry of her
+brain, she could see them, by way of the broken screen across the
+ventilator hole, down into the cellar in the dark rubbish-corner
+under the stairway, where she had stolen her lair and birthed her
+litter.
+
+And the vision of them, and the hurt of her hunger stirred her
+afresh, so that she gathered her body and measured the distance
+for the leap.  But Cocky was himself again.
+
+"Devil be damned!  Devil be damned!" he shouted his loudest and
+most belligerent, as he ruffled like a bravo at the gutter-cat
+beneath him, so that he sent her crouching, with startlement,
+lower to the floor, her ears wilting rigidly flat and down, her
+tail lashing, her head turning about the room so that her eyes
+might penetrate its obscurest corners in quest of the human whose
+voice had so cried out.
+
+All of which the gutter-cat did, despite the positive evidence of
+her senses that this human noise had proceeded from the white bird
+itself on the window-sill.
+
+The bottle fly bumped once again against its invisible prison wall
+in the silence that ensued.  The gutter-cat prepared and sprang
+with sudden decision, landing where Cocky had perched the fraction
+of a second before.  Cocky had darted to the side, but, even as he
+darted, and as the cat landed on the sill, the cat's paw flashed
+out sidewise and Cocky leaped straight up, beating the air with
+his wings so little used to flying.  The gutter-cat reared on her
+hind-legs, smote upward with one paw as a child might strike with
+its hat at a butterfly.  But there was weight in the cat's paw,
+and the claws of it were outspread like so many hooks.
+
+Struck in mid-air, a trifle of a flying machine, all its delicate
+gears tangled and disrupted, Cocky fell to the floor in a shower
+of white feathers, which, like snowflakes, eddied slowly down
+after, and after the plummet-like descent of the cat, so that some
+of them came to rest on her back, startling her tense nerves with
+their gentle impact and making her crouch closer while she shot a
+swift glance around and overhead for any danger that might
+threaten.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+
+Harry Del Mar found only a few white feathers on the floor of Dag
+Daughtry's room in the Bowhead Lodging House, and from the
+landlady learned what had happened to Michael.  The first thing
+Harry Del Mar did, still retaining his taxi, was to locate the
+residence of Doctor Emory and make sure that Michael was confined
+in an outhouse in the back yard.  Next he engaged passage on the
+steamship Umatilla, sailing for Seattle and Puget Sound ports at
+daylight.  And next he packed his luggage and paid his bills.
+
+In the meantime, a wordy war was occurring in Walter Merritt
+Emory's office.
+
+"The man's yelling his head off," Doctor Masters was contending.
+"The police had to rap him with their clubs in the ambulance.  He
+was violent.  He wanted his dog.  It can't be done.  It's too raw.
+You can't steal his dog this way.  He'll make a howl in the
+papers."
+
+"Huh!" quoth Walter Merritt Emory.  "I'd like to see a reporter
+with backbone enough to go within talking distance of a leper in
+the pest-house.  And I'd like to see the editor who wouldn't send
+a pest-house letter (granting it'd been smuggled past the guards)
+out to be burned the very second he became aware of its source.
+Don't you worry, Doc.  There won't be any noise in the papers."
+
+"But leprosy!  Public health!  The dog has been exposed to his
+master.  The dog itself is a peripatetic source of infection."
+
+"Contagion is the better and more technical word, Doc.," Walter
+Merritt Emory soothed with the sting of superior knowledge.
+
+"Contagion, then," Doctor Masters took him up.  "The public must
+be considered.  It must not run the risk of being infected--"
+
+"Of contracting the contagion," the other corrected smoothly.
+
+"Call it what you will.  The public--"
+
+"Poppycock," said Walter Merritt Emory.  "What you don't know
+about leprosy, and what the rest of the board of health doesn't
+know about leprosy, would fill more books than have been compiled
+by the men who have expertly studied the disease.  The one thing
+they have eternally tried, and are eternally trying, is to
+inoculate one animal outside man with the leprosy that is peculiar
+to man.  Horses, rabbits, rats, donkeys, monkeys, mice, and dogs--
+heavens, they have tried it on them all, tens of thousands of
+times and a hundred thousand times ten thousand times, and never a
+successful inoculation!  They have never succeeded in inoculating
+it on one man from another.  Here--let me show you."
+
+And from his shelves Waiter Merritt Emory began pulling down his
+authorities.
+
+"Amazing . . . most interesting . . . " Doctor Masters continued
+to emit from time to time as he followed the expert guidance of
+the other through the books.  "I never dreamed . . . the amount of
+work they have done is astounding . . . "
+
+"But," he said in conclusion, "there is no convincing a layman of
+the matter contained on your shelves.  Nor can I so convince my
+public.  Nor will I try to.  Besides, the man is consigned to the
+living death of life-long imprisonment in the pest-house.  You
+know the beastly hole it is.  He loves the dog.  He's mad over it.
+Let him have it.  I tell you it's rotten unfair and cruel, and I
+won't stand for it."
+
+"Yes, you will," Walter Merritt Emory assured him coolly.  "And
+I'll tell you why."
+
+He told him.  He said things that no doctor should say to another,
+but which a politician may well say, and has often said, to
+another politician--things which cannot bear repeating, if, for no
+other reason, because they are too humiliating and too little
+conducive to pride for the average American citizen to know;
+things of the inside, secret governments of imperial
+municipalities which the average American citizen, voting free as
+a king at the polls, fondly thinks he manages; things which are,
+on rare occasion, partly unburied and promptly reburied in the
+tomes of reports of Lexow Committees and Federal Commissions.
+
+
+And Walter Merritt Emory won his desire of Michael against Doctor
+Masters; had his wife dine with him at Jules' that evening and
+took her to see Margaret Anglin in celebration of the victory;
+returned home at one in the morning, in his pyjamas went out to
+take a last look at Michael, and found no Michael.
+
+
+The pest-house of San Francisco, as is naturally the case with
+pest-houses in all American cities, was situated on the bleakest,
+remotest, forlornest, cheapest space of land owned by the city.
+Poorly protected from the Pacific Ocean, chill winds and dense
+fog-banks whistled and swirled sadly across the sand-dunes.
+Picnicking parties never came there, nor did small boys hunting
+birds' nests or playing at being wild Indians.  The only class of
+frequenters was the suicides, who, sad of life, sought the saddest
+landscape as a fitting scene in which to end.  And, because they
+so ended, they never repeated their visits.
+
+The outlook from the windows was not inspiriting.  A quarter of a
+mile in either direction, looking out along the shallow canyon of
+the sand-hills, Dag Daughtry could see the sentry-boxes of the
+guards, themselves armed and more prone to kill than to lay hands
+on any escaping pest-man, much less persuavively discuss with him
+the advisability of his return to the prison house.
+
+On the opposing sides of the prospect from the windows of the four
+walls of the pest-house were trees.  Eucalyptus they were, but not
+the royal monarchs that their brothers are in native habitats.
+Poorly planted, by politics, illy attended, by politics, decimated
+and many times repeatedly decimated by the hostile forces of their
+environment, a straggling corporal's guard of survivors, they
+thrust their branches, twisted and distorted, as if writhing in
+agony, into the air.  Scrub of growth they were, expending the
+major portion of their meagre nourishment in their roots that
+crawled seaward through the insufficient sand for anchorage
+against the prevailing gales.
+
+Not even so far as the sentry-boxes were Daughtry and Kwaque
+permitted to stroll.  A hundred yards inside was the dead-line.
+Here, the guards came hastily to deposit food-supplies, medicines,
+and written doctors' instructions, retreating as hastily as they
+came.  Here, also, was a blackboard upon which Daughtry was
+instructed to chalk up his needs and requests in letters of such
+size that they could be read from a distance.  And on this board,
+for many days, he wrote, not demands for beer, although the six-
+quart daily custom had been broken sharply off, but demands like:
+
+
+WHERE IS MY DOG?
+HE IS AN IRISH TERRIER.
+HE IS ROUGH-COATED.
+HIS NAME IS KILLENY BOY.
+I WANT MY DOG.
+I WANT TO TALK TO DOC. EMORY.
+TELL DOC. EMORY TO WRITE TO ME ABOUT MY DOG.
+
+
+One day, Dag Daughtry wrote:
+
+
+IF I DON'T GET MY DOG I WILL KILL DOC. EMORY.
+
+
+Whereupon the newspapers informed the public that the sad case of
+the two lepers at the pest-house had become tragic, because the
+white one had gone insane.  Public-spirited citizens wrote to the
+papers, declaiming against the maintenance of such a danger to the
+community, and demanding that the United States government build a
+national leprosarium on some remote island or isolated mountain
+peak.  But this tiny ripple of interest faded out in seventy-two
+hours, and the reporter-cubs proceeded variously to interest the
+public in the Alaskan husky dog that was half a bear, in the
+question whether or not Crispi Angelotti was guilty of having cut
+the carcass of Giuseppe Bartholdi into small portions and thrown
+it into the bay in a grain-sack off Fisherman's Wharf, and in the
+overt designs of Japan upon Hawaii, the Philippines, and the
+Pacific Coast of North America.
+
+And, outside of imprisonment, nothing happened of interest to Dag
+Daughtry and Kwaque at the pest-house until one night in the late
+fall.  A gale was not merely brewing.  It was coming on to blow.
+Because, in a basket of fruit, stated to have been sent by the
+young ladies of Miss Foote's Seminary, Daughtry had read a note
+artfully concealed in the heart of an apple, telling him on the
+forthcoming Friday night to keep a light burning in his window.
+Daughtry received a visitor at five in the morning.
+
+It was Charles Stough Greenleaf, the Ancient Mariner himself.
+Having wallowed for two hours through the deep sand of the
+eucalyptus forest, he fell exhausted against the penthouse door.
+When Daughtry opened it, the ancient one blew in upon him along
+with a gusty wet splatter of the freshening gale.  Daughtry caught
+him first and supported him toward a chair.  But, remembering his
+own affliction, he released the old man so abruptly as to drop him
+violently into the chair.
+
+"My word, sir," said Daughtry.  "You must 'a' ben havin' a time of
+it.--Here, you fella Kwaque, this fella wringin' wet.  You fella
+take 'm off shoe stop along him."
+
+But before Kwaque, immediately kneeling, could touch hand to the
+shoelaces, Daughtry, remembering that Kwaque was likewise unclean,
+had thrust him away.
+
+"My word, I don't know what to do," Daughtry murmured, staring
+about helplessly as he realised that it was a leper-house, that
+the very chair in which the old man sat was a leper-chair, that
+the very floor on which his exhausted feet rested was a leper-
+floor.
+
+"I'm glad to see you, most exceeding glad," the Ancient Mariner
+panted, extending his hand in greeting.
+
+Dag Daughtry avoided it.
+
+"How goes the treasure-hunting?" he queried lightly.  "Any
+prospects in sight?"
+
+The Ancient Mariner nodded, and with returning breath, at first
+whispering, gasped out:
+
+"We're all cleared to sail on the first of the ebb at seven this
+morning.  She's out in the stream now, a tidy bit of a schooner,
+the Bethlehem, with good lines and hull and large cabin
+accommodations.  She used to be in the Tahiti trade, before the
+steamers ran her out.  Provisions are good.  Everything is most
+excellent.  I saw to that.  I cannot say I like the captain.  I've
+seen his type before.  A splendid seaman, I am certain, but a
+Bully Hayes grown old.  A natural born pirate, a very wicked old
+man indeed.  Nor is the backer any better.  He is middle-aged, has
+a bad record, and is not in any sense of the word a gentleman, but
+he has plenty of money--made it first in California oil, then
+grub-staked a prospector in British Columbia, cheated him out of
+his share of the big lode he discovered and doubled his own wealth
+half a dozen times over.  A very undesirable, unlikeable sort of a
+man.  But he believes in luck, and is confident that he'll make at
+least fifty millions out of our adventure and cheat me out of my
+share.  He's as much a pirate as is the captain he's engaged."
+
+"Mr. Greenleaf, I congratulate you, sir," Daughtry said.  "And you
+have touched me, sir, touched me to the heart, coming all the way
+out here on such a night, and running such risks, just to say
+good-bye to poor Dag Daughtry, who always meant somewhat well but
+had bad luck."
+
+But while he talked so heartily, Daughtry saw, in a resplendent
+visioning, all the freedom of a schooner in the great South Seas,
+and felt his heart sink in realisation that remained for him only
+the pest-house, the sand-dunes, and the sad eucalyptus trees.
+
+The Ancient Mariner sat stiffly upright.
+
+"Sir, you have hurt me.  You have hurt me to the heart."
+
+"No offence, sir, no offence," Daughtry stammered in apology,
+although he wondered in what way he could have hurt the old
+gentleman's feelings.
+
+"You are my friend, sir," the other went on, gravely censorious.
+"I am your friend, sir.  And you give me to understand that you
+think I have come out here to this hell-hole to say good-bye.  I
+came out here to get you, sir, and your nigger, sir.  The schooner
+is waiting for you.  All is arranged.  You are signed on the
+articles before the shipping commissioner.  Both of you.  Signed
+on yesterday by proxies I arranged for myself.  One was a
+Barbadoes nigger.  I got him and the white man out of a sailors'
+boarding-house on Commercial Street and paid them five dollars
+each to appear before the Commissioner and sign on."
+
+"But, my God, Mr. Greenleaf, you don't seem to grasp it that he
+and I are lepers."
+
+Almost with a galvanic spring, the Ancient Mariner was out of the
+chair and on his feet, the anger of age and of a generous soul in
+his face as he cried:
+
+"My God, sir, what you don't seem to grasp is that you are my
+friend, and that I am your friend."
+
+Abruptly, still under the pressure of his wrath, he thrust out his
+hand.
+
+"Steward, Daughtry.  Mr. Daughtry, friend, sir, or whatever I may
+name you, this is no fairy-story of the open boat, the cross-
+bearings unnamable, and the treasure a fathom under the sand.
+This is real.  I have a heart.  That, sir"--here he waved his
+extended hand under Daughtry's nose--"is my hand.  There is only
+one thing you may do, must do, right now.  You must take that hand
+in your hand, and shake it, with your heart in your hand as mine
+is in my hand."
+
+"But . . . but. . . " Daughtry faltered.
+
+"If you don't, then I shall not depart from this place.  I shall
+remain here, die here.  I know you are a leper.  You can't tell me
+anything about that.  There's my hand.  Are you going to take it?
+My heart is there in the palm of it, in the pulse in every finger-
+end of it.  If you don't take it, I warn you I'll sit right down
+here in this chair and die.  I want you to understand I am a man,
+sir, a gentleman.  I am a friend, a comrade.  I am no poltroon of
+the flesh.  I live in my heart and in my head, sir--not in this
+feeble carcass I cursorily inhabit.  Take that hand.  I want to
+talk with you afterward."
+
+Dag Daughtry extended his hand hesitantly, but the Ancient Mariner
+seized it and pressed it so fiercely with his age-lean fingers as
+to hurt.
+
+"Now we can talk," he said.  "I have thought the whole matter
+over.  We sail on the Bethlehem.  When the wicked man discovers
+that he can never get a penny of my fabulous treasure, we will
+leave him.  He will be glad to be quit of us.  We, you and I and
+your nigger, will go ashore in the Marquesas.  Lepers roam about
+free there.  There are no regulations.  I have seen them.  We will
+be free.  The land is a paradise.  And you and I will set up
+housekeeping.  A thatched hut--no more is needed.  The work is
+trifling.  The freedom of beach and sea and mountain will be ours.
+For you there will be sailing, swimming, fishing, hunting.  There
+are mountain goats, wild chickens and wild cattle.  Bananas and
+plantains will ripen over our heads--avocados and custard apples,
+also.  The red peppers grow by the door, and there will be fowls,
+and the eggs of fowls.  Kwaque shall do the cooking.  And there
+will be beer.  I have long noted your thirst unquenchable.  There
+will be beer, six quarts of it a day, and more, more.
+
+"Quick.  We must start now.  I am sorry to tell you that I have
+vainly sought your dog.  I have even paid detectives who were
+robbers.  Doctor Emory stole Killeny Boy from you, but within a
+dozen hours he was stolen from Doctor Emory.  I have left no stone
+unturned.  Killeny Boy is gone, as we shall be gone from this
+detestable hole of a city.
+
+"I have a machine waiting.  The driver is paid well.  Also, I have
+promised to kill him if he defaults on me.  It bears just a bit
+north of east over the sandhill on the road that runs along the
+other side of the funny forest . . . That is right.  We will start
+now.  We can discuss afterward.  Look!  Daylight is beginning to
+break.  The guards must not see us . . . "
+
+Out into the storm they passed, Kwaque, with a heart wild with
+gladness, bringing up the rear.  At the beginning Daughtry strove
+to walk aloof, but in a trice, in the first heavy gust that
+threatened to whisk the frail old man away, Dag Daughtry's hand
+was grasping the other's arm, his own weight behind and under,
+supporting and impelling forward and up the hill through the heavy
+sand.
+
+"Thank you, steward, thank you, my friend," the Ancient Mariner
+murmured in the first lull between the gusts.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+
+Not altogether unwillingly, in the darkness of night, despite that
+he disliked the man, did Michael go with Harry Del Mar.  Like a
+burglar the man came, with infinite caution of silence, to the
+outhouse in Doctor Emory's back yard where Michael was a prisoner.
+Del Mar knew the theatre too well to venture any hackneyed
+melodramatic effect such as an electric torch.  He felt his way in
+the darkness to the door of the outhouse, unlatched it, and
+entered softly, feeling with his hands for the wire-haired coat.
+
+And Michael, a man-dog and a lion-dog in all the stuff of him,
+bristled at the instant of intrusion, but made no outcry.
+Instead, he smelled out the intruder and recognised him.
+Disliking the man, nevertheless he permitted the tying of the rope
+around his neck and silently followed him out to the sidewalk,
+down to the corner, and into the waiting taxi.
+
+His reasoning--unless reason be denied him--was simple.  This man
+he had met, more than once, in the company of Steward.  Amity had
+existed between him and Steward, for they had sat at table, and
+drunk together.  Steward was lost.  Michael knew not where to find
+him, and was himself a prisoner in the back yard of a strange
+place.  What had once happened, could again happen.  It had
+happened that Steward, Del Mar, and Michael had sat at table
+together on divers occasions.  It was probable that such a
+combination would happen again, was going to happen now, and, once
+more, in the bright-lighted cabaret, he would sit on a chair, Del
+Mar on one side, and on the other side beloved Steward with a
+glass of beer before him--all of which might be called "leaping to
+a conclusion"; for conclusion there was, and upon the conclusion
+Michael acted.
+
+Now Michael could not reason to this conclusion nor think to this
+conclusion, in words.  "Amity," as an instance, was no word in his
+consciousness.  Whether or not he thought to the conclusion in
+swift-related images and pictures and swift-welded composites of
+images and pictures, is a problem that still waits human solution.
+The point is:  HE DID THINK.  If this be denied him, then must he
+have acted wholly by instinct--which would seem more marvellous on
+the face of it than if, in dim ways, he had performed a vague
+thought-process.
+
+However, into the taxi and away through the maze of San
+Francisco's streets, Michael lay alertly on the floor near Del
+Mar's feet, making no overtures of friendliness, by the same token
+making no demonstration of the repulsion of the man's personality
+engendered in him.  For Harry Del Mar, who was base, and who had
+been further abased by his money-making desire for the possession
+of Michael, had had his baseness sensed by Michael from the
+beginning.  That first meeting in the Barbary Coast cabaret,
+Michael had bristled at him, and stiffened belligerently, when he
+laid his hand on Michael's head.  Nor had Michael thought about
+the man at all, much less attempted any analysis of him.
+Something had been wrong with that hand--the perfunctory way in
+which it had touched him under a show of heartiness that could
+well deceive the onlooker.  The FEEL of it had not been right.
+There had been no warmth in it, no heart, no communication of
+genuine good approach from the brain and the soul of the man of
+which it was the telegraphic tentacle and transmitter.  In short,
+the message or feel had not been a good message or feel, and
+Michael had bristled and stiffened without thinking, but by mere
+KNOWING, which is what men call "intuition."
+
+Electric lights, a shed-covered wharf, mountains of luggage and
+freight, the noisy toil of 'longshoremen and sailors, the staccato
+snorts of donkey engines and the whining sheaves as running lines
+ran through the blocks, a crowd of white-coated stewards carrying
+hand-baggage, the quartermaster at the gangway foot, the gangway
+sloping steeply up to the Umatilla's promenade deck, more
+quartermasters and gold-laced ship's officers at the head of the
+gangway, and more crowd and confusion blocking the narrow deck--
+thus Michael knew, beyond all peradventure, that he had come back
+to the sea and its ships, where he had first met Steward, where he
+had been always with Steward, save for the recent nightmare period
+in the great city.  Nor was there absent from the flashing visions
+of his consciousness the images and memories of Kwaque and Cocky.
+Whining eagerly, he strained at the leash, risking his tender toes
+among the many inconsiderate, restless, leather-shod feet of the
+humans, as he quested and scented for Cocky and Kwaque, and, most
+of all, for Steward.
+
+Michael accepted his disappointment in not immediately meeting
+them, for from the dawn of consciousness, the limitations and
+restrictions of dogs in relation to humans had been hammered into
+him in the form of concepts of patience.  The patience of waiting,
+when he wanted to go home and when Steward continued to sit at
+table and talk and drink beer, was his, as was the patience of the
+rope around the neck, the fence too high to scale, the narrowed-
+walled room with the closed door which he could never unlatch but
+which humans unlatched so easily.  So that he permitted himself to
+be led away by the ship's butcher, who on the Umatilla had the
+charge of all dog passengers.  Immured in a tiny between-decks
+cubby which was filled mostly with boxes and bales, tied as well
+by the rope around his neck, he waited from moment to moment for
+the door to open and admit, realised in the flesh, the resplendent
+vision of Steward which blazed through the totality of his
+consciousness.
+
+Instead, although Michael did not guess it then, and, only later,
+divined it as a vague manifestation of power on the part of Del
+Mar, the well-tipped ship's butcher opened the door, untied him,
+and turned him over to the well-tipped stateroom steward who led
+him to Del Mar's stateroom.  Up to the last, Michael was convinced
+that he was being led to Steward.  Instead, in the stateroom, he
+found only Del Mar.  "No Steward," might be described as Michael's
+thought; but by PATIENCE, as his mood and key, might be described
+his acceptance of further delay in meeting up with his god, his
+best beloved, his Steward who was his own human god amidst the
+multitude of human gods he was encountering.
+
+Michael wagged his tail, flattened his ears, even his crinkled
+ear, a trifle, and smiled, all in a casual way of recognition,
+smelled out the room to make doubly sure that there was no scent
+of Steward, and lay down on the floor.  When Del Mar spoke to him,
+he looked up and gazed at him.
+
+"Now, my boy, times have changed," Del Mar addressed him in cold,
+brittle tones.  "I'm going to make an actor out of you, and teach
+you what's what.  First of all, come here . . . COME HERE!"
+
+Michael obeyed, without haste, without lagging, and patently
+without eagerness.
+
+"You'll get over that, my lad, and put pep into your motions when
+I talk to you," Del Mar assured him; and the very manner of his
+utterance was a threat that Michael could not fail to recognise.
+"Now we'll just see if I can pull off the trick.  You listen to
+me, and sing like you did for that leper guy."
+
+Drawing a harmonica from his vest pocket, he put it to his lips
+and began to play "Marching through Georgia."
+
+"Sit down!" he commanded.
+
+Again Michael obeyed, although all that was Michael was in
+protest.  He quivered as the shrill-sweet strains from the silver
+reeds ran through him.  All his throat and chest was in the
+impulse to sing; but he mastered it, for he did not care to sing
+for this man.  All he wanted of him was Steward.
+
+"Oh, you're stubborn, eh?" Del Mar sneered at him.  "The matter
+with you is you're thoroughbred.  Well, my boy, it just happens I
+know your kind and I reckon I can make you get busy and work for
+me just as much as you did for that other guy.  Now get busy."
+
+He shifted the tune on into "Georgia Camp Meeting."  But Michael
+was obdurate.  Not until the melting strains of "Old Kentucky
+Home" poured through him did he lose his self-control and lift his
+mellow-throated howl that was the call for the lost pack of the
+ancient millenniums.  Under the prodding hypnosis of this music he
+could not but yearn and burn for the vague, forgotten life of the
+pack when the world was young and the pack was the pack ere it was
+lost for ever through the endless centuries of domestication.
+
+"Ah, ha," Del Mar chuckled coldly, unaware of the profound history
+and vast past he evoked by his silver reeds.
+
+A loud knock on the partition wall warned him that some sleepy
+passenger was objecting.
+
+"That will do!" he said sharply, taking the harmonica from his
+lips.  And Michael ceased, and hated him.  "I guess I've got your
+number all right.  And you needn't think you're going to sleep
+here scratching fleas and disturbing my sleep."
+
+He pressed the call-button, and, when his room-steward answered,
+turned Michael over to him to be taken down below and tied up in
+the crowded cubby-hole.
+
+
+During the several days and nights on the Umatilla, Michael
+learned much of what manner of man Harry Del Mar was.  Almost,
+might it be said, he learned Del Mar's pedigree without knowing
+anything of his history.  For instance he did not know that Del
+Mar's real name was Percival Grunsky, and that at grammar school
+he had been called "Brownie" by the girls and "Blackie" by the
+boys.  No more did he know that he had gone from half-way-through
+grammar school directly into the industrial reform school; nor
+that, after serving two years, he had been paroled out by Harris
+Collins, who made a living, and an excellent one, by training
+animals for the stage.  Much less could he know the training that
+for six years Del Mar, as assistant, had been taught to give the
+animals, and, thereby, had received for himself.
+
+What Michael did know was that Del Mar had no pedigree and was a
+scrub as compared with thoroughbreds such as Steward, Captain
+Kellar, and MISTER Haggin of Meringe.  And he learned it swiftly
+and simply.  In the day-time, fetched by a steward, Michael would
+be brought on deck to Del Mar, who was always surrounded by
+effusive young ladies and matrons who lavished caresses and
+endearments upon Michael.  This he stood, although much bored; but
+what irked him almost beyond standing were the feigned caresses
+and endearments Del Mar lavished on him.  He knew the cold-blooded
+insincerity of them, for, at night, when he was brought to Del
+Mar's room, he heard only the cold brittle tones, sensed only the
+threat and the menace of the other's personality, felt, when
+touched by the other's hand, only a stiffness and sharpness of
+contact that was like to so much steel or wood in so far as all
+subtle tenderness of heart and spirit was absent.
+
+This man was two-faced, two-mannered.  No thoroughbred was
+anything but single-faced and single-mannered.  A thoroughbred,
+hot-blooded as it might be, was always sincere.  But in this scrub
+was no sincerity, only a positive insincerity.  A thoroughbred had
+passion, because of its hot blood; but this scrub had no passion.
+Its blood was cold as its deliberateness, and it did nothing save
+deliberately.  These things he did not think.  He merely realized
+them, as any creature realizes itself in LIKING and in not LIKING.
+
+To cap it all, the last night on board, Michael lost his
+thoroughbred temper with this man who had no temper.  It came to a
+fight.  And Michael had no chance.  He raged royally and fought
+royally, leaping to the attack, after being knocked over twice by
+open-handed blows under his ear.  Quick as Michael was, slashing
+South Sea niggers by virtue of his quickness and cleverness, he
+could not touch his teeth to the flesh of this man, who had been
+trained for six years with animals by Harris Collins.  So that,
+when he leaped, open-mouthed, for the bite, Del Mar's right hand
+shot out, gripped his under-jaw as he was in the air, and flipped
+him over in a somersaulting fall to the floor on his back.  Once
+again he leapt open-mouthed to the attack, and was filliped to the
+floor so hard that almost the last particle of breath was knocked
+out of him.  The next leap was nearly his last.  He was clutched
+by the throat.  Two thumbs pressed into his neck on either side of
+the windpipe directly on the carotid arteries, shutting off the
+blood to his brain and giving him most exquisite agony, at the
+same time rendering him unconscious far more swiftly than the
+swiftest anaesthetic.  Darkness thrust itself upon him; and,
+quivering on the floor, glimmeringly he came back to the light of
+the room and to the man who was casually touching a match to a
+cigarette and cautiously keeping an observant eye on him.
+
+"Come on," Del Mar challenged.  "I know your kind.  You can't get
+my goat, and maybe I can't get yours entirely, but I can keep you
+under my thumb to work for me.  Come on, you!"
+
+And Michael came.  Being a thoroughbred, despite that he knew he
+was beaten by this two-legged thing which was not warm human but
+was so alien and hard that he might as well attack the wall of a
+room with his teeth, or a tree-trunk, or a cliff of rock, Michael
+leapt bare-fanged for the throat.  And all that he leapt against
+was training, formula.  The experience was repeated.  His throat
+was gripped, the thumbs shut off the blood from his brain, and
+darkness smote him.  Had he been more than a normal thoroughbred
+dog, he would have continued to assail his impregnable enemy until
+he burst his heart or fell in a fit.  But he was normal.  Here was
+something unassailable, adamantine.  As little might he win
+victory from it, as from the cement-paved side-walk of a city.
+The thing was a devil, with the hardness and coldness, the
+wickedness and wisdom, of a devil.  It was as bad as Steward was
+good.  Both were two-legged.  Both were gods.  But this one was an
+evil god.
+
+He did not reason all this, nor any of it.  Yet, transmuted into
+human terms of thought and understanding, it adequately describes
+the fulness of his state of mind toward Del Mar.  Had Michael been
+entangled in a fight with a warm god, he could have raged and
+battled blindly, inflicting and receiving hurt in the chaos of
+conflict, as such a god, being warm, would have likewise received
+and given hurt, being only a flesh-and-blood, living, breathing
+entity after all.  But this two-legged god-devil did not rage
+blindly and was incapable of passional heat.  He was like so much
+cunning, massive steel machinery, and he did what Michael could
+never dream he did--and, for that matter, which few humans do and
+which all animal trainers do:  HE KEPT ONE THOUGHT AHEAD OF
+MICHAEL'S THOUGHT ALL THE TIME, and therefore, was able to have
+ready one action always in anticipation of Michael's next action.
+This was the training he had received from Harris Collins, who,
+withal he was a sentimental and doting husband and father, was the
+arch-devil when it came to animals other than human ones, and who
+reigned in an animal hell which he had created and made lucrative.
+
+
+Michael went ashore in Seattle all eagerness, straining at his
+leash until he choked and coughed and was coldly cursed by Del
+Mar.  For Michael was mastered by his expectation that he would
+meet Steward, and he looked for him around the first corner, and
+around all corners with undiminished zeal.  But amongst the
+multitudes of men there was no Steward.  Instead, down in the
+basement of the New Washington Hotel, where electric lights burned
+always, under the care of the baggage porter, he was tied securely
+by the neck in the midst of Alpine ranges of trunks which were for
+ever being heaped up, sought over, taken down, carried away, or
+added to.
+
+Three days of this dolorous existence he passed.  The porters made
+friends with him and offered him prodigious quantities of cooked
+meats from the leavings of the dining-room.  Michael was too
+disappointed and grief-stricken over Steward to overeat himself,
+while Del Mar, accompanied by the manager of the hotel, raised a
+great row with the porters for violating the feeding instructions.
+
+"That guy's no good," said the head porter to assistant, when Del
+Mar had departed.  "He's greasy.  I never liked greasy brunettes
+anyway.  My wife's a brunette, but thank the Lord she ain't
+greasy."
+
+"Sure," agreed the assistant.  "I know his kind.  Why, if you'd
+stick a knife into him he wouldn't bleed blood.  It'd be straight
+liquid lard."
+
+Whereupon the pair of them immediately presented Michael with
+vaster quantities of meat which he could not eat because the
+desire for Steward was too much with him.
+
+In the meantime Del Mar sent off two telegrams to New York, the
+first to Harris Collins' animal training school, where his troupe
+of dogs was boarding through his vacation:
+
+
+"Sell my dogs.  You know what they can do and what they are worth.
+Am done with them.  Deduct the board and hold the balance for me
+until I see you.  I have the limit here of a dog.  Every turn I
+ever pulled is put in the shade by this one.  He's a ten strike.
+Wait till you see him."
+
+
+The second, to his booking agent:
+
+
+"Get busy.  Book me over the best.  Talk it up.  I have the turn.
+A winner.  Nothing like it.  Don't talk up top price but way over
+top price.  Prepare them for the dog when I give them the chance
+for the once over.  You know me.  I am giving it straight.  This
+will head the bill anywhere all the time."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+
+Came the crate.  Because Del Mar brought it into the baggage-room,
+Michael was suspicious of it.  A minute later his suspicion was
+justified.  Del Mar invited him to go into the crate, and he
+declined.  With a quick deft clutch on the collar at the back of
+his neck, Del Mar jerked him off his footing and thrust him in, or
+partly in, rather, because he had managed to get a hold on the
+edge of the crate with his two fore-paws.  The animal trainer
+wasted no time.  He brought the clenched fist of his free hand
+down in two blows, rat-tat, on Michael's paws.  And Michael, at
+the pain, relaxed both holds.  The next instant he was thrust
+inside, snarling his indignation and rage as he vainly flung
+himself at the open bars, while Del Mar was locking the stout
+door.
+
+Next, the crate was carried out to an express wagon and loaded in
+along with a number of trunks.  Del Mar had disappeared the moment
+he had locked the door, and the two men in the wagon, which was
+now bouncing along over the cobblestones, were strangers.  There
+was just room in the crate for Michael to stand upright, although
+he could not lift his head above the level of his shoulders.  And
+so standing, his head pressed against the top, a rut in the road,
+jolting the wagon and its contents, caused his head to bump
+violently.
+
+The crate was not quite so long as Michael, so that he was
+compelled to stand with the end of his nose pressing against the
+end of the crate.  An automobile, darting out from a cross-street,
+caused the driver of the wagon to pull in abruptly and apply the
+brake.  With the crate thus suddenly arrested, Michael's body was
+precipitated forward.  There was no brake to stop him, unless the
+soft end of his nose be considered the brake, for it was his nose
+that brought his body to rest inside the crate.
+
+He tried lying down, confined as the space was, and made out
+better, although his lips were cut and bleeding by having been
+forced so sharply against his teeth.  But the worst was to come.
+One of his fore-paws slipped out through the slats or bars and
+rested on the bottom of the wagon where the trunks were squeaking,
+screeching, and jigging.  A rut in the roadway made the nearest
+trunk tilt one edge in the air and shift position, so that when it
+tilted back again it rested on Michael's paw.  The unexpectedness
+of the crushing hurt of it caused him to yelp and at the same time
+instinctively and spasmodically to pull back with all his
+strength.  This wrenched his shoulder and added to the agony of
+the imprisoned foot.
+
+And blind fear descended upon Michael, the fear that is implanted
+in all animals and in man himself--THE  FEAR OF THE TRAP.  Utterly
+beside himself, though he no longer yelped, he flung himself madly
+about, straining the tendons and muscles of his shoulder and leg
+and further and severely injuring the crushed foot.  He even
+attacked the bars with his teeth in his agony to get at the
+monster thing outside that had laid hold of him and would not let
+him go.  Another rut saved him, however, tilting the trunk just
+sufficiently to enable his violent struggling to drag the foot
+clear.
+
+At the railroad station, the crate was handled, not with
+deliberate roughness, but with such carelessness that it half-
+slipped out of a baggage-man's hands, capsized sidewise, and was
+caught when it was past the man's knees but before it struck the
+cement floor.  But, Michael, sliding helplessly down the
+perpendicular bottom of the crate, fetched up with his full weight
+on the injured paw.
+
+"Huh!" said Del Mar a little later to Michael, having strolled
+down the platform to where the crate was piled on a truck with
+other baggage destined for the train.  "Got your foot smashed.
+Well, it'll teach you a lesson to keep your feet inside."
+
+"That claw is a goner," one of the station baggage-men said,
+straightening up from an examination of Michael through the bars.
+
+Del Mar bent to a closer scrutiny.
+
+"So's the whole toe," he said, drawing his pocket-knife and
+opening a blade.  "I'll fix it in half a jiffy if you'll lend a
+hand."
+
+He unlocked the box and dipped Michael out with the customary
+strangle-hold on the neck.  He squirmed and struggled, dabbing at
+the air with the injured as well as the uninjured forepaw and
+increasing his pain.
+
+"You hold the leg," Del Mar commanded.  "He's safe with that grip.
+It won't take a second."
+
+Nor did it take longer.  And Michael, back in the box and raging,
+was one toe short of the number which he had brought into the
+world.  The blood ran freely from the crude but effective surgery,
+and he lay and licked the wound and was depressed with
+apprehension of he knew not what terrible fate awaited him and was
+close at hand.  Never, in his experience of men, had he been so
+treated, while the confinement of the box was maddening with its
+suggestion of the trap.  Trapped he was, and helpless, and the
+ultimate evil of life had happened to Steward, who had evidently
+been swallowed up by the Nothingness which had swallowed up
+Meringe, the Eugenie, the Solomon Islands, the Makambo, Australia,
+and the Mary Turner.
+
+Suddenly, from a distance, came a bedlam of noise that made
+Michael prick up his ears and bristle with premonition of fresh
+disaster.  It was a confused yelping, howling, and barking of many
+dogs.
+
+"Holy Smoke!--It's them damned acting dogs," growled the
+baggageman to his mate.  "There ought to be a law against dog-
+acts.  It ain't decent."
+
+"It's Peterson's Troupe," said the other.  "I was on when they
+come in last week.  One of 'em was dead in his box, and from what
+I could see of him it looked mighty like he'd had the tar knocked
+outa him."
+
+"Got a wollopin' from Peterson most likely in the last town and
+then was shipped along with the bunch and left to die in the
+baggage car."
+
+The bedlam increased as the animals were transferred from the
+wagon to a platform truck, and when the truck rolled up and
+stopped alongside Michael's he made out that it was piled high
+with crated dogs.  In truth, there were thirty-five dogs, of every
+sort of breed and mostly mongrel, and that they were far from
+happy was attested by their actions.  Some howled, some whimpered,
+others growled and raged at one another through the slots, and
+many maintained a silence of misery.  Several licked and nursed
+bruised feet.  Smaller dogs that did not fight much were crammed
+two or more into single crates.  Half a dozen greyhounds were
+crammed into larger crates that were anything save large enough.
+
+"Them's the high-jumpers," said the first baggageman.  "An' look
+at the way they're packed.  Peterson ain't going to pay any more
+excess baggage than he has to.  Not half room enough for them to
+stand up.  It must be hell for them from the time they leave one
+town till they arrive at the next."
+
+But what the baggageman did not know was that in the towns the
+hell was not mitigated, that the dogs were still confined in their
+too-narrow prisons, that, in fact, they were life-prisoners.
+Rarely, except for their acts, were they taken out from their
+cages.  From a business standpoint, good care did not pay.  Since
+mongrel dogs were cheap, it was cheaper to replace them when they
+died than so to care for them as to keep them from dying.
+
+What the baggageman did not know, and what Peterson did know, was
+that of these thirty-five dogs not one was a surviving original of
+the troupe when it first started out four years before.  Nor had
+there been any originals discarded.  The only way they left the
+troupe and its cages was by dying.  Nor did Michael know even as
+little as the baggageman knew.  He knew nothing save that here
+reigned pain and woe and that it seemed he was destined to share
+the same fate.
+
+Into the midst of them, when with more howlings and yelpings they
+were loaded into the baggage car, was Michael's cage piled.  And
+for a day and a part of two nights, travelling eastward, he
+remained in the dog inferno.  Then they were loaded off in some
+large city, and Michael continued on in greater quietness and
+comfort, although his injured foot still hurt and was bruised
+afresh whenever his crate was moved about in the car.
+
+What it was all about--why he was kept in his cramped prison in
+the cramped car--he did not ask himself.  He accepted it as
+unhappiness and misery, and had no more explanation for it than
+for the crushing of the paw.  Such things happened.  It was life,
+and life had many evils.  The WHY of things never entered his
+head.  He knew THINGS and some small bit of the HOW of things.
+What was, WAS.  Water was wet, fire hot, iron hard, meat good.  He
+accepted such things as he accepted the everlasting miracles of
+the light and of the dark, which were no miracles to him any more
+than was his wire coat a miracle, or his beating heart, or his
+thinking brain.
+
+In Chicago, he was loaded upon a track, carted through the roaring
+streets of the vast city, and put into another baggage-car which
+was quickly in motion in continuation of the eastward journey.  It
+meant more strange men who handled baggage, as it meant in New
+York, where, from railroad baggage-room to express wagon he was
+exchanged, for ever a crated prisoner and dispatched to one,
+Harris Collins, on Long Island.
+
+First of all came Harris Collins and the animal hell over which he
+ruled.  But the second event must be stated first.  Michael never
+saw Harry Del Mar again.  As the other men he had known had
+stepped out of life, which was a way they had, so Harry Del Mar
+stepped out of Michael's purview of life as well as out of life
+itself.  And his stepping out was literal.  A collision on the
+elevated, a panic scramble of the uninjured out upon the trestle
+over the street, a step on the third rail, and Harry Del Mar was
+engulfed in the Nothingness which men know as death and which is
+nothingness in so far as such engulfed ones never reappear nor
+walk the ways of life again.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+
+Harris Collins was fifty-two years of age.  He was slender and
+dapper, and in appearance and comportment was so sweet- and
+gentle-spirited that the impression he radiated was almost of
+sissyness.  He might have taught a Sunday-school, presided over a
+girls' seminary, or been a president of a humane society.
+
+His complexion was pink and white, his hands were as soft as the
+hands of his daughters, and he weighed a hundred and twelve
+pounds.  Moreover, he was afraid of his wife, afraid of a
+policeman, afraid of physical violence, and lived in constant
+dread of burglars.  But the one thing he was not afraid of was
+wild animals of the most ferocious sorts, such as lions, tigers,
+leopards, and jaguars.  He knew the game, and could conquer the
+most refractory lion with a broom-handle--not outside the cage,
+but inside and locked in.
+
+It was because he knew the game and had learned it from his father
+before him, a man even smaller than himself and more fearful of
+all things except animals.  This father, Noel Collins, had been a
+successful animal trainer in England, before emigrating to
+America, and in America he had continued the success and laid the
+foundation of the big animal training school at Cedarwild, which
+his son had developed and built up after him.  So well had Harris
+Collins built on his father's foundation that the place was
+considered a model of sanitation and kindness.  It entertained
+many visitors, who invariably went away with their souls filled
+with ecstasy over the atmosphere of sweetness and light that
+pervaded the place.  Never, however, were they permitted to see
+the actual training.  On occasion, performances were given them by
+the finished products which verified all their other delightful
+and charming conclusions about the school.  But had they seen the
+training of raw novices, it would have been a different story.  It
+might even have been a riot.  As it was, the place was a zoo, and
+free at that; for, in addition to the animals he owned and trained
+and bought and sold, a large portion of the business was devoted
+to boarding trained animals and troupes of animals for owners who
+were out of engagements, or for estates of such owners which were
+in process of settlement.  From mice and rats to camels and
+elephants, and even, on occasion, to a rhinoceros or a pair of
+hippopotamuses, he could supply any animal on demand.
+
+When the Circling Brothers' big three-ring show on a hard winter
+went into the hands of the receivers, he boarded the menagerie and
+the horses and in three months turned a profit of fifteen thousand
+dollars.  More--he mortgaged all he possessed against the day of
+the auction, bought in the trained horses and ponies, the giraffe
+herd and the performing elephants, and, in six months more was
+quit of an of them, save the pony Repeater who turned air-springs,
+at another profit of fifteen thousand dollars.  As for Repeater,
+he sold the pony several months later for a sheer profit of two
+thousand.  While this bankruptcy of the Circling Brothers had been
+the greatest financial achievement of Harris Collin's life,
+nevertheless he enjoyed no mean permanent income from his plant,
+and, in addition, split fees with the owners of his board animals
+when he sent them to the winter Hippodrome shows, and, more often
+than not, failed to split any fee at all when he rented the
+animals to moving-picture companies.
+
+Animal men, the country over, acknowledged him to be, not only the
+richest in the business, but the king of trainers and the
+grittiest man who ever went into a cage.  And those who from the
+inside had seen him work were agreed that he had no soul.  Yet his
+wife and children, and those in his small social circle, thought
+otherwise.  They, never seeing him at work, were convinced that no
+softer-hearted, more sentimental man had ever been born.  His
+voice was low and gentle, his gestures were delicate, his views on
+life, the world, religion and politics, the mildest.  A kind word
+melted him.  A plea won him.  He gave to all local charities, and
+was gravely depressed for a week when the Titanic went down.  And
+yet--the men in the trained-animal game acknowledged him the
+nerviest and most nerveless of the profession.  And yet--his
+greatest fear in the world was that his large, stout wife, at
+table, should crown him with a plate of hot soup.  Twice, in a
+tantrum, she had done this during their earlier married life.  In
+addition to his fear that she might do it again, he loved her
+sincerely and devotedly, as he loved his children, seven of them,
+for whom nothing was too good or too expensive.
+
+So well did he love them, that the four boys from the beginning he
+forbade from seeing him WORK, and planned gentler careers for
+them.  John, the oldest, in Yale, had elected to become a man of
+letters, and, in the meantime, ran his own automobile with the
+corresponding standard of living such ownership connoted in the
+college town of New Haven.  Harold and Frederick were down at a
+millionaires' sons' academy in Pennsylvania; and Clarence, the
+youngest, at a prep. school in Massachusetts, was divided in his
+choice of career between becoming a doctor or an aviator.  The
+three girls, two of them twins, were pledged to be cultured into
+ladies.  Elsie was on the verge of graduating from Vassar.  Mary
+and Madeline, the twins, in the most select and most expensive of
+seminaries, were preparing for Vassar.  All of which required
+money which Harris Collins did not grudge, but which strained the
+earning capacity of his animal-training school.  It compelled him
+to work the harder, although his wife and the four sons and three
+daughters did not dream that he actually worked at all.  Their
+idea was that by virtue of superior wisdom he merely
+superintended, and they would have been terribly shocked could
+they have seen him, club in hand, thrashing forty mongrel dogs, in
+the process of training, which had become excited and out of hand.
+
+A great deal of the work was done by his assistants, but it was
+Harris Collins who taught them continually what to do and how to
+do it, and who himself, on more important animals, did the work
+and showed them how.  His assistants were almost invariably youths
+from the reform schools, and he picked them with skilful eye and
+intuition.  Control of them, under their paroles, with
+intelligence and coldness on their part, were the conditions and
+qualities he sought, and such combination, as a matter of course,
+carried with it cruelty.  Hot blood, generous impulses,
+sentimentality, were qualities he did not want for his business;
+and the Cedarwild Animal School was business from the first tick
+of the clock to the last bite of the lash.  In short, Harris
+Collins, in the totality of results, was guilty of causing more
+misery and pain to animals than all laboratories of vivisection in
+Christendom.
+
+And into this animal hell Michael descended--although his arrival
+was horizontal, across three thousand five hundred miles, in the
+same crate in which he had been placed at the New Washington Hotel
+in Seattle.  Never once had he been out of the crate during the
+entire journey, and filthiness, as well as wretchedness,
+characterized his condition.  Thanks to his general good health,
+the wound of the amputated toe was in the process of uneventful
+healing.  But dirt clung to him, and he was infested with fleas.
+
+Cedarwild, to look at, was anything save a hell.  Velvet lawns,
+gravelled walks and drives, and flowers formally growing, led up
+to the group of long low buildings, some of frame and some of
+concrete.  But Michael was not received by Harris Collins, who, at
+the moment, sat in his private office, Harry Del Mar's last
+telegram on his desk, writing a memorandum to his secretary to
+query the railroad and the express companies for the whereabouts
+of a dog, crated and shipped by one, Harry Del Mar, from Seattle
+and consigned to Cedarwild.  It was a pallid-eyed youth of
+eighteen in overalls who received Michael, receipted for him to
+the expressman, and carried his crate into a slope-floored
+concrete room that smelled offensively and chemically clean.
+
+Michael was impressed by his surroundings but not attracted by the
+youth, who rolled up his sleeves and encased himself in large
+oilskin apron before he opened the crate.  Michael sprang out and
+staggered about on legs which had not walked for days.  This
+particular two-legged god was uninteresting.  He was as cold as
+the concrete floor, as methodical as a machine; and in such
+fashion he went about the washing, scrubbing, and disinfecting of
+Michael.  For Harris Collins was scientific and antiseptic to the
+last word in his handling of animals, and Michael was
+scientifically made clean, without deliberate harshness, but
+without any slightest hint of gentleness or consideration.
+
+Naturally, he did not understand.  On top of all he had already
+experienced, not even knowing executioners and execution chambers,
+for all he knew this bare room of cement and chemical smell might
+well be the place of the ultimate life-disaster and this youth the
+god who was to send him into the dark which had engulfed all he
+had known and loved.  What Michael did know beyond the shadow of
+any doubt was that it was all coldly ominous and terribly strange.
+He endured the hand of the youth-god on the scruff of his neck,
+after the collar had been unbuckled; but when the hose was turned
+on him, he resented and resisted.  The youth, merely working by
+formula, tightened the safe grip on the scruff of Michael's neck
+and lifted him clear of the floor, at the same time, with the
+other hand, directing the stream of water into his mouth and
+increasing it to full force by the nozzle control.  Michael
+fought, and was well drowned for his pains, until he gasped and
+strangled helplessly.
+
+After that he resisted no more, and was washed out and scrubbed
+out and cleansed out with the hose, a big bristly brush, and much
+carbolic soap, the lather of which got into and stung his eyes and
+nose, causing him to weep copiously and sneeze violently.
+Apprehensive of what might at any moment happen to him, but by
+this time aware that the youth was neither positive nor negative
+for kindness or harm, Michael continued to endure without further
+battling, until, clean and comfortable, he was put away into a
+pen, sweet and wholesome, where he slept and for the time being
+forgot.  The place was the hospital, or segregation ward, and a
+week of imprisonment was spent therein, in which nothing happened
+in the way of development of germ diseases, and nothing happened
+to him except regular good food, pure drinking-water, and absolute
+isolation from contact with all life save the youth-god who, like
+an automaton, attended on him.
+
+Michael had yet to meet Harris Collins, although, from a distance,
+often he heard his voice, not loud, but very imperative.  That the
+owner of this voice was a high god, Michael knew from the first
+sound of it.  Only a high god, a master over ordinary gods, could
+be so imperative.  Will was in that voice, and accustomedness to
+command.  Any dog would have so decided as quickly as Michael did.
+And any dog would have decided that there was no love nor
+lovableness in the god behind the voice, nothing to warm one's
+heart nor to adore.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+
+It was at eleven in the morning that the pale youth-god put collar
+and chain on Michael, led him out of the segregation ward, and
+turned him over to a dark youth-god who wasted no time of greeting
+on him and manifested no friendliness.  A captive at the end of a
+chain, on the way Michael quickly encountered other captives going
+in his direction.  There were three of them, and never had he seen
+the like.  Three slouching, ambling monsters of bears they were,
+and at sight of them Michael bristled and uttered the lowest of
+growls; for he knew them, out of his heredity (as a domestic cow
+knows her first wolf), as immemorial enemies from the wild.  But
+he had travelled too far, seen too much, and was altogether too
+sensible, to attack them.  Instead, walking stiff-legged and
+circumspectly, but smelling with all his nose the strange scent of
+the creatures, he followed at the end of his chain his own captor
+god.
+
+Continually a multitude of strange scents invaded his nostrils.
+Although he could not see through walls, he got the smells he was
+later to identify of lions, leopards, monkeys, baboons, and seals
+and sea-lions.  All of which might have stunned an ordinary dog;
+but the effect on him was to make him very alert and at the same
+time very subdued.  It was as if he walked in a new and
+monstrously populous jungle and was unacquainted with its ways and
+denizens.
+
+As he was entering the arena, he shied off to the side more stiff-
+leggedly than ever, bristled all along his neck and back, and
+growled deep and low in his throat.  For, emerging from the arena,
+came five elephants.  Small elephants they were, but to him they
+were the hugest of monsters, in his mind comparable only with the
+cow-whale of which he had caught fleeting glimpses when she
+destroyed the schooner Mary Turner.  But the elephants took no
+notice of him, each with its trunk clutching the tail of the one
+in front of it as it had been taught to do in making an exit.
+
+Into the arena, he came, the bears following on his heels.  It was
+a sawdust circle the size of a circus ring, contained inside a
+square building that was roofed over with glass.  But there were
+no seats about the ring, since spectators were not tolerated.
+Only Harris Collins and his assistants, and buyers and sellers of
+animals and men in the profession, were ever permitted to behold
+how animals were tormented into the performance of tricks to make
+the public open its mouth in astonishment or laughter.
+
+Michael forgot about the bears, who were quickly at work on the
+other side of the circle from that to which he was taken.  Some
+men, rolling out stout bright-painted barrels which elephants
+could not crush by sitting on, attracted his attention for a
+moment.  Next, in a pause on the part of the man who led him, he
+regarded with huge interest a piebald Shetland pony.  It lay on
+the ground.  A man sat on it.  And ever and anon it lifted its
+head from the sawdust and kissed the man.  This was all Michael
+saw, yet he sensed something wrong about it.  He knew not why, had
+no evidence why, but he felt cruelty and power and unfairness.
+What he did not see was the long pin in the man's hand.  Each time
+he thrust this in the pony's shoulder, the pony, stung by the pain
+and reflex action, lifted its head, and the man was deftly ready
+to meet the pony's mouth with his own mouth.  To an audience the
+impression would be that in such fashion the pony was expressing
+its affection for the master.
+
+Not a dozen feet away another Shetland, a coal-black one, was
+behaving as peculiarly as it was being treated.  Ropes were
+attached to its forelegs, each rope held by an assistant, who
+jerked on the same stoutly when a third man, standing in front of
+the pony, tapped it on the knees with a short, stiff whip of
+rattan.  Whereupon the pony went down on its knees in the sawdust
+in a genuflection to the man with the whip.  The pony did not like
+it, sometimes so successfully resisting with spread, taut legs and
+mutinous head-tossings, as to overcome the jerk of the ropes, and,
+at the same time wheeling, to fall heavily on its side or to
+uprear as the pull on the ropes was relaxed.  But always it was
+lined up again to face the man who rapped its knees with the
+rattan.  It was being taught merely how to kneel in the way that
+is ever a delight to the audiences who see only the results of the
+schooling and never dream of the manner of the schooling.  For, as
+Michael was quickly sensing, knowledge was here learned by pain.
+In short, this was the college of pain, this Cedarwild Animal
+School.
+
+Harris Collins himself nodded the dark youth-god up to him, and
+turned an inquiring and estimating gaze on Michael.
+
+"The Del Mar dog, sir," said the youth-god.
+
+Collins's eyes brightened, and he looked Michael over more
+carefully.
+
+"Do you know what he can do?" he queried.
+
+The youth shook his head.
+
+"Harry was a keen one," Collins went on, apparently to the youth-
+god but mostly for his own benefit, being given to thinking aloud.
+"He picked this dog as a winner.  And now what can he do?  That's
+the question.  Poor Harry's gone, and we don't know what he can
+do.--Take off the chain."
+
+Released Michael regarded the master-god and waited for what might
+happen.  A squall of pain from one of the bears across the ring
+hinted to him what he might expect.
+
+"Come here," Collins commanded in his cold, hard tones.
+
+Michael came and stood before him.
+
+"Lie down!"
+
+Michael lay down, although he did it slowly, with advertised
+reluctance.
+
+"Damned thoroughbred!" Collins sneered at him.  "Won't put any pep
+into your motions, eh?  Well, we'll take care of that.--Get up!--
+Lie down!--Get up!--Lie down!--Get up!"
+
+His commands were staccato, like revolver shots or the cracks of
+whips, and Michael obeyed them in his same slow, reluctant way.
+
+"Understands English, at any rate," said Collins.
+
+"Wonder if he can turn the double flip," he added, expressing the
+golden dream of all dog-trainers.  "Come on, we'll try him for a
+flip.  Put the chain on him.  Come over here, Jimmy.  Put another
+lead on him."
+
+Another reform-school graduate youth obeyed, snapping a girth
+about Michael's loins, to which was attached a thin rope.
+
+"Line him up," Collins commanded.  "Ready?--Go!"
+
+And the most amazing, astounding indignity was wreaked upon
+Michael.  At the word "Go!", simultaneously, the chain on his
+collar jerked him up and back in the air, the rope on his
+hindquarters jerked that portion of him under, forward, and up,
+and the still short stick in Collins's hand hit him under the
+lower jaw.  Had he had any previous experience with the manoeuvre,
+he would have saved himself part of the pain at least by springing
+and whirling backward in the air.  As it was, he felt as if being
+torn and wrenched apart while at the same time the blow under his
+jaw stung him and almost dazed him.  And, at the same time,
+whirled violently into the air, he fell on the back of his head in
+the sawdust.
+
+Out of the sawdust he soared in rage, neck-hair erect, throat a-
+snarl, teeth bared to bite, and he would have sunk his teeth into
+the flesh of the master-god had he not been the slave of cunning
+formula.  The two youths knew their work.  One tightened the lead
+ahead, the other to the rear, and Michael snarled and bristled his
+impotent wrath.  Nothing could he do, neither advance, nor
+retreat, nor whirl sideways.  The youth in front by the chain
+prevented him from attacking the youth behind, and the youth
+behind, with the rope, prevented him from attacking the youth in
+front, and both prevented him from attacking Collins, whom he knew
+incontrovertibly to be the master of evil and hurt.
+
+Michael's wrath was as superlative as was his helplessness.  He
+could only bristle and tear his vocal chords with his rage.  But
+it was a very ancient and boresome experience to Collins.  He was
+even taking advantage of the moment to glance across the arena and
+size up what the bears were doing.
+
+"Oh, you thoroughbred," he sneered at Michael, returning his
+attention to him.  "Slack him!  Let go!"
+
+The instant his bonds were released, Michael soared at Collins,
+and Collins, timing and distancing with the accuracy of long
+years, kicked him under the jaw and whirled him back and down into
+the sawdust.
+
+"Hold him!" Collins ordered.  "Line him out!"
+
+And the two youths, pulling in opposite directions with chain and
+rope, stretched him into helplessness.
+
+Collins glanced across the ring to the entrance, where two teams
+of heavy draft-horses were entering, followed by a woman dressed
+to over-dressedness in the last word of a stylish street-costume.
+
+"I fancy he's never done any flipping," Collins remarked, coming
+back to the problem of Michael for a moment.  "Take off your lead,
+Jimmy, and go over and help Smith.--Johnny, hold him to one side
+there and mind your legs.  Here comes Miss Marie for her first
+lesson, and that mutt of a husband of hers can't handle her."
+
+Michael did not understand the scene that followed, which he
+witnessed, for the youth led him over to look on at the arranging
+of the woman and the four horses.  Yet, from her conduct, he
+sensed that she, too, was captive and ill-treated.  In truth, she
+was herself being trained unwillingly to do a trick.  She had
+carried herself bravely right to the moment of the ordeal, but the
+sight of the four horses, ranged two and two opposing her, with
+the thing patent that she was to hold in her hands the hooks on
+the double-trees and form the link that connected the two spans
+which were to pull in opposite directions--at the sight of this
+her courage failed her and she shrank back, drooping and cowering,
+her face buried in her hands.
+
+"No, no, Billikens," she pleaded to the stout though youthful man
+who was her husband.  "I can't do it.  I'm afraid.  I'm afraid."
+
+"Nonsense, madam," Collins interposed.  "The trick is absolutely
+safe.  And it's a good one, a money-maker.  Straighten up a
+moment."  With his hands he began feeling out her shoulders and
+back under her jacket.  "The apparatus is all right."  He ran his
+hands down her arms.  "Now!  Drop the hooks."  He shook each arm,
+and from under each of the fluffy lace cuffs fell out an iron hook
+fast to a thin cable of steel that evidently ran up her sleeves.
+"Not that way!  Nobody must see.  Put them back.  Try it again.
+They must come down hidden in your palms.  Like this.  See.--
+That's it.  That's the idea."
+
+She controlled herself and strove to obey, though ever and anon
+she cast appealing glances to Billikens, who stood remote and
+aloof, his brows wrinkled with displeasure.
+
+Each of the men driving the harnessed spans lifted up the double-
+trees so that the girl could grasp the hooks.  She tried to take
+hold, but broke down again.
+
+"If anything breaks, my arms will be torn out of me," she
+protested.
+
+"On the contrary," Collins reassured her.  "You will lose merely
+most of your jacket.  The worst that can happen will be the
+exposure of the trick and the laugh on you.  But the apparatus
+isn't going to break.  Let me explain again.  The horses do not
+pull against you.  They pull against each other.  The audience
+thinks that they are pulling against you.--Now try once more.
+Take hold the double-trees, and at the same moment slip down the
+hooks and connect.--Now!"
+
+He spoke sharply.  She shook the hooks down out of her sleeves,
+but drew back from grasping the double-trees.  Collins did not
+betray his vexation.  Instead, he glanced aside to where the
+kissing pony and the kneeling pony were leaving the ring.  But the
+husband raged at her:
+
+"By God, Julia, if you throw me down this way!"
+
+"Oh, I'll try, Billikens," she whimpered.  "Honestly, I'll try.
+See!  I'm not afraid now."
+
+She extended her hands and clasped the double-trees.  With a thin
+writhe of a smile, Collins investigated the insides of her
+clenched hands to make sure that the hooks were connected.
+
+"Now brace yourself!  Spread your legs.  And straighten out."
+With his hands he manipulated her arms and shoulders into
+position.  "Remember, you've got to meet the first of the strain
+with your arms straight out.  After the strain is on, you couldn't
+bend 'em if you wanted to.  But if the strain catches them bent,
+the wire'll rip the hide off of you.  Remember, straight out,
+extended, so that they form a straight line with each other and
+with the flat of your back and shoulders.  That's it.  Ready now."
+
+"Oh, wait a minute," she begged, forsaking the position.  "I'll do
+it--oh, I will do it, but, Billikens, kiss me first, and then I
+won't care if my arms are pulled out."
+
+The dark youth who held Michael, and others looking on, grinned.
+Collins dissembled whatever grin might have troubled for
+expression, and murmured:
+
+"All the time in the world, madam.  The point is, the first time
+must come off right.  After that you'll have the confidence.--
+Bill, you'd better love her up before she tackles it."
+
+And Billikens, very angry, very disgusted, very embarrassed,
+obeyed, putting his arms around his wife and kissing her neither
+too perfunctorily nor very long.  She was a pretty young thing of
+a woman, perhaps twenty years old, with an exceedingly childish,
+girlish face and a slender-waisted, generously moulded body of
+fully a hundred and forty pounds.
+
+The embrace and kiss of her husband put courage into her.  She
+stiffened and steeled herself, and with compressed lips, as he
+stepped clear of her, muttered, "Ready."
+
+"Go!" Collins commanded.
+
+The four horses, under the urge of the drivers, pressed lazily
+into their collars and began pulling.
+
+"Give 'em the whip!" Collins barked, his eyes on the girl and
+noting that the pull of the apparatus was straight across her.
+
+The lashes fell on the horses' rumps, and they leaped, and surged,
+and plunged, with their huge steel-shod hoofs, the size of soup-
+plates, tearing up the sawdust into smoke.
+
+And Billikens forgot himself.  The terribleness of the sight
+painted the honest anxiety for the woman on his face.  And her
+face was a kaleidoscope.  At the first, tense and fearful, it was
+like that of a Christian martyr meeting the lions, or of a felon
+falling through the trap.  Next, and quickly, came surprise and
+relief in that there was no hurt.  And, finally, her face was
+proudly happy with a smile of triumph.  She even smiled to
+Billikens her pride at making good her love to him.  And Billikens
+relaxed and looked love and pride back, until, on the spur of the
+second, Harris Collins broke in:
+
+"This ain't a smiling act!  Get that smile off your face.  The
+audience has got to think you're carrying the pull.  Show that you
+are.  Make your face stiff till it cracks.  Show determination,
+will-power.  Show great muscular effort.  Spread your legs more.
+Bring up the muscles through your skirt just as if you was really
+working.  Let 'em pull you this way a bit and that way a bit.
+Give 'em to.  Spread your legs more.  Make a noise on your face as
+if you was being pulled to pieces an' that all that holds you is
+will-power.--That's the idea!  That's the stuff!  It's a winner,
+Bill!  It's a winner!--Throw the leather into 'em!  Make 'm jump!
+Make 'm get right down and pull the daylights out of each other!"
+
+The whips fell on the horses, and the horses struggled in all
+their hugeness and might to pull away from the pain of the
+punishment.  It was a spectacle to win approval from any audience.
+Each horse averaged eighteen hundredweight; thus, to the eye of
+the onlooker, seven thousand two hundred pounds of straining
+horse-flesh seemed wrenching and dragging apart the slim-waisted,
+delicately bodied, hundred-and-forty pound woman in her fancy
+street costume.  It was a sight to make women in circus audiences
+scream with terror and turn their faces away.
+
+"Slack down!" Collins commanded the drivers.
+
+"The lady wins," he announced, after the manner of a ringmaster.--
+"Bill, you've got a mint in that turn.--Unhook, madam, unhook!"
+
+Marie obeyed, and, the hooks still dangling from her sleeves, made
+a short run to Billikens, into whose arms she threw herself, her
+own arms folding him about the neck as she exclaimed before she
+kissed him:
+
+"Oh, Billikens, I knew I could do it all the time!  I was brave,
+wasn't I!"
+
+"A give-away," Collins's dry voice broke in on her ecstasy.
+"Letting all the audience see the hooks.  They must go up your
+sleeves the moment you let go.--Try it again.  And another thing.
+When you finish the turn, no chestiness.  No making out how easy
+it was.  Make out it was the very devil.  Show yourself weak, just
+about to collapse from the strain.  Give at the knees.  Make your
+shoulders cave in.  The ringmaster will half step forward to catch
+you before you faint.  That's your cue.  Beat him to it.  Stiffen
+up and straighten up with an effort of will-power--will-power's
+the idea, gameness, and all that, and kiss your hands to the
+audience and make a weak, pitiful sort of a smile, as though your
+heart's been pulled 'most out of you and you'll have to go to the
+hospital, but for right then that you're game an' smiling and
+kissing your hands to the audience that's riping the seats up and
+loving you.--Get me, madam?  You, Bill, get the idea!  And see she
+does it.--Now, ready!  Be a bit wistful as you look at the
+horses.--That's it!  Nobody'd guess you'd palmed the hooks and
+connected them.--Straight out!--Let her go!"
+
+And again the thirty-six-hundredweight of horses on either side
+pitted its strength against the similar weight on the other side,
+and the seeming was that Marie was the link of woman-flesh being
+torn asunder.
+
+A third and a fourth time the turn was rehearsed, and, between
+turns, Collins sent a man to his office, for the Del Mar telegram.
+
+"You take her now, Bill," he told Marie's husband, as, telegram in
+hand, he returned to the problem of Michael.  "Give her half a
+dozen tries more.  And don't forget, any time any jay farmer
+thinks he's got a span that can pull, bet him on the side your
+best span can beat him.  That means advance advertising and some
+paper.  It'll be worth it.  The ringmaster'll favour you, and your
+span can get the first jump.  If I was young and foot-loose, I'd
+ask nothing better than to go out with your turn."
+
+Harris Collins, in the pauses gazing down at Michael, read Del
+Mar's Seattle telegram:
+
+
+"Sell my dogs.  You know what they can do and what they are worth.
+Am done with them.  Deduct the board and hold the balance until I
+see you.  I have the limit of a dog.  Every turn I ever pulled is
+put in the shade by this one.  He's a ten strike.  Wait till you
+see him."
+
+
+Over to one side in the busy arena, Collins contemplated Michael.
+
+"Del Mar was the limit himself," he told Johnny, who held Michael
+by the chain.  "When he wired me to sell his dogs it meant he had
+a better turn, and here's only one dog to show for it, a damned
+thoroughbred at that.  He says it's the limit.  It must be, but in
+heaven's name, what is its turn?  It's never done a flip in its
+life, much less a double flip.  What do you think, Johnny?  Use
+your head.  Suggest something."
+
+"Maybe it can count," Johnny advanced.
+
+"And counting-dogs are a drug on the market.  Well, anyway, let's
+try."
+
+And Michael, who knew unerringly how to count, refused to perform.
+
+"If he was a regular dog, he could walk anyway," was Collins' next
+idea.  "We'll try him."
+
+And Michael went through the humiliating ordeal of being jerked
+erect on his hind legs by Johnny while Collins with the stick
+cracked him under the jaw and across the knees.  In his wrath,
+Michael tried to bite the master-god, and was jerked away by the
+chain.  When he strove to retaliate on Johnny, that imperturbable
+youth, with extended arm, merely lifted him into the air on his
+chain and strangled him.
+
+"That's off," quoth Collins wearily.  "If he can't stand on his
+hind legs he can't barrel-jump--you've heard about Ruth, Johnny.
+She was a winner.  Jump in and out of nail-kegs, on her hind legs,
+without ever touching with her front ones.  She used to do eight
+kegs, in one and out into the next.  Remember when she was boarded
+here and rehearsed.  She was a gold-mine, but Carson didn't know
+how to treat her, and she croaked off with penumonia at Cripple
+Creek."
+
+"Wonder if he can spin plates on his nose," Johnny volunteered.
+
+"Can't stand up on hind legs," Collins negatived.  "Besides,
+nothing like the limit in a turn like that.  This dog's got a
+specially.  He ain't ordinary.  He does some unusual thing
+unusually well, and it's up to us to locate it.  That comes of
+Harry dying so inconsiderately and leaving this puzzle-box on my
+hands.  I see I just got to devote myself to him.  Take him away,
+Johnny.  Number Eighteen for him.  Later on we can put him in the
+single compartments."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+
+Number Eighteen was a big compartment or cage in the dog row,
+large enough with due comfort for a dozen Irish terriers like
+Michael.  For Harris Collins was scientific.  Dogs on vacation,
+boarding at the Cedarwild Animal School, were given every
+opportunity to recuperate from the hardships and wear and tear of
+from six months to a year and more on the road.  It was for this
+reason that the school was so popular a boarding-place for
+performing animals when the owners were on vacation or out of
+"time."  Harris Collins kept his animals clean and comfortable and
+guarded from germ diseases.  In short, he renovated them against
+their next trips out on vaudeville time or circus engagement.
+
+To the left of Michael, in Number Seventeen, were five grotesquely
+clipped French poodles.  Michael could not see them, save when he
+was being taken out or brought back, but he could smell them and
+hear them, and, in his loneliness, he even started a feud of
+snarling bickeringness with Pedro, the biggest of them who acted
+as clown in their turn.  They were aristocrats among performing
+animals, and Michael's feud with Pedro was not so much real as
+play-acted.  Had he and Pedro been brought together they would
+have made friends in no time.  But through the slow monotonous
+drag of the hours they developed a fictitious excitement and
+interest in mouthing their quarrel which each knew in his heart of
+hearts was no quarrel at all.
+
+In Number Nineteen, on Michael's right, was a sad and tragic
+company.  They were mongrels, kept spotlessly and germicidally
+clean, who were unattached and untrained.  They composed a sort of
+reserve of raw material, to be worked into established troupes
+when an extra one or a substitute was needed.  This meant the hell
+of the arena where the training went on.  Also, in spare moments,
+Collins, or his assistants, were for ever trying them out with all
+manner of tricks in the quest of special aptitudes on their parts.
+Thus, a mongrel semblance to a cooker spaniel of a dog was tried
+out for several days as a pony-rider who would leap through paper
+hoops from the pony's back, and return upon the back again.  After
+several falls and painful injuries, it was rejected for the feat
+and tried out as a plate-balancer.  Failing in this, it was made
+into a see-saw dog who, for the rest of the turn, filled into the
+background of a troupe of twenty dogs.
+
+Number Nineteen was a place of perpetual quarrelling and pain.
+Dogs, hurt in the training, licked their wounds, and moaned, or
+howled, or were irritable to excess on the slightest provocation.
+Always, when a new dog entered--and this was a regular happening,
+for others were continually being taken away to hit the road--the
+cage was vexed with quarrels and battles, until the new dog, by
+fighting or by non resistance, had commanded or been taught its
+proper place.
+
+Michael ignored the denizens of Number Nineteen.  They could sniff
+and snarl belligerently across at him, but he took no notice,
+reserving his companionship for the play-acted and perennial
+quarrel with Pedro.  Also, Michael was out in the arena more often
+and far longer hours than any of them.
+
+"Trust Harry not to make a mistake on a dog," was Collins's
+judgment; and constantly he strove to find in Michael what had
+made Del Mar declare him a ten strike and the limit.
+
+Every indignity, in the attempt to find out, was wreaked upon
+Michael.  They tried him at hurdle-jumping, at walking on fore-
+legs, at pony-riding, at forward flips, and at clowning with other
+dogs.  They tried him at waltzing, all his legs cord-fastened and
+dragged and jerked and slacked under him.  They spiked his collar
+in some of the attempted tricks to keep him from lurching from
+side to side or from falling forward or backward.  They used the
+whip and the rattan stick; and twisted his nose.  They attempted
+to make a goal-keeper of him in a football game between two teams
+of pain-driven and pain-bitten mongrels.  And they dragged him up
+ladders to make him dive into a tank of water.
+
+Even they essayed to make him "loop the loop"--rushing him down an
+inclined trough at so high speed of his legs, accelerated by the
+slash of whips on his hindquarters, that, with such initial
+momentum, had he put his heart and will into it, he could have
+successfully run up the inside of the loop, and across the inside
+of the top of it, back-downward, like a fly on the ceiling, and on
+and down and around and out of the loop.  But he refused the will
+and the heart, and every time, when he was unable at the beginning
+to leap sideways out of the inclined trough, he fell grievously
+from the inside of the loop, bruising and injuring himself.
+
+"It isn't that I expect these things are what Harry had in mind,"
+Collins would say, for always he was training his assistants; "but
+that through them I may get a cue to his specially, whatever in
+God's name it is, that poor Harry must have known."
+
+Out of love, at the wish of his love-god, Steward, Michael would
+have striven to learn these tricks and in most of them would have
+succeeded.  But here at Cedarwild was no love, and his own
+thoroughbred nature made him stubbornly refuse to do under
+compulsion what he would gladly have done out of love.  As a
+result, since Collins was no thoroughbred of a man, the clashes
+between them were for a time frequent and savage.  In this
+fighting Michael quickly learned he had no chance.  He was always
+doomed to defeat.  He was beaten by stereotyped formula before he
+began.  Never once could he get his teeth into Collins or Johnny.
+He was too common-sensed to keep up the battling in which he would
+surely have broken his heart and his body and gone dumb mad.
+Instead, he retired into himself, became sullen, undemonstrative,
+and, though he never cowered in defeat, and though he was always
+ready to snarl and bristle his hair in advertisement that inside
+he was himself and unconquered, he no longer burst out in furious
+anger.
+
+After a time, scarcely ever trying him out on a new trick, the
+chain and Johnny were dispensed with, and with Collins he spent
+all Collins's hours in the arena.  He learned, by bitter lessons,
+that he must follow Collins around; and follow him he did, hating
+him perpetually and in his own body slowly and subtly poisoning
+himself by the juices of his glands that did not secrete and flow
+in quite their normal way because of the pressure put upon them by
+his hatred.
+
+The effect of this, on his body, was not perceptible.  This was
+because of his splendid constitution and health.  Wherefore, since
+the effect must be produced somewhere, it was his mind, or spirit,
+or nature, or brain, or processes of consciousness, that received
+it.  He drew more and more within himself, became morose, and
+brooded much.  All of which was spiritually unhealthful.  He, who
+had been so merry-hearted, even merrier-hearted than his brother
+Jerry, began to grow saturnine, and peevish, and ill-tempered.  He
+no longer experienced impulses to play, to romp around, to run
+about.  His body became as quiet and controlled as his brain.
+Human convicts, in prisons, attain this quietude.  He could stand
+by the hour, to heel to Collins, uninterested, infinitely bored,
+while Collins tortured some mongrel creature into the performance
+of a trick.
+
+And much of this torturing Michael witnessed.  There were the
+greyhounds, the high-jumpers and wide-leapers.  They were willing
+to do their best, but Collins and his assistants achieved the
+miracle, if miracle it may be called, of making them do better
+than their best.  Their best was natural.  Their better than best
+was unnatural, and it killed some and shortened the lives of all.
+Rushed to the spring-board and the leap, always, after the take-
+off, in mid-air, they had to encounter an assistant who stood
+underneath, an extraordinarily long buggy-whip in hand, and lashed
+them vigorously.  This made them leap from the springboard beyond
+their normal powers, hurting and straining and injuring them in
+their desperate attempt to escape the whip-lash, to beat the whip-
+lash in the air and be past ere it could catch their flying flanks
+and sting them like a scorpion.
+
+"Never will a jumping dog jump his hardest," Collins told his
+assistants, "unless he's made to.  That's your job.  That's the
+difference between the jumpers I turn out and some of these dub
+amateur-jumping outfits that fail to make good even on the bush
+circuits."
+
+Collins continually taught.  A graduate from his school, an
+assistant who received from him a letter of recommendation,
+carried a high credential of a sheepskin into the trained-animal
+world.
+
+"No dog walks naturally on its hind legs, much less on its
+forelegs," Collins would say.  "Dogs ain't built that way.  THEY
+HAVE TO BE MADE TO, that's all.  That's the secret of all animal
+training.  They have to.  You've got to make them.  That's your
+job.  Make them.  Anybody who can't, can't make good in this
+factory.  Put that in your pipe and smoke it, and get busy."
+
+Michael saw, without fully appreciating, the use of the spiked
+saddle on the bucking mule.  The mule was fat and good-natured the
+first day of its appearance in the arena.  It had been a pet mule
+in a family of children until Collins's keen eyes rested on it;
+and it had known only love and kindness and much laughter for its
+foolish mulishness.  But Collins's eyes had read health, vigour,
+and long life, as well as laughableness of appearance and action
+in the long-eared hybrid.
+
+Barney Barnato he was renamed that first day in the arena, when,
+also, he received the surprise of his life.  He did not dream of
+the spike in the saddle, nor, while the saddle was empty, did it
+press against him.  But the moment Samuel Bacon, a negro tumbler,
+got into the saddle, the spike sank home.  He knew about it and
+was prepared.  But Barney, taken by surprise, arched his back in
+the first buck he had ever made.  It was so prodigious a buck that
+Collins eyes snapped with satisfaction, while Sam landed a dozen
+feet away in the sawdust.
+
+"Make good like that," Collins approved, "and when I sell the mule
+you'll go along as part of the turn, or I miss my guess.  And it
+will be some turn.  There'll be at least two more like you, who'll
+have to be nervy and know how to fall.  Get busy.  Try him again."
+
+And Barney entered into the hell of education that later won his
+purchaser more time than he could deliver over the best vaudeville
+circuits in Canada and the United States.  Day after day Barney
+took his torture.  Not for long did he carry the spiked saddle.
+Instead, bare-back, he received the negro on his back, and was
+spiked and set bucking just the same; for the spike was now
+attached to Sam's palm by means of leather straps.  In the end,
+Barney became so "touchy" about his back that he almost began
+bucking if a person as much as looked at it.  Certainly, aware of
+the stab of pain, he started bucking, whirling, and kicking
+whenever the first signal was given of some one trying to mount
+him.
+
+At the end of the fourth week, two other tumblers, white youths,
+being secured, the complete, builded turn was performed for the
+benefit of a slender, French-looking gentleman, with waxed
+moustaches.  In the end he bought Barney, without haggling, at
+Collins's own terms and engaged Sammy and the other two tumblers
+as well.  Collins staged the trick properly, as it would be staged
+in the theatre, even had ready and set up all the necessary
+apparatus, and himself acted as ringmaster while the prospective
+purchaser looked on.
+
+Barney, fat as butter, humorous-looking, was led into the square
+of cloth-covered steel cables and cloth-covered steel uprights.
+The halter was removed and he was turned loose.  Immediately he
+became restless, the ears were laid back, and he was a picture of
+viciousness.
+
+"Remember one thing," Collins told the man who might buy.  "If you
+buy him, you'll be ringmaster, and you must never, never spike
+him.  When he comes to know that, you can always put your hands on
+him any time and control him.  He's good-natured at heart, and
+he's the gratefullest mule I've ever seen in the business.  He's
+just got to love you, and hate the other three.  And one warning:
+if he goes real bad and starts biting, you'll have to pull out his
+teeth and feed him soft mashes and crushed grain that's steamed.
+I'll give you the recipe for the digestive dope you'll have to put
+in.  Now--watch!"
+
+Collins stopped into the ring and caressed Barney, who responded
+in the best of tempers and tried affectionately to nudge and shove
+past on the way out of the ropes to escape what he knew was
+coming.
+
+"See," Collins exposited.  "He's got confidence in me.  He trusts
+me.  He knows I've never spiked him and that I always save him in
+the end.  I'm his good Samaritan, and you'll have to be the same
+to him if you buy him.--Now I'll give you your spiel.  Of course,
+you can improve on it to suit yourself."
+
+The master-trainer walked out of the rope square, stepped forward
+to an imaginary line, and looked down and out and up as if he were
+gazing at the pit of the orchestra beneath him, across at the body
+of the house, and up into the galleries.
+
+"Ladies and gentlemen," he addressed the sawdust emptiness before
+him as if it were a packed audience, "this is Barney Barnato, the
+biggest joker of a mule ever born.  He's as affectionate as a
+Newfoundland puppy--just watch--"
+
+Stepping back to the ropes, Collins extended his hand across them,
+saying:  "Come here, Barney, and show all these people who you
+love best."
+
+And Barney twinkled forward on his small hoofs, nozzled the open
+hand, and came closer, nozzling up the arm, nudging Collins's
+shoulders with his nose, half-rearing as if to get across the
+ropes and embrace him.  What he was really doing was begging and
+entreating Collins to take him away out of the squared ring from
+the torment he knew awaited him.
+
+"That's what it means by never spiking him," Collins shot at the
+man with the waxed moustaches, as he stepped forward to the
+imaginary line in the sawdust, above the imaginary pit of the
+orchestra, and addressed the imaginary house.
+
+"Ladies and gentlemen, Barney Barnato is a josher.  He's got forty
+tricks up each of his four legs, and the man don't live that he'll
+let stick on big back for sixty seconds.  I'm telling you this in
+fair warning, before I make my proposition.  Looks easy, doesn't
+it?--one minute, the sixtieth part of an hour, to be precise,
+sixty seconds, to stick on the back of an affectionate josher mule
+like Barney.  Well, come on you boys and broncho riders.  To
+anybody who sticks on for one minute I shall immediately pay the
+sum of fifty dollars; for two whole, entire minutes, the sum of
+five hundred dollars."
+
+This was the cue for Samuel Bacon, who advanced across the
+sawdust, awkward and grinning and embarrassed, and apparently was
+helped up to the stage by the extended hand of Collins.
+
+"Is your life insured?" Collins demanded.
+
+Sam shook his head and grinned.
+
+"Then what are you tackling this for?"
+
+"For the money," said Sam.  "I jes' naturally needs it in my
+business."
+
+"What is your business?"
+
+"None of your business, mister."  Here Sam grinned ingratiating
+apology for his impertinence and shuffled on his legs.  "I might
+be investin' in lottery tickets, only I ain't.  Do I get the
+money?--that's OUR business."
+
+"Sure you do," Collins replied.  "When you earn it.  Stand over
+there to one side and wait a moment.--Ladies and gentlemen, if you
+will forgive the delay, I must ask for more volunteers.--Any more
+takers?  Fifty dollars for sixty seconds.  Almost a dollar a
+second . . . if you win.  Better!  I'll make it a dollar a second.
+Sixty dollars to the boy, man, woman, or girl who sticks on
+Barney's back for one minute.  Come on, ladies.  Remember this is
+the day of equal suffrage.  Here's where you put it over on your
+husbands, brothers, sons, fathers, and grandfathers.  Age is no
+limit.--Grandma, do I get you?" he uttered directly to what must
+have been a very elderly lady in a near front row.--"You see," (to
+the prospective buyer), "I've got the entire patter for you.  You
+could do it with two rehearsals, and you can do them right here,
+free of charge, part of the purchase."
+
+The next two tumblers crossed the sawdust and were helped by
+Collins up to the imaginary stage.
+
+"You can change the patter according to the cities you're in," he
+explained to the Frenchman.  "It's easy to find out the names of
+the most despised and toughest neighbourhoods or villages, and
+have the boys hail from them."
+
+Continuing the patter, Collins put the performance on.  Sam's
+first attempt was brief.  He was not half on when he was flung to
+the ground.  Half a dozen attempts, quickly repeated, were
+scarcely better, the last one permitting him to remain on Barney's
+back nearly ten seconds, and culminating in a ludicrous fall over
+Barney's head.  Sam withdrew from the ring, shaking his head
+dubiously and holding his side as if in pain.  The other lads
+followed.  Expert tumblers, they executed most amazing and side-
+splitting fails.  Sam recovered and came back.  Toward the last,
+all three made a combined attack on Barney, striving to mount him
+simultaneously from different slants of approach.  They were
+scattered and flung like chaff, sometimes falling heaped together.
+Once, the two white boys, standing apart as if recovering breath,
+were mowed down by Sam's flying body.
+
+"Remember, this is a real mule," Collins told the man with the
+waxed moustaches.  "If any outsiders butt in for a hack at the
+money, all the better.  They'll get theirs quick.  The man don't
+live who can stay on his back a minute . . . if you keep him
+rehearsed with the spike.  He must live in fear of the spike.
+Never let him slow up on it.  Never let him forget it.  If you lay
+off any time for a few days, rehearse him with the spike a couple
+of times just before you begin again, or else he might forget it
+and queer the turn by ambling around with the first outside rube
+that mounts him.
+
+"And just suppose some rube, all hooks of arms and legs and hands,
+is managing to stick on anyway, and the minute is getting near up.
+Just have Sam here, or any of your three, slide in and spike him
+from the palm.  That'll be good night for Mr. Rube.  You can't
+lose, and the audience'll laugh its fool head off.
+
+"Now for the climax!  Watch!  This always brings the house down.
+Get busy you two!--Sam!  Ready!"
+
+While the white boys threatened to mount Barney from either side
+and kept his attention engaged, Sam, from outside, in a sudden fit
+of rage and desperation, made a flying dive across the ropes and
+from in front locked arms and legs about Barney's neck, tucking
+his own head close against Barney's head.  And Barney reared up on
+his hind legs, as he had long since learned from the many palm-
+spikings he had received on head and neck.
+
+"It's a corker," Collins announced, as Barney, on his hind legs,
+striking vainly with his fore, struggled about the ring.  "There's
+no danger.  He'll never fall over backwards.  He's a mule, and
+he's too wise.  Besides, even if he does, all Sam has to do is let
+go and fall clear."
+
+The turn over, Barney gladly accepted the halter and was led out
+of the square ring and up to the Frenchman.
+
+"Long life there--look him over," Collins continued to sell.
+"It's a full turn, including yourself, four performers, besides
+the mule, and besides any suckers from the audience.  It's all
+ready to put on the boards, and dirt cheap at five thousand."
+
+The Frenchman winced at the sum.
+
+"Listen to arithmetic," Collins went on.  "You can sell at twelve
+hundred a week at least, and you can net eight hundred certain.
+Six weeks of the net pays for the turn, and you can book a hundred
+weeks right off the bat and have them yelling for more.  Wish I
+was young and footloose.  I'd take it out on the road myself and
+coin a fortune."
+
+And Barney was sold, and passed out of the Cedarwild Animal School
+to the slavery of the spike and to be provocative of much joy and
+laughter in the pleasure-theatre of the world.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+
+"The thing is, Johnny, you can't love dogs into doing professional
+tricks, which is the difference between dogs and women," Collins
+told his assistant.  "You know how it is with any dog.  You love
+it up into lying down and rolling over and playing dead and all
+such dub tricks.  And then one day you show him off to your
+friends, and the conditions are changed, and he gets all excited
+and foolish, and you can't get him to do a thing.  Children are
+like that.  Lose their heads in company, forget all their
+training, and throw you down."
+
+"Now on the stage, they got real tricks to do, tricks they don't
+do, tricks they hate.  And they mightn't be feeling good--got a
+touch of cold, or mange, or are sour-balled.  What are you going
+to do?  Apologize to the audience?  Besides, on the stage, the
+programme runs like clockwork.  Got to start performing on the
+tick of the clock, and anywhere from one to seven turns a day, all
+depending what kind of time you've got.  The point is, your dogs
+have got to get right up and perform.  No loving them, no begging
+them, no waiting on them.  And there's only the one way.  They've
+got to know when you start, you mean it."
+
+"And dogs ain't fools," Johnny opined.  "They know when you mean
+anything, an' when you don't."
+
+"Sure thing," Collins nodded approbation.  "The moment you slack
+up on them is the moment they slack up in their work.  You get
+soft, and see how quick they begin making mistakes in their
+tricks.  You've got to keep the fear of God over them.  If you
+don't, they won't, and you'll find yourself begging for spotted
+time on the bush circuits."
+
+Half an hour later, Michael heard, though he understood no word of
+it, the master-trainer laying another law down to another
+assistant.
+
+"Cross-breds and mongrels are what's needed, Charles.  Not one
+thoroughbred in ten makes good, unless he's got the heart of a
+coward, and that's just what distinguishes them from mongrels and
+cross-breds.  Like race-horses, they're hot-blooded.  They've got
+sensitiveness, and pride.  Pride's the worst.  You listen to me.
+I was born into the business and I've studied it all my life.  I'm
+a success.  There's only one reason I'm a success--I KNOW.  Get
+that.  I KNOW."
+
+"Another thing is that cross-breds and mongrels are cheap.  You
+needn't be afraid of losing them or working them out.  You can
+always get more, and cheap.  And they ain't the trouble in
+teaching.  You can throw the fear of God into them.  That's what's
+the matter with the thoroughbreds.  You can't throw the fear of
+God into them."
+
+"Give a mongrel a real licking, and what's he do?  He'll kiss your
+hand, and be obedient, and crawl on his belly to do what you want
+him to do.  They're slave dogs, that's what mongrels are.  They
+ain't got courage, and you don't want courage in a performing dog.
+You want fear.  Now you give a thoroughbred a licking and see what
+happens.  Sometimes they die.  I've known them to die.  And if
+they don't die, what do they do?  Either they go stubborn, or
+vicious, or both.  Sometimes they just go to biting and foaming.
+You can kill them, but you can't keep them from biting and
+foaming.  Or they'll go straight stubborn.  They're the worst.
+They're the passive resisters--that's what I call them.  They
+won't fight back.  You can flog them to death, but it won't buy
+you anything.  They're like those Christians that used to be
+burned at the stake or boiled in oil.  They've got their opinions,
+and nothing you can do will change them.  They'll die first. . . .
+And they do.  I've had them.  I was learning myself . . . and I
+learned to leave the thoroughbred alone.  They beat you out.  They
+get your goat.  You never get theirs.  And they're time-wasters,
+and patience-wasters, and they're expensive."
+
+"Take this terrier here." Collins nodded at Michael, who stood
+several feet back of him, morosely regarding the various
+activities of the arena.  "He's both kinds of a thoroughbred, and
+therefore no good.  I've never given him a real licking, and I
+never will.  It would be a waste of time.  He'll fight if you
+press him too hard.  And he'll die fighting you.  He's too
+sensible to fight if you don't press him too hard.  And if you
+don't press him too hard, he'll just stay as he is, and refuse to
+learn anything.  I'd chuck him right now, except Del Mar couldn't
+make a mistake.  Poor Harry knew he had a specially, and a
+crackerjack, and it's up to me to find it."
+
+"Wonder if he's a lion dog," Charles suggested.
+
+"He's the kind that ain't afraid of lions," Collins concurred.
+"But what sort of a specially trick could he do with lions?  Stick
+his head in their mouths?  I never heard of a dog doing that, and
+it's an idea.  But we can try him.  We've tried him at 'most
+everything else."
+
+"There's old Hannibal," said Charles.  "He used to take a woman's
+head in his mouth with the old Sales-Sinker shows."
+
+"But old Hannibal's getting cranky," Collins objected.  "I've been
+watching him and trying to get rid of him.  Any animal is liable
+to go off its nut any time, especially wild ones.  You see, the
+life ain't natural.  And when they do, it's good night.  You lose
+your investment, and, if you don't know your business, maybe your
+life."
+
+And Michael might well have been tried out on Hannibal and have
+lost his head inside that animal's huge mouth, had not the good
+fortune of apropos-ness intervened.  For, the next moment, Collins
+was listening to the hasty report of his lion-and-tiger keeper.
+The man who reported was possibly forty years of age, although he
+looked half as old again.  He was a withered-faced man, whose
+face-lines, deep and vertical, looked as if they had been clawed
+there by some beast other than himself.
+
+"Old Hannibal is going crazy," was the burden of his report.
+
+"Nonsense," said Harris Collins.  "It's you that's getting old.
+He's got your goat, that's all.  I'll show it to you.--Come on
+along, all of you.  We'll take fifteen minutes off of the work,
+and I'll show you a show never seen in the show-ring.  It'd be
+worth ten thousand a week anywhere . . . only it wouldn't last.
+Old Hannibal would turn up his toes out of sheer hurt feelings.--
+Come on everybody!  All hands!  Fifteen minutes recess!"
+
+And Michael followed at the heels of his latest and most terrible
+master, the twain leading the procession of employees and visiting
+professional animal men who trooped along behind.  As was well
+known, when Harris Collins performed he performed only for the
+elite, for the hoi-polloi of the trained-animal world.
+
+The lion-and-tiger man, who had clawed his own face with the
+beast-claws of his nature, whimpered protest when he saw his
+employer's preparation to enter Hannibal's cage; for the
+preparation consisted merely in equipping himself with a broom-
+handle.
+
+Hannibal was old, but he was reputed the largest lion in
+captivity, and he had not lost his teeth.  He was pacing up and
+down the length of his cage, heavily and swaying, after the manner
+of captive animals, when the unexpected audience erupted into the
+space before his cage.  Yet he took no notice whatever, merely
+continuing his pacing, swinging his head from side to side,
+turning lithely at each end of his cage, with all the air of being
+bent on some determined purpose.
+
+"That's the way he's been goin' on for two days," whimpered his
+keeper.  "An' when you go near 'm, he just reaches for you.  Look
+what he done to me."  The man held up his right arm, the shirt and
+undershirt ripped to shreds, and red parallel grooves, slightly
+clotted with blood, showing where the claws had broken the skin.
+"An' I wasn't inside.  He did it through the bars, with one swipe,
+when I was startin' to clean his cage.  Now if he'd only roar, or
+something.  But he never makes a sound, just keeps on goin' up an'
+down."
+
+"Where's the key?" Collins demanded.  "Good.  Now let me in.  And
+lock it afterward and take the key out.  Lose it, forget it, throw
+it away.  I'll have all the time in the world to wait for you to
+find it to let me out."
+
+And Harris Collins, a sliver of a less than a light-weight man,
+who lived in mortal fear that at table the mother of his children
+would crown him with a plate of hot soup, went into the cage,
+before the critical audience of his employees and professional
+visitors, armed only with a broom-handle.  Further, the door was
+locked behind him, and, the moment he was in, keeping a casual but
+alert eye on the pacing Hannibal, he reiterated his order to lock
+the door and remove the key.
+
+Half a dozen times the lion paced up and down, declining to take
+any notice of the intruder.  And then, when his back was turned as
+he went down the cage, Collins stepped directly in the way of his
+return path and stood still.  Coming back and finding his way
+blocked, Hannibal did not roar.  His muscular movements sliding
+each into the next like so much silk of tawny hide, he struck at
+the obstacle that confronted his way.  But Collins, knowing ahead
+of the lion what the lion was going to do, struck first, with the
+broom-handle rapping the beast on its tender nose.  Hannibal
+recoiled with a flash of snarl and flashed back a second sweeping
+stroke of his mighty paw.  Again he was anticipated, and the rap
+on his nose sent him into recoil.
+
+"Got to keep his head down--that way lies safety," the master-
+trainer muttered in a low, tense voice.
+
+"Ah, would you?  Take it, then."
+
+Hannibal, in wrath, crouching for a spring, had lifted his head.
+The consequent blow on his nose forced his head down to the floor,
+and the king of beasts, nose still to floor, backed away with
+mouth-snarls and throat-and-chest noises.
+
+"Follow up," Collins enunciated, himself following, rapping the
+nose again sharply and accelerating the lion's backward retreat.
+
+"Man is the boss because he's got the head that thinks," Collins
+preached the lesson; "and he's just got to make his head boss his
+body, that's all, so that he can think one thought ahead of the
+animal, and act one act ahead.  Watch me get his goat.  He ain't
+the hard case he's trying to make himself believe he is.  And that
+idea, which he's just starting, has got to be taken out of him.
+The broomstick will do it.  Watch."
+
+He backed the animal down the length of the cage, continually
+rapping at the nose and keeping it down to the floor.
+
+"Now I'm going to pile him into the corner."
+
+And Hannibal, snarling, growling, and spitting, ducking his head
+and with short paw-strokes trying to ward off the insistent
+broomstick, backed obediently into the corner, crumpled up his
+hind-parts, and tried to withdraw his corporeal body within itself
+in a pain-urged effort to make it smaller.  And always he kept his
+nose down and himself harmless for a spring.  In the thick of it
+he slowly raised his nose and yawned.  Nor, because it came up
+slowly, and because Collins had anticipated the yawn by being one
+thought ahead of Hannibal in Hannibal's own brain, was the nose
+rapped.
+
+"That's the goat," Collins announced, for the first time speaking
+in a hearty voice in which was no vibration of strain.  "When a
+lion yawns in the thick of a fight, you know he ain't crazy.  He's
+sensible.  He's got to be sensible, or he'd be springing or
+lashing out instead of yawning.  He knows he's licked, and that
+yawn of his merely says:  'I quit.  For the I love of Mike leave
+me alone.  My nose is awful sore.  I'd like to get you, but I
+can't.  I'll do anything you want, and I'll be dreadful good, but
+don't hit my poor sore nose.'
+
+"But man is the boss, and he can't afford to be so easy.  Drive
+the lesson home that you're boss.  Rub it in.  Don't stop when he
+quits.  Make him swallow the medicine and lick the spoon.  Make
+him kiss your foot on his neck holding him down in the dirt.  Make
+him kiss the stick that's beaten him.--Watch!"
+
+And Hannibal, the largest lion in captivity, with all his teeth,
+captured out of the jungle after he was full-grown, a veritable
+king of beasts, before the menacing broomstick in the hand of a
+sliver of a man, backed deeper and more crumpled together into the
+corner.  His back was bowed up, the very opposite muscular
+position to that for a spring, while he drew his head more and
+more down and under his chest in utter abjectness, resting his
+weight on his elbows and shielding his poor nose with his massive
+paws, a single stroke of which could have ripped the life of
+Collins quivering from his body.
+
+"Now he might be tricky," Collins announced, "but he's got to kiss
+my foot and the stick just the same.  Watch!"
+
+He lifted and advanced his left foot, not tentatively and
+hesitantly, but quickly and firmly, bringing it to rest on the
+lion's neck.  The stick was poised to strike, one act ahead of the
+lion's next possible act, as Collins's mind was one thought ahead
+of the lion's next thought.
+
+And Hannibal did the forecasted and predestined.  His head flashed
+up, huge jaws distended, fangs gleaming, to sink into the slender,
+silken-hosed ankle above the tan low-cut shoes.  But the fangs
+never sank.  They were scarcely started a fifth of the way of the
+distance, when the waiting broomstick rapped on his nose and made
+him sink it in the floor under his chest and cover it again with
+his paws.
+
+"He ain't crazy," said Collins.  "He knows, from the little he
+knows, that I know more than him and that I've got him licked to a
+fare-you-well.  If he was crazy, he wouldn't know, and I wouldn't
+know his mind either, and I wouldn't be that one jump ahead of
+him, and he'd get me and mess the whole cage up with my insides."
+
+He prodded Hannibal with the end of the broom-handle, after each
+prod poising it for a stroke.  And the great lion lay and roared
+in helplessness, and at each prod exposed his nose more and lifted
+it higher, until, at the end, his red tongue ran out between his
+fangs and licked the boot resting none too gently on his neck,
+and, after that, licked the broomstick that had administered all
+the punishment.
+
+"Going to be a good lion now?" Collins demanded, roughly rubbing
+his foot back and forth on Hannibal's neck.
+
+Hannibal could not refrain from growling his hatred.
+
+"Going to be a good lion?" Collins repeated, rubbing his foot back
+and forth still more roughly.
+
+And Hannibal exposed his nose and with his red tongue licked again
+the tan shoe and the slender, tan-silken ankle that he could have
+destroyed with one crunch.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+
+
+One friend Michael made among the many animals he encountered in
+the Cedarwild School, and a strange, sad friendship it was.  Sara
+she was called, a small, green monkey from South America, who
+seemed to have been born hysterical and indignant, and with no
+appreciation of humour.  Sometimes, following Collins about the
+arena, Michael would meet her while she waited to be tried out on
+some new turn.  For, unable or unwilling to try, she was for ever
+being tried out on turns, or, with little herself to do, as a
+filler-in for more important performers.
+
+But she always caused confusion, either chattering and squealing
+with fright or bickering at the other animals.  Whenever they
+attempted to make her do anything, she protested indignantly; and
+if they tried force, her squalls and cries excited all the animals
+in the arena and set the work back.
+
+"Never mind," said Collins finally.  "She'll go into the next
+monkey band we make up."
+
+This was the last and most horrible fate that could befall a
+monkey on the stage, to be a helpless marionette, compelled by
+unseen sticks and wires, poked and jerked by concealed men, to
+move and act throughout an entire turn.
+
+But it was before this doom was passed upon her that Michael made
+her acquaintance.  Their first meeting, she sprang suddenly at
+him, a screaming, chattering little demon, threatening him with
+nails and teeth.  And Michael, already deep-sunk in habitual
+moroseness merely looked at her calmly, not a ripple to his neck-
+hair nor a prick to his ears.  The next moment, her fuss and fury
+quite ignored, she saw him turn his head away.  This gave her
+pause.  Had he sprung at her, or snarled, or shown any anger or
+resentment such as did the other dogs when so treated by her, she
+would have screamed and screeched and raised a hubbub of
+expostulation, crying for help and calling all men to witness how
+she was being unwarrantably attacked.
+
+As it was, Michael's unusual behaviour seemed to fascinate her.
+She approached him tentatively, without further racket; and the
+boy who had her in charge slacked the thin chain that held her.
+
+"Hope he breaks her back for her," was his unholy wish; for he
+hated Sara intensely, desiring to be with the lions or elephants
+rather than dancing attendance on a cantankerous female monkey
+there was no reasoning with.
+
+And because Michael took no notice of her, she made up to him.  It
+was not long before she had her hands on him, and, quickly after
+that, an arm around his neck and her head snuggled against his.
+Then began her interminable tale.  Day after day, catching him at
+odd times in the ring, she would cling closely to him and in a low
+voice, running on and on, never pausing for breath, tell him, for
+all he knew, the story of her life.  At any rate, it sounded like
+the story of her woes and of all the indignities which had been
+wreaked upon her.  It was one long complaint, and some of it might
+have been about her health, for she sniffed and coughed a great
+deal and her chest seemed always to hurt her from the way she had
+of continually and gingerly pressing the palm of her hand to it.
+Sometimes, however, she would cease her complaining, and love and
+mother him, uttering occasional series of gentle mellow sounds
+that were like croonings.
+
+Hers was the only hand of affection that was laid on him at
+Cedarwild, and she was ever gentle, never pinching him, never
+pulling his ears.  By the same token, he was the only friend she
+had; and he came to look forward to meeting her in the course of
+the morning work--and this, despite that every meeting always
+concluded in a scene, when she fought with her keeper against
+being taken away.  Her cries and protests would give way to
+whimperings and wailings, while the men about laughed at the
+strangeness of the love-affair between her and the Irish terrier.
+
+But Harris Collins tolerated, even encouraged, their friendship.
+
+"The two sour-balls get along best together," he said.  "And it
+does them good.  Gives them something to live for, and that way
+lies health.  But some day, mark my words, she'll turn on him and
+give him what for, and their friendship will get a terrible
+smash."
+
+And half of it he spoke with the voice of prophecy, and, though
+she never turned on Michael, the day in the world was written when
+their friendship would truly receive a terrible smash.
+
+"Now seals are too wise," Collins explained one day, in a sort of
+extempore lecture to several of his apprentice trainers.  "You've
+just got to toss fish to them when they perform.  If you don't,
+they won't, and there's an end of it.  But you can't depend on
+feeding dainties to dogs, for instance, though you can make a
+young, untrained pig perform creditably by means of a nursing
+bottle hidden up your sleeve."
+
+"All you have to do is think it over.  Do you think you can make
+those greyhounds extend themselves with the promise of a bite of
+meat?  It's the whip that makes them extend.--Look over there at
+Billy Green.  There ain't another way to teach that dog that
+trick.  You can't love her into doing it.  You can't pay her to do
+it.  There's only one way, and that's MAKE her."
+
+Billy Green, at the moment, was training a tiny, nondescript,
+frizzly-haired dog.  Always, on the stage, he made a hit by
+drawing from his pocket a tiny dog that would do this particular
+trick.  The last one had died from a wrenched back, and he was now
+breaking in a new one.  He was catching the little mite by the
+hind-legs and tossing it up in the air, where, making a half-flip
+and descending head first, it was supposed to alight with its
+fore-feet on his hand and there balance itself, its hind feet and
+body above it in the air.  Again and again he stooped, caught her
+hind-legs and flung her up into the half-turn.  Almost frozen with
+fear, she vainly strove to effect the trick.  Time after time, and
+every time, she failed to make the balance.  Sometimes she fell
+crumpled; several times she all but struck the ground:  and once,
+she did strike, on her side and so hard as to knock the breath out
+of her.  Her master, taking advantage of the moment to wipe the
+sweat from his streaming face, nudged her about with his toe till
+she staggered weakly to her feet.
+
+"The dog was never born that'd learn that trick for the promise of
+a bit of meat," Collins went on.  "Any more than was the dog ever
+born that'd walk on its fore-legs without having its hind-legs
+rapped up in the air with the stick a thousand times.  Yet you
+take that trick there.  It's always a winner, especially with the
+women--so cunning, you know, so adorable cute, to be yanked out of
+its beloved master's pocket and to have such trust and confidence
+in him as to allow herself to be tossed around that way.  Trust
+and confidence hell!  He's put the fear of God into her, that's
+what."
+
+"Just the same, to dig a dainty out of your pocket once in a while
+and give an animal a nibble, always makes a hit with the audience.
+That's about all it's good for, yet it's a good stunt.  Audiences
+like to believe that the animals enjoy doing their tricks, and
+that they are treated like pampered darlings, and that they just
+love their masters to death.  But God help all of us and our meal
+tickets if the audiences could see behind the scenes.  Every
+trained-animal turn would be taken off the stage instanter, and
+we'd be all hunting for a job."
+
+"Yes, and there's rough stuff no end pulled off on the stage right
+before the audience's eyes.  The best fooler I ever saw was
+Lottie's.  She had a bunch of trained cats.  She loved them to
+death right before everybody, especially if a trick wasn't going
+good.  What'd she do?  She'd take that cat right up in her arms
+and kiss it.  And when she put it down it'd perform the trick all
+right all right, while the audience applauded its silly head off
+for the kindness and humaneness she'd shown.  Kiss it?  Did she?
+I'll tell you what she did.  She bit its nose."
+
+"Eleanor Pavalo learned the trick from Lottie, and used it herself
+on her toy dogs.  And many a dog works on the stage in a spiked
+collar, and a clever man can twist a dog's nose and nobody in the
+audience any the wiser.  But it's the fear that counts.  It's what
+the dog knows he'll get afterward when the turn's over that keeps
+most of them straight."
+
+"Remember Captain Roberts and his great Danes.  They weren't pure-
+breds, though.  He must have had a dozen of them--toughest bunch
+of brutes I ever saw.  He boarded them here twice.  You couldn't
+go among them without a club in your hand.  I had a Mexican lad
+laid up by them.  He was a tough one, too.  But they got him down
+and nearly ate him.  The doctors took over forty stitches in him
+and shot him full of that Pasteur dope for hydrophobia.  And he
+always will limp with his right leg from what the dogs did to him.
+I tell you, they were the limit.  And yet, every time the curtain
+went up, Captain Roberts brought the house down with the first
+stunt.  Those dogs just flocked all over him, loving him to death,
+from the looks of it.  And were they loving him?  They hated him.
+I've seen him, right here in the cage at Cedarwild, wade into them
+with a club and whale the stuffing impartially out of all of them.
+Sure, they loved him not.  Just a bit of the same old aniseed was
+what he used.  He'd soak small pieces of meat in aniseed oil and
+stick them in his pockets.  But that stunt would only work with a
+bunch of giant dogs like his.  It was their size that got it
+across.  Had they been a lot of ordinary dogs it would have looked
+silly.  And, besides, they didn't do their regular tricks for
+aniseed.  They did it for Captain Roberts's club.  He was a tough
+bird himself."
+
+"He used to say that the art of training animals was the art of
+inspiring them with fear.  One of his assistants told me a nasty
+one about him afterwards.  They had an off month in Los Angeles,
+and Captain Roberts got it into his head he was going to make a
+dog balance a silver dollar on the neck of a champagne bottle.
+Now just think that over and try to see yourself loving a dog into
+doing it.  The assistant said he wore out about as many sticks as
+dogs, and that he wore out half a dozen dogs.  He used to get them
+from the public pound at two and a half apiece, and every time one
+died he had another ready and waiting.  And he succeeded with the
+seventh dog.  I'm telling you, it learned to balance a dollar on
+the neck of a bottle.  And it died from the effects of the
+learning within a week after he put it on the stage.  Abscesses in
+the lungs, from the stick."
+
+"There was an Englishman came over when I was a youngster.  He had
+ponies, monkeys, and dogs.  He bit the monkey's ears, so that, on
+the stage, all he had to do was to make a move as if he was going
+to bite and they'd quit their fooling and be good.  He had a big
+chimpanzee that was a winner.  It could turn four somersaults as
+fast as you could count on the back of a galloping pony, and he
+used to have to give it a real licking about twice a week.  And
+sometimes the lickings were too stiff, and the monkey'd get sick
+and have to lay off.  But the owner solved the problem.  He got to
+giving him a little licking, a mere taste of the stick, regular,
+just before the turn came on.  And that did it in his case, though
+with some other case the monkey most likely would have got sullen
+and not acted at all."
+
+It was on that day that Harris Collins sold a valuable bit of
+information to a lion man who needed it.  It was off time for him,
+and his three lions were boarding at Cedarwild.  Their turn was an
+exciting and even terrifying one, when viewed from the audience;
+for, jumping about and roaring, they were made to appear as if
+about to destroy the slender little lady who performed with them
+and seemed to hold them in subjection only by her indomitable
+courage and a small riding-switch in her hand.
+
+"The trouble is they're getting too used to it," the man
+complained.  "Isadora can't prod them up any more.  They just
+won't make a showing."
+
+"I know them," Collins nodded.  "They're pretty old now, and
+they're spirit-broken besides.  Take old Sark there.  He's had so
+many blank cartridges fired into his ears that he's stone deaf.
+And Selim--he lost his heart with his teeth.  A Portuguese fellow
+who was handling him for the Barnum and Bailey show did that for
+him.  You've heard?"
+
+"I've often wondered," the man shook his head.  "It must have been
+a smash."
+
+"It was.  The Portuguese did it with an iron bar.  Selim was sulky
+and took a swipe at him with his paw, and he whopped it to him
+full in the mouth just as he opened it to let out a roar.  He told
+me about it himself.  Said Selim's teeth rattled on the floor like
+dominoes.  But he shouldn't have done it.  It was destroying
+valuable property.  Anyway, they fired him for it."
+
+"Well, all three of them ain't worth much to me now," said their
+owner.  "They won't play up to Isadora in that roaring and
+rampaging at the end.  It really made the turn.  It was our
+finale, and we always got a great hand for it.  Say, what am I
+going to do about it anyway?  Ditch it?  Or get some young lions?"
+
+"Isadora would be safer with the old ones," Collins said.
+
+"Too safe," Isadora's husband objected.  "Of course, with younger
+lions, the work and responsibility piles up on me.  But we've got
+to make our living, and this turn's about busted."
+
+Harris Collins shook his head.
+
+"What d'ye mean?--what's the idea?" the man demanded eagerly.
+
+"They'll live for years yet, seeing how captivity has agreed with
+them," Collins elucidated.  "If you invest in young lions you run
+the risk of having them pass out on you.  And you can go right on
+pulling the trick off with what you've got.  All you've got to do
+is to take my advice . . . "
+
+The master-trainer paused, and the lion man opened his mouth to
+speak.
+
+"Which will cost you," Collins went on deliberately, "say three
+hundred dollars."
+
+"Just for some advice?" the other asked quickly.
+
+"Which I guarantee will work.  What would you have to pay for
+three new lions?  Here's where you make money at three hundred.
+And it's the simplest of advice.  I can tell it to you in three
+words, which is at the rate of a hundred dollars a word, and one
+of the words is 'the.'"
+
+"Too steep for me," the other objected.  "I've got a make a
+living."
+
+"So have I," Collins assured him.  "That's why I'm here.  I'm a
+specialist, and you're paying a specialist's fee.  You'll be as
+mad as a hornet when I tell you, it's that simple; and for the
+life of me I can't understand why you don't already know it."
+
+"And if it don't work?" was the dubious query.
+
+"If it don't work, you don't pay."
+
+"Well, shoot it along," the lion man surrendered.
+
+"WIRE THE CAGE," said Collins.
+
+At first the man could not comprehend; then the light began to
+break on him.
+
+"You mean . . . ?"
+
+"Just that," Collins nodded.  "And nobody need be the wiser.  Dry
+batteries will do it beautifully.  You can install them nicely
+under the cage floor.  All Isadora has to do when she's ready is
+to step on the button; and when the electricity shoots through
+their feet, if they don't go up in the air and rampage and roar
+around to beat the band, not only can you keep the three hundred,
+but I'll give you three hundred more.  I know.  I've seen it done,
+and it never misses fire.  It's just as though they were dancing
+on a red-hot stove.  Up they go, and every time they come down
+they burn their feet again.
+
+"But you'll have to put the juice into them slowly," Collins
+warned.  "I'll show you how to do the wiring.  Just a weak battery
+first, so as they can work up to it, and then stronger and
+stronger to the curtain.  And they never get used to it.  As long
+as they live they'll dance just as lively as the first time.  What
+do you think of it?"
+
+"It's worth three hundred all right," the man admitted.  "I wish I
+could make my money that easy."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+
+
+"Guess I'll have to wash my hands of him," Collins told Johnny.
+"I know Del Mar must have been right when he said he was the
+limit, but I can't get a clue to it."
+
+This followed upon a fight between Michael and Collins.  Michael,
+more morose than ever, had become even crusty-tempered, and,
+scarcely with provocation at all, had attacked the man he hated,
+failing, as ever, to put his teeth into him, and receiving, in
+turn, a couple of smashing kicks under his jaw.
+
+"He's like a gold-mine all right all right," Collins meditated,
+"but I'm hanged if I can crack it, and he's getting grouchier
+every day.  Look at him.  What'd he want to jump me for?  I wasn't
+rough with him.  He's piling up a sour-ball that'll make him fight
+a policeman some day."
+
+A few minutes later, one of his patrons, a tow-headed young man
+who was boarding and rehearsing three performing leopards at
+Cedarwild, was asking Collins for the loan of an Airedale.
+
+"I've only got one left now," he explained, "and I ain't safe
+without two."
+
+"What's happened to the other one?" the master-trainer queried.
+
+"Alphonso--that's the big buck leopard--got nasty this morning and
+settled his hash.  I had to put him out of his misery.  He was
+gutted like a horse in the bull-ring.  But he saved me all right.
+If it hadn't been for him I'd have got a mauling.  Alphonso gets
+these bad streaks just about every so often.  That's the second
+dog he's killed for me."
+
+Collins shook his head.
+
+"Haven't got an Airedale," he said, and just then his eyes chanced
+to fall on Michael.  "Try out the Irish terrier," he suggested.
+"They're like the Airedale in disposition.  Pretty close cousins,
+at any rate."
+
+"I pin my faith on the Airedale when it comes to lion dogs," the
+leopard man demurred.
+
+"So's an Irish terrier a lion dog.  Take that one there.  Look at
+the size and weight of him.  Also, take it from me, he's all
+spunk.  He'll stand up to anything.  Try him out.  I'll lend him
+to you.  If he makes good I'll sell him to you cheap.  An Irish
+terrier for a leopard dog will be a novelty."
+
+"If he gets fresh with them cats he'll find his finish," Johnny
+told Collins, as Michael was led away by the leopard man.
+
+"Then, maybe, the stage will lose a star," Collins answered, with
+a shrug of shoulders.  "But I'll have him off my chest anyway.
+When a dog gets a perpetual sour-ball like that he's finished.
+Never can do a thing with them.  I've had them on my hands
+before."
+
+
+And Michael went to make the acquaintance of Jack, the surviving
+Airedale, and to do his daily turn with the leopards.  In the big
+spotted cats he recognized the hereditary enemy, and, even before
+he was thrust into the cage, his neck was all a-prickle as the
+skin nervously tightened and the hair uprose stiff-ended.  It was
+a nervous moment for all concerned, the introduction of a new dog
+into the cage.  The tow-headed leopard man, who was billed on the
+boards as Raoul Castlemon and was called Ralph by his intimates,
+was already in the cage.  The Airedale was with him, while outside
+stood several men armed with iron bars and long steel forks.
+These weapons, ready for immediate use, were thrust between the
+bars as a menace to the leopards who were, very much against their
+wills, to be made to perform.
+
+They resented Michael's intrusion on the instant, spitting,
+lashing their long tails, and crouching to spring.  At the same
+instant the trainer spoke with sharp imperativeness and raised his
+whip, while the men on the outside lifted their irons and advanced
+them intimidatingly into the cage.  And the leopards, bitter-wise
+of the taste of the iron, remained crouched, although they still
+spat and whipped their tails angrily.
+
+Michael was no coward.  He did not slink behind the man for
+protection.  On the other hand, he was too sensible to rush to
+attack such formidable creatures.  What he did do, with bristling
+neck-hair, was to stalk stiff-leggedly across the cage, turn about
+with his face toward the danger, and stalk stiffly back, coming to
+a pause alongside of Jack, who gave him a good-natured sniff of
+greeting.
+
+"He's the stuff," the trainer muttered in a curiously tense voice.
+"They don't get his goat."
+
+The situation was deservedly tense, and Ralph developed it with
+cautious care, making no abrupt movements, his eyes playing
+everywhere over dogs and leopards and the men outside with the
+prods and bars.  He made the savage cats come out of their crouch
+and separate from one another.  At his word of command, Jack
+walked about among them.  Michael, on his own initiative,
+followed.  And, like Jack, he walked very stiffly on his guard and
+very circumspectly.
+
+One of them, Alphonso, spat suddenly at him.  He did not startle,
+though his hair rippled erect and he bared his fangs in a silent
+snarl.  At the same moment the nearest iron bar was shoved in
+threateningly close to Alphonso, who shifted his yellow eyes from
+Michael to the bar and back again and did not strike out.
+
+The first day was the hardest.  After that the leopards accepted
+Michael as they accepted Jack.  No love was lost on either side,
+nor were friendly overtures ever offered.  Michael was quick to
+realize that it was the men and dogs against the cats and that the
+men and does must stand together.  Each day he spent from an hour
+to two hours in the cage, watching the rehearsing, with nothing
+for him and Jack to do save stand vigilantly on guard.  Sometimes,
+when the leopards seemed better natured, Ralph even encouraged the
+two dogs to lie down.  But, on bad mornings, he saw to it that
+they were ever ready to spring in between him and any possible
+attack.
+
+For the rest of the time Michael shared his large pen with Jack.
+They were well cared for, as were all animals at Cedarwild,
+receiving frequent scrubbings and being kept clean of vermin.  For
+a dog only three years old, Jack was very sedate.  Either he had
+never learned to play or had already forgotten how.  On the other
+hand, he was sweet-tempered and equable, and he did not resent the
+early shows of crustiness which Michael made.  And Michael quickly
+ceased from being crusty and took pleasure in their quiet
+companionship.  There were no demonstrations.  They were content
+to lie awake by the hour, merely pleasantly aware of each other's
+proximity.
+
+Occasionally, Michael could hear Sara making a distant scene or
+sending out calls which he knew were for him.  Once she got away
+from her keeper and located Michael coming out of the leopard
+cage.  With a shrill squeal of joy she was upon him, clinging to
+him and chattering the hysterical tale of all her woes since they
+had been parted.  The leopard man looked on tolerantly and let her
+have her few minutes.  It was her keeper who tore her away in the
+end, cling as she would to Michael, screaming all the while like a
+harridan.  When her hold was broken, she sprang at the man in a
+fury, and, before he could throttle her to subjection, sank her
+teeth into his thumb and wrist.  All of which was provocative of
+great hilarity to the onlookers, while her squalls and cries
+excited the leopards to spitting and leaping against their bars.
+And, as she was borne away, she set up a soft wailing like that of
+a heart-broken child.
+
+
+Although Michael proved a success with the leopards, Raoul
+Castlemon never bought him from Collins.  One morning, several
+days later, the arena was vexed by uproar and commotion from the
+animal cages.  The excitement, starting with revolver shots, was
+communicated everywhere.  The various lions raised a great
+roaring, and the many dogs barked frantically.  All tricks in the
+arena stopped, the animals temporarily unstrung and unable to
+continue.  Several men, among them Collins, ran in the direction
+of the cages.  Sara's keeper dropped her chain in order to follow.
+
+"It's Alphonso--shillings to pence it is," Collins called to one
+of his assistants who was running beside him.  "He'll get Ralph
+yet."
+
+The affair was all but over and leaping to its culmination when
+Collins arrived.  Castlemon was just being dragged out, and as
+Collins ran he could see the two men drop him to the ground so
+that they might slam the cage-door shut.  Inside, in so wildly
+struggling a tangle on the floor that it was difficult to discern
+what animals composed it, were Alphonso, Jack, and Michael looked
+together.  Men danced about outside, thrusting in with iron bars
+and trying to separate them.  In the far end of the cage were the
+other two leopards, nursing their wounds and snarling and striking
+at the iron rods that kept them out of the combat.
+
+Sara's arrival and what followed was a matter of seconds.
+Trailing her chain behind her, the little green monkey, the tailed
+female who knew love and hysteria and was remote cousin to human
+women, flashed up to the narrow cage-bars and squeezed through.
+Simultaneously the tangle underwent a violent upheaval.  Flung out
+with such force as to be smashed against the near end of the cage,
+Michael fell to the floor, tried to spring up, but crumpled and
+sank down, his right shoulder streaming blood from a terrible
+mauling and crushing.  To him Sara leaped, throwing her arms
+around him and mothering him up to her flat little hairy breast.
+She uttered solicitous cries, and, as Michael strove to rise on
+his ruined foreleg, scolded him with sharp gentleness and with her
+arms tried to hold him away from the battle.  Also, in an
+interval, her eyes malevolent in her rage, she chattered piercing
+curses at Alphonso.
+
+A crowbar, shoved into his side, distracted the big leopard.  He
+struck at the weapon with his paw, and, when it was poked into him
+again, flung himself upon it, biting the naked iron with his
+teeth.  With a second fling he was against the cage bars, with a
+single slash of paw ripping down the forearm of the man who had
+poked him.  The crowbar was dropped as the man leaped away.
+Alphonso flung back on Jack, a sorry antagonist by this time, who
+could only pant and quiver where he lay in the welter of what was
+left of him.
+
+Michael had managed to get up on his three legs and was striving
+to stumble forward against the restraining arms of Sara.  The mad
+leopard was on the verge of springing upon them when deflected by
+another prod of the iron.  This time he went straight at the man,
+fetching up against the cage-bars with such fierceness as to shake
+the structure.
+
+More men began thrusting with more rods, but Alphonso was not to
+be balked.  Sara saw him coming and screamed her shrillest and
+savagest at him.  Collins snatched a revolver from one of the men.
+
+"Don't kill him!" Castlemon cried, seizing Collins's arm.
+
+The leopard man was in a bad way himself.  One arm dangled
+helplessly at his side, while his eyes, filling with blood from a
+scalp wound, he wiped on the master-trainer's shoulder so that he
+might see.
+
+"He's my property," he protested.  "And he's worth a hundred sick
+monkeys and sour-balled terriers.  Anyway, we'll get them out all
+right.  Give me a chance.--Somebody mop my eyes out, please.  I
+can't see.  I've used up my blank cartridges.  Has anybody any
+blanks?"
+
+One moment Sara would interpose her body between Michael and the
+leopard, which was still being delayed by the prodding irons; and
+the next moment she would turn to screech at the fanged cat is if
+by very advertisement of her malignancy she might intimidate him
+into keeping back.
+
+Michael, dragging her with him, growling and bristling, staggered
+forward a couple of three-legged steps, gave at the ruined
+shoulder, and collapsed.  And then Sara did the great deed.  With
+one last scream of utmost fury, she sprang full into the face of
+the monstrous cat, tearing and scratching with hands and feet, her
+mouth buried into the roots of one of its stubby ears.  The
+astounded leopard upreared, with his fore-paws striking and
+ripping at the little demon that would not let go.
+
+The fight and the life in the little green monkey lasted a short
+ten seconds.  But this was sufficient for Collins to get the door
+ajar and with a quick clutch on Michael's hind-leg jerk him out
+and to the ground.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+
+
+No rough-and-ready surgery of the Del Mar sort obtained at
+Cedarwild, else Michael would not have lived.  A real surgeon,
+skilful and audacious, came very close to vivisecting him as he
+radically repaired the ruin of a shoulder, doing things he would
+not have dared with a human but which proved to be correct for
+Michael.
+
+"He'll always be lame," the surgeon said, wiping his hands and
+gazing down at Michael, who lay, for the most part of him, a
+motionless prisoner set in plaster of Paris.  "All the healing,
+and there's plenty of it, will have to be by first intention.  If
+his temperature shoots up we'll have to put him out of his misery.
+What's he worth?"
+
+"He has no tricks," Collins answered.  "Possibly fifty dollars,
+and certainly not that now.  Lame dogs are not worth teaching
+tricks to."
+
+Time was to prove both men wrong.  Michael was not destined to
+permanent lameness, although in after-years his shoulder was
+always tender, and, on occasion, when the weather was damp, he was
+compelled to ease it with a slight limp.  On the other hand, he
+was destined to appreciate to a great price and to become the star
+performer Harry Del Mar had predicted of him.
+
+In the meantime he lay for many weary days in the plaster and
+abstained from raising a dangerous temperature.  The care taken of
+him was excellent.  But not out of love and affection was it
+given.  It was merely a part of the system at Cedarwild which made
+the institution such a success.  When he was taken out of the
+plaster, he was still denied that instinctive pleasure which all
+animals take in licking their wounds, for shrewdly arranged
+bandages were wrapped and buckled on him.  And when they were
+finally removed, there were no wounds to lick; though deep in the
+shoulder was a pain that required months in which to die out.
+
+Harris Collins bothered him no more with trying to teach him
+tricks, and, one day, loaned him as a filler-in to a man and woman
+who had lost three of their dog-troupe by pneumonia.
+
+"If he makes out you can have him for twenty dollars," Collins
+told the man, Wilton Davis.
+
+"And if he croaks?" Davis queried.
+
+Collins shrugged his shoulders.  "I won't sit up nights worrying
+about him.  He's unteachable."
+
+And when Michael departed from Cedarwild in a crate on an express
+wagon, he might well have never returned, for Wilton Davis was
+notorious among trained-animal men for his cruelty to dogs.  Some
+care he might take of a particular dog with a particularly
+valuable trick, but mere fillers-in came too cheaply.  They cost
+from three to five dollars apiece.  Worse than that, so far as he
+was concerned, Michael had cost nothing.  And if he died it meant
+nothing to Davis except the trouble of finding another dog.
+
+The first stage of Michael's new adventure involved no unusual
+hardship, despite the fact that he was so cramped in his crate
+that he could not stand up and that the jolting and handling of
+the crate sent countless twinges of pain shooting through his
+shoulder.  The journey was only to Brooklyn, where he was duly
+delivered to a second-rate theatre, Wilton Davis being so
+indifferent a second-rate animal man that he could never succeed
+in getting time with the big circuits.
+
+The hardship of the cramped crate began after Michael had been
+carried into a big room above the stage and deposited with nearly
+a score of similarly crated dogs.  A sorry lot they were, all of
+them scrubs and most of them spirit-broken and miserable.  Several
+had bad sores on their heads from being knocked about by Davis.
+No care was taken of these sores, and they were not improved by
+the whitening that was put on them for concealment whenever they
+performed.  Some of them howled lamentably at times, and every
+little while, as if it were all that remained for them to do in
+their narrow cells, all of them would break out into barking.
+
+Michael was the only one who did not join in these choruses.  Long
+since, as one feature of his developing moroseness, he had ceased
+from barking.  He had become too unsociable for any such
+demonstrations; nor did he pattern after the example of some of
+the sourer-tempered dogs in the room, who were for ever bickering
+and snarling through the slats of their cages.  In fact, Michael's
+sourness of temper had become too profound even for quarrelling.
+All he desired was to be let alone, and of this he had a surfeit
+for the first forty-eight hours.
+
+Wilton Davis had assembled his troupe ahead of time, so that the
+change of programme was five days away.  Having taken advantage of
+this to go to see his wife's people over in New Jersey, he had
+hired one of the stage-hands to feed and water his dogs.  This the
+stage-hand would have done, had he not had the misfortune to get
+into an altercation with a barkeeper which culminated in a
+fractured skull and an ambulance ride to the receiving hospital.
+To make the situation perfect for what followed, the theatre was
+closed for three days in order to make certain alterations
+demanded by the Fire Commissioners.
+
+No one came near the room, and after several hours Michael grew
+aware of hunger and thirst.  The time passed, and the desire for
+food was supplanted by the desire for water.  By nightfall the
+barking and yelping became continuous, changing through the long
+night hours to whimpering and whining.  Michael alone made no
+sound, suffering dumbly in the bedlam of misery.
+
+Morning of the second day dawned; the slow hours dragged by to the
+second night; and the darkness of the second night drew down upon
+a scene behind the scenes, sufficient of itself to condemn all
+trained-animal acts in all theatres and show-tents of all the
+world.  Whether Michael dreamed or was in semi-delirium, there is
+no telling; but, whichever it was, he lived most of his past life
+over again.  Again he played as a puppy on the broad verandas of
+MISTER Haggin's plantation bungalow at Meringe; or, with Jerry,
+stalked the edges of the jungle down by the river-bank to spy upon
+the crocodiles; or, learning from MISTER Haggin and Bob, and
+patterning after Biddy and Terrence, to consider black men as
+lesser and despised gods who must for ever be kept strictly in
+their places.
+
+On the schooner Eugenie he sailed with Captain Kellar, his second
+master, and on the beach at Tulagi lost his heart to Steward of
+the magic fingers and sailed away with him and Kwaque on the
+steamer Makambo.  Steward was most in his visions, against a hazy
+background of vessels, and of individuals like the Ancient
+Mariner, Simon Nishikanta, Grimshaw, Captain Doane, and little old
+Ah Moy.  Nor least of all did Scraps appear, and Cocky, the
+valiant-hearted little fluff of life gallantly bearing himself
+through his brief adventure in the sun.  And it would seem to
+Michael that on one side, clinging to him, Cocky talked farrago in
+his ear, and on the other side Sara clung to him and chattered an
+interminable and incommunicable tale.  And then, deep about the
+roots of his ears would seem to prod the magic, caressing fingers
+of Steward the beloved.
+
+"I just don't I have no luck," Wilton Davis mourned, gazing about
+at his dogs, the air still vibrating with the string of oaths he
+had at first ripped out.
+
+"That comes of trusting a drunken stage-hand," his wife remarked
+placidly.  "I wouldn't be surprised if half of them died on us
+now."
+
+"Well, this is no time for talk," Davis snarled, proceeding to
+take off his coat.  "Get busy, my love, and learn the worst.
+Water's what they need.  I'll give them a tub of it."
+
+Bucketful by bucketful, from the tap at the sink in the corner, he
+filled a large galvanized-iron tub.  At sound of the running water
+the dogs began whimpering and yelping and moaning.  Some tried to
+lick his hands with their swollen tongues as he dragged them
+roughly out of their cages.  The weaker ones crawled and bellied
+toward the tub, and were over-trod by the stronger ones.  There
+was not room for all, and the stronger ones drank first, with much
+fighting and squabbling and slashing of fangs.  Into the foremost
+of this was Michael, slashing and being slashed, but managing to
+get hasty gulps of the life-saving fluid.  Davis danced about
+among them, kicking right and left, so that all might have a
+chance.  His wife took a hand, laying about her with a mop.  It
+was a pandemonium of pain, for, their parched throats softened by
+the water, they were again able to yelp and cry out loudly all
+their hurt and woe.
+
+Several were too weak to get to the water, so it was carried to
+them and doused and splashed into their mouths.  It seemed that
+they would never be satisfied.  They lay in collapse all about the
+room, but every little while one or another would crawl over to
+the tub and try to drink more.  In the meantime Davis had started
+a fire and filled a caldron with potatoes.
+
+"The place stinks like a den of skunks," Mrs. Davis observed,
+pausing from dabbing the end of her nose with a powder-puff.
+"Dearest, we'll just have to wash them."
+
+"All right, sweetheart," her husband agreed.  "And the quicker the
+better.  We can get through with it while the potatoes are boiling
+and cooling.  I'll scrub them and you dry them.  Remember that
+pneumonia, and do it thoroughly."
+
+It was quick, rough bathing.  Reaching out for the dogs nearest
+him, he flung them in turn into the tub from which they had drunk.
+When they were frightened, or when they objected in any way, he
+rapped them on the head with the scrubbing brush or the bar of
+yellow laundry soap with which he was lathering them.  Several
+minutes sufficed for a dog.
+
+"Drink, damn you, drink--have some more," he would say, as he
+shoved their heads down and under the dirty, soapy water.
+
+He seemed to hold them responsible for their horrible condition,
+to look upon their filthiness as a personal affront.
+
+Michael yielded to being flung into the tub.  He recognized that
+baths were necessary and compulsory, although they were
+administered in much better fashion at Cedarwild, while Kwaque and
+Steward had made a sort of love function of it when they bathed
+him.  So he did his best to endure the scrubbing, and all might
+have been well had not Davis soused him under.  Michael jerked his
+head up with a warning growl.  Davis suspended half-way the blow
+he was delivering with the heavy brush, and emitted a low whistle
+of surprise.
+
+"Hello!" he said.  "And look who's here!--Lovey, this is the Irish
+terrier I got from Collins.  He's no good.  Collins said so.  Just
+a fill-in.--Get out!" he commanded Michael.  "That's all you get
+now, Mr. Fresh Dog.  But take it from me pretty soon you'll be
+getting it fast enough to make you dizzy."
+
+While the potatoes were cooling, Mrs. Davis kept the hungry dogs
+warned away by sharp cries.  Michael lay down sullenly to one
+side, and took no part in the rush for the trough when permission
+was given.  Again Davis danced among them, kicking away the
+stronger and the more eager.
+
+"If they get to fighting after all we've done for them, kick in
+their ribs, lovey," he told his wife.
+
+"There!  You would, would you?"--this to a large black dog,
+accompanied by a savage kick in the side.  The animal yelped its
+pain as it fled away, and, from a safe distance, looked on
+piteously at the steaming food.
+
+"Well, after this they can't say I don't never give my dogs a
+bath," Davis remarked from the sink, where he was rinsing his
+arms.  What d'ye say we call it a day's work, my dear?"  Mrs.
+Davis nodded agreement.  "We can rehearse them to-morrow and next
+day.  That will be plenty of time.  I'll run in to-night and boil
+them some bran.  They'll need an extra meal after fasting two
+days."
+
+The potatoes finished, the dogs were put back in their cages for
+another twenty-four hours of close confinement.  Water was poured
+into their drinking-tins, and, in the evening, still in their
+cages, they were served liberally with boiled bran and dog-
+biscuit.  This was Michael's first food, for he had sulkily
+refused to go near the potatoes.
+
+
+The rehearsing took place on the stage, and for Michael trouble
+came at the very start.  The drop-curtain was supposed to go up
+and reveal the twenty dogs seated on chairs in a semi-circle.
+Because, while they were being thus arranged, the preceding turn
+was taking place in front of the drop-curtain, it was imperative
+that rigid silence should be kept.  Next, when the curtain rose on
+full stage, the dogs were trained to make a great barking.
+
+As a filler-in, Michael had nothing to do but sit on a chair.  But
+he had to get upon the chair, first, and when Davis so ordered him
+he accompanied the order with a clout on the side of the head.
+Michael growled warningly.
+
+"Oh, ho, eh?" the man sneered.  "It's Fresh Dog looking for
+trouble.  Well, you might as well get it over with now so your
+name can be changed to Good Dog.--My dear, just keep the rest of
+them in order while I teach Fresh Dog lesson number one."
+
+Of the beating that followed, the least said the better.  Michael
+put up a fight that was hopeless, and was thoroughly beaten in
+return.  Bruised and bleeding, he sat on the chair, taking no part
+in the performance and only sullenly engendering a deeper and
+bitterer sourness.  To keep silent before the curtain went up was
+no hardship for him.  But when the curtain did go up, he declined
+to join the rest of the dogs in their frantic barking and yelping.
+
+The dogs, sometimes alone and sometimes in couples and trios and
+groups, left their chairs at command and performed the
+conventional dog tricks such as walking on hind-legs, hopping,
+limping, waltzing, and throwing somersaults.  Wilton Davis's
+temper was short and his hand heavy throughout the rehearsal, as
+the shrill yelps of pain from the lagging and stupid attested.
+
+In all, during that day and the forenoon of the next, three long
+rehearsals took place.  Michael's troubles ceased for the time
+being.  At command, he silently got on the chair and silently sat
+there.  "Which shows, dearest, what a bit of the stick will do,"
+Davis bragged to his wife.  Nor did the pair of them dream of the
+scandalizing part Michael was going to play in their first
+performance.
+
+Behind the curtain all was ready on the full stage.  The dogs sat
+on their chairs in abject silence with Davis and his wife menacing
+them to remain silent, while, in front of the curtain, Dick and
+Daisy Bell delighted the matinee audience with their singing and
+dancing.  And all went well, and no one in the audience would have
+suspected the full stage of dogs behind the curtain had not Dick
+and Daisy, accompanied by the orchestra, begun to sing "Roll Me
+Down to Rio."
+
+Michael could not help it.  Even as Kwaque had long before
+mastered him by the jews' harp, and Steward by love, and Harry Del
+Mar by the harmonica, so now was he mastered by the strains of the
+orchestra and the voices of the man and woman lifting the old
+familiar rhythm, taught him by Steward, of "Roll Me Down to Rio."
+Despite himself, despite his sullenness, the forces compulsive
+opened his jaws and set all his throat vibrating in accompaniment.
+
+From beyond the curtain came a titter of children and women that
+grew into a roar and drowned out the voices of Dick and Daisy.
+Wilton Davis cursed unbelievably as he sprang down the stage to
+Michael.  But Michael howled on, and the audience laughed on.
+Michael was still howling when the short club smote him.  The
+shock and hurt of it made him break off and yelp an involuntary
+cry of pain.
+
+"Knock his block off, dearest," Mrs. Davis counselled.
+
+And then ensued battle royal.  Davis struck shrewd blows that
+could be heard, as were heard the snarls and growls of Michael.
+The audience, under the sway of the comic, ignored Dick and Daisy
+Bell.  Their turn was spoiled.  The Davis turn was "queered," as
+Wilton impressed it.  Michael's block was knocked off within the
+meaning of the term.  And the audience, on the other side of the
+curtain, was edified and delighted.
+
+Dick and Daisy could not continue.  The audience wanted what was
+behind the curtain, not in front of it.  Michael was taken off
+stage thoroughly throttled by one of the stage-hands, and the
+curtain arose on the full set--full, save for the one empty chair.
+The boys in the audience first realized the connection between the
+empty chair and the previous uproar, and began clamouring for the
+absent dog.  The audience took up the cry, the dogs barked more
+excitedly, and five minutes of hilarity delayed the turn which,
+when at last started, was marked by rustiness and erraticness on
+the part of the dogs and by great peevishness on the part of
+Wilton Davis.
+
+"Never mind, honey," his imperturbable wife assured him in a stage
+whisper.  "We'll just ditch that dog and get a regular one.  And,
+anyway, we've put one over on that Daisy Bell.  I ain't told you
+yet what she said about me, only last week, to some of my
+friends."
+
+Several minutes later, still on the stage and handling his
+animals, the husband managed a chance to mutter to his wife:
+"It's the dog.  It's him I'm after.  I'm going to lay him out."
+
+"Yes, dearest," she agreed.
+
+The curtain down, with a gleeful audience in front and with the
+dogs back in the room over the stage, Wilton Davis descended to
+look for Michael, who, instead of cowering in some corner, stood
+between the legs of the stage-hand, quivering yet from his
+mishandling and threatening to fight as hard as ever if attacked.
+On his way, Davis encountered the song-and-dance couple.  The
+woman was in a tearful rage, the man in a dry one.
+
+"You're a peach of a dog man, you are," he announced
+belligerently.  "Here's where you get yours."
+
+"You keep away from me, or I'll lay you out," Wilton Davis
+responded desperately, brandishing a short iron bar in his right
+hand.  "Besides, you just wait if you want to, and I'll lay you
+out afterward.  But first of all I'm going to lay out that dog.
+Come on along and see--damn him!  How was I to know?  He was a new
+one.  He never peeped in rehearsal.  How was I to know he was
+going to yap when we arranged the set behind you?"
+
+"You've raised hell," the manager of the theatre greeted Davis, as
+the latter, trailed by Dick Bell, came upon Michael bristling from
+between the legs of the stage-hand.
+
+"Nothing to what I'm going to raise," Davis retorted, shortening
+his grip on the iron bar and raising it.  "I'm going to kill 'm.
+I'm going to beat the life out of him.  You just watch."
+
+Michael snarled acknowledgment of the threat, crouched to spring,
+and kept his eyes on the iron weapon.
+
+"I just guess you ain't goin' to do anything of the sort," the
+stage-hand assured Davis.
+
+"It's my property," the latter asserted with an air of legal
+convincingness.
+
+"And against it I'm goin' to stack up my common sense," was the
+stage-hand's reply.  "You tap him once, and see what you'll get.
+Dogs is dogs, and men is men, but I'm damned if I know what you
+are.  You can't pull off rough stuff on that dog.  First time he
+was on a stage in his life, after being starved and thirsted for
+two days.  Oh, I know, Mr. Manager."
+
+"If you kill the dog it'll cost you a dollar to the garbage man to
+get rid of the carcass," the manager took up.
+
+"I'll pay it gladly," Davis said, again lifting the iron bar.
+"I've got some come-back, ain't I?"
+
+"You animal guys make me sick," the stage-hand uttered.  "You just
+make me draw the line somewheres.  And here it is:  you tap him
+once with that baby crowbar, and I'll tap you hard enough to lose
+me my job and to send you to hospital."
+
+"Now look here, Jackson . . . " the manager began threateningly.
+
+"You can't say nothin' to me," was the retort.  "My mind's made
+up.  If that cheap guy lays a finger on that dog I'm just sure
+goin' to lose my job.  I'm gettin tired anyway of seein' these
+skates beatin' up their animals.  They've made me sick clean
+through."
+
+The manager looked to Davis and shrugged his shoulders helplessly.
+
+"There's no use pulling off a rough-house," he counselled.  "I
+don't want to lose Jackson and he'll put you into hospital if he
+ever gets started.  Send the dog back where you got him.  Your
+wife's told me about him.  Stick him into a box and send him back
+collect.  Collins won't mind.  He'll take the singing out of him
+and work him into something."
+
+Davis, with another glance at the truculent Jackson, wavered.
+
+"I'll tell you what," the manager went on persuasively.  "Jackson
+will attend to the whole thing, box him up, ship him, everything--
+won't you, Jackson?"
+
+The stage-hand nodded curtly, then reached down and gently
+caressed Michael's bruised head.
+
+"Well," Davis gave in, turning on his heel, "they can make fools
+of themselves over dogs, them that wants to.  But when they've
+been in the business as long as I have . . . "
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+
+
+A post card from Davis to Collins explained the reasons for
+Michael's return.  "He sings too much to suit my fancy," was
+Davis's way of putting it, thereby unwittingly giving the clue to
+what Collins had vainly sought, and which Collins as unwittingly
+failed to grasp.  As he told Johnny:
+
+"From the looks of the beatings he's got no wonder he's been
+singing.  That's the trouble with these animal people.  They don't
+know how to take care of their property.  They hammer its head off
+and get grouched because it ain't an angel of obedience.--Put him
+away, Johnny.  Wash him clean, and put on the regular dressing
+wherever the skin's broken.  I give him up myself, but I'll find
+some place for him in the next bunch of dogs."
+
+Two weeks later, by sheerest accident, Harris Collins made the
+discovery for himself of what Michael was good for.  In a spare
+moment in the arena, he had sent for him to be tried out by a dog
+man who needed several fillers-in.  Beyond what he knew, such as
+at command to stand up, to lie down, to come here and go there,
+Michael had done nothing.  He had refused to learn the most
+elementary things a show-dog should know, and Collins had left him
+to go over to another part of the arena where a monkey band, on a
+sort of mimic stage, was being arranged and broken in.
+
+Frightened and mutinous, nevertheless the monkeys were compelled
+to perform by being tied to their seats and instruments and by
+being pulled and jerked from off stage by wires fastened to their
+bodies.  The leader of the orchestra, an irascible elderly monkey,
+sat on a revolving stool to which he was securely attached.  When
+poked from off the stage by means of long poles, he flew into
+ecstasies of rage.  At the same time, by a rope arrangement, his
+chair was whirled around and around.  To an audience the effect
+would be that he was angered by the blunders of his fellow-
+musicians.  And to an audience such anger would be highly
+ludicrous.  As Collins said:
+
+"A monkey band is always a winner.  It fetches the laugh, and the
+money's in the laugh.  Humans just have to laugh at monkeys
+because they're so similar and because the human has the advantage
+and feels himself superior.  Suppose we're walking along the
+street, you and me, and you slip and fall down.  Of course I
+laugh.  That's because I'm superior to you.  I didn't fall down.
+Same thing if your hat blows off.  I laugh while you chase it down
+the street.  I'm superior.  My hat's still on my head.  Same thing
+with the monkey band.  All the fool things of it make us feel so
+superior.  We don't see ourselves as foolish.  That's why we pay
+to see the monkeys behave foolish."
+
+It was scarcely a matter of training the monkeys.  Rather was it
+the training of the men who operated the concealed mechanisms that
+made the monkeys perform.  To this Harris Collins was devoting his
+effort.
+
+"There isn't any reason why you fellows can't make them play a
+real tune.  It's up to you, just according to how you pull the
+wires.  Come on.  It's worth going in for.  Let's try something
+you all know.  And remember, the regular orchestra will always
+help you out.  Now, what do you all know?  Something simple, and
+something the audience'll know, too?"
+
+He became absorbed in trying out the idea, and even borrowed a
+circus rider whose act was to play the violin while standing on
+the back of a galloping horse and to throw somersaults on such
+precarious platform while still playing the violin.  This man he
+got merely to play simple airs in slow time, so that the
+assistants could keep the time and the air and pull the wires
+accordingly.
+
+"Of course, if you make a howling mistake," Collins told them,
+"that's when you all pull the wires like mad and poke the leader
+and whirl him around.  That always brings down the house.  They
+think he's got a real musical ear and is mad at his orchestra for
+the discord."
+
+In the midst of the work, Johnny and Michael came along.
+
+"That guy says he wouldn't take him for a gift," Johnny reported
+to his employer.
+
+"All right, all right, put him back in the kennels," Collins
+ordered hurriedly.--"Now, you fellows, all ready!  'Home, Sweet
+Home!'  Go to it, Fisher!  Now keep the time the rest of you! . .
+. That's it.  With a full orchestra you're making motions like the
+tune.--Faster, you, Simmons.  You drag behind all the time."
+
+And the accident happened.  Johnny, instead of immediately obeying
+the order and taking Michael back to the kennels, lingered in the
+hope of seeing the orchestra leader whirled chattering around on
+his stool.  The violinist, within a yard of where Michael sat
+squatted on his haunches, played the notes of "Home, Sweet Home"
+with loud slow exactitude and emphasis.
+
+And Michael could not help it.  No more could he help it than
+could he help responding with a snarl when threatened by a club;
+no more could he help it than when he had spoiled the turn of Dick
+and Daisy Bell when swept by the strains of "Roll Me Down to Rio";
+no more could he help it than could Jerry, on the deck of the
+Ariel, help singing when Villa Kennan put her arms around him,
+smothered him deliciously in her cloud of hair, and sang his
+memory back into time and the fellowship of the ancient pack.  As
+with Jerry, was it with Michael.  Music was a drug of dream.  He,
+too, remembered the lost pack and sought it, seeing the bare hills
+of snow and the stars glimmering overhead through the frosty
+darkness of night, hearing the faint answering howls from other
+hills as the pack assembled.  Lost the pack was, through the
+thousands of years Michael's ancestors had lived by the fires of
+men; yet remembered always it was when the magic of rhythm poured
+through him and flooded his being with visions and sensations of
+that Otherwhere which in his own life he had never known.
+
+Compounded with the waking dream of Otherwhere, was the memory of
+Steward and the love of Steward, with whom he had learned to sing
+the very series of notes that now were being reproduced by the
+circus-rider violinist.  And Michael's jaw dropped down, his
+throat vibrated, his forefeet made restless little movements as if
+in the body he were running, as truly he was running in the mind,
+back to Steward, back through all the ages to the lost pack, and
+with the shadowy lost pack itself across the snowy wastes and
+through the forest aisles in the hunt of the meat.
+
+The spectral forms of the lost pack were all about him as he sang
+and ran in open-eyed dream; the violinist paused in surprise; the
+men poked the monkey leader of the monkey orchestra and whirled
+him about wildly raging on his revolving stool; and Johnny
+laughed.  But Harris Collins took note.  He had heard Michael
+accurately follow the air.  He had heard him sing--not merely
+howl, but SING.
+
+Silence fell.  The monkey leader ceased revolving and chattering.
+The men who had poked him held poles and wires suspended in their
+hands.  The rest of the monkey orchestra merely shivered in
+apprehension of what next atrocity should be perpetrated.  The
+violinist stared.  Johnny still heaved from his laughter.  But
+Harris Collins pondered, scratched his head, and continued to
+ponder.
+
+"You can't tell me . . . " he began vaguely.  "I know it.  I heard
+it.  That dog carried the tune.  Didn't he now?  I leave it to all
+of you.  Didn't he?  The damned dog sang.  I'll stake my life on
+it.--Hold on, you fellows; rest the monkeys off.  This is worth
+following up.--Mr. Violinist, play that over again, now, 'Home,
+Sweet Home,'--let her go.  Press her strong, and loud, and slow.--
+Now watch, all of you, and listen, and tell me if I'm crazy, or if
+that dog ain't carrying the tune.--There!  What d'ye call it?
+Ain't it?"
+
+There was no discussion.  Michael's jaw dropped and his forefeet
+began their restless lifting after several measures had been
+played.  And Harris Collins stepped close to him and sang with him
+and in accord.
+
+"Harry Del Mar was right when he said that dog was the limit and
+sold his troupe.  He knew.  The dog's a dog Caruso.  No howling
+chorus of mutts such as Kingman used to carry around with him, but
+a real singer, a soloist.  No wonder he wouldn't learn tricks.  He
+had his specially all the time.  And just to think of it!  I as
+good as gave him away to that dog-killing Wilton Davis.  Only he
+came back.--Johnny, take extra care of him after this.  Bring him
+up to the house this afternoon, and I'll give him a real try-out.
+My daughter plays the violin.  We'll see what music he'll sing
+with her.  There's a mint of money in him, take it from me."
+
+
+Thus was Michael discovered.  The afternoon's try-out was
+partially successful.  After vainly attempting strange music on
+him, Collins found that he could sing, and would sing, "God Save
+the King" and "Sweet Bye and Bye."  Many hours of many days were
+spent in the quest.  Vainly he tried to teach Michael new airs.
+Michael put no heart of love in the effort and sullenly abstained.
+But whenever one of the songs he had learned from Steward was
+played, he responded.  He could not help responding.  The magic
+was stronger than he.  In the end, Collins discovered five of the
+six songs he knew:  "God Save the King," "Sweet Bye and Bye,"
+"Lead, Kindly Light," "Home, Sweet Home," and "Roll Me Down to
+Rio."  Michael never sang "Shenandoah," because Collins and
+Collins's daughter did not know the old sea-chanty and therefore
+were unable to suggest it to him.
+
+"Five songs are enough, if he won't never learn another note,"
+Collins concluded.  "They'll make him a bill-topper anywhere.
+There's a mint in him.  Hang me if I wouldn't take him out on the
+road myself if only I was young and footloose."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+
+
+And so Michael was ultimately sold to one Jacob Henderson for two
+thousand dollars.  "And I'm giving him away to you at that," said
+Collins.  "If you don't refuse five thousand for him before six
+months, I don't know anything about the show game.  He'll skin
+that last arithmetic dog of yours to a finish and you won't have
+to show yourself and work every minute of the turn.  And if you
+don't insure him for fifty thousand as soon as he's made good
+you'll be a fool.  Why, I wouldn't ask anything better, if I was
+young and footloose, than to take him out on the road myself."
+
+Henderson proved totally different from any master Michael had
+had.  The man was a neutral sort of creature.  He was neither good
+nor evil.  He neither drank, smoked, nor swore; nor did he go to
+church or belong to the Y.M.C.A.  He was a vegetarian without
+being a bigoted one, liked moving pictures when they were
+concerned with travel, and spent most of his spare time in reading
+Swedenborg.  He had no temper whatever.  Nobody had ever witnessed
+anger in him, and all said he had the patience of Job.  He was
+even timid of policemen, freight agents, and conductors, though he
+was not afraid of them.  He was not afraid of anything, any more
+than was he enamoured of anything save Swedenborg.  He was as
+colourless of character as the neutral-coloured clothes he wore,
+as the neutral-coloured hair that sprawled upon his crown, as the
+neutral-coloured eyes with which he observed the world.  Nor was
+he a fool any more than was he a wise man or a scholar.  He gave
+little to life, asked little of life, and, in the show business,
+was a recluse in the very heart of life.
+
+Michael neither liked nor disliked him, but, rather, merely
+accepted him.  They travelled the United States over together, and
+they never had a quarrel.  Not once did Henderson raise his voice
+sharply to Michael, and not once did Michael snarl a warning at
+him.  They simply endured together, existed together, because the
+currents of life had drifted them together.  Of course, there was
+no heart-bond between them.  Henderson was master.  Michael was
+Henderson's chattel.  Michael was as dead to him as he was himself
+dead to all things.
+
+Yet Jacob Henderson was fair and square, business-like and
+methodical.  Once each day, when not travelling on the
+interminable trains, he gave Michael a thorough bath and
+thoroughly dried him afterward.  He was never harsh nor hasty in
+the bathing.  Michael never was aware whether he liked or disliked
+the bathing function.  It was all one, part of his own fate in the
+world as it was part of Henderson's fate to bathe him every so
+often.
+
+Michael's own work was tolerably easy, though monotonous.  Leaving
+out the eternal travelling, the never-ending jumps from town to
+town and from city to city, he appeared on the stage once each
+night for seven nights in the week and for two afternoon
+performances in the week.  The curtain went up, leaving him alone
+on the stage in the full set that befitted a bill-topper.
+Henderson stood in the wings, unseen by the audience, and looked
+on.  The orchestra played four of the pieces Michael had been
+taught by Steward, and Michael sang them, for his modulated
+howling was truly singing.  He never responded to more than one
+encore, which was always "Home, Sweet Home."  After that, while
+the audience clapped and stamped its approval and delight of the
+dog Caruso, Jacob Henderson would appear on the stage, bowing and
+smiling in stereotyped gladness and gratefulness, rest his right
+hand on Michael's shoulders with a play-acted assumption of
+comradeliness, whereupon both Henderson and Michael would bow ere
+the final curtain went down.
+
+And yet Michael was a prisoner, a life-prisoner.  Fed well, bathed
+well, exercised well, he never knew a moment of freedom.  When
+travelling, days and nights he spent in the cage, which, however,
+was generous enough to allow him to stand at full height and to
+turn around without too uncomfortable squirming.  Sometimes, in
+hotels in country towns, out of the crate he shared Henderson's
+room with him.  Otherwise, unless other animals were hewing on the
+same circuit time, he had, outside his cage, the freedom of the
+animal room attached to the particular theatre where he performed
+for from three days to a week.
+
+But there was never a chance, never a moment, when he might run
+free of a cage about him, of the walls of a room restricting him,
+of a chain shackled to the collar about his throat.  In good
+weather, in the afternoons, Henderson often took him for a walk.
+But always it was at the end of a chain.  And almost always the
+way led to some park, where Henderson fastened the other end of
+the chain to the bench on which he sat and browsed Swedenborg.
+Not one act of free agency was left to Michael.  Other dogs ran
+free, playing with one another, or behaving bellicosely.  If they
+approached him for purposes of investigation or acquaintance,
+Henderson invariably ceased from his reading long enough to drive
+them away.
+
+A life prisoner to a lifeless gaoler, life was all grey to
+Michael.  His moroseness changed to a deep-seated melancholy.  He
+ceased to be interested in life and in the freedom of life.  Not
+that he regarded the play of life about him with a jaundiced eye,
+but, rather, that his eyes became unseeing.  Debarred from life,
+he ignored life.  He permitted himself to become a sheer puppet
+slave, eating, taking his baths, travelling in his cage,
+performing regularly, and sleeping much.
+
+He had pride--the pride of the thoroughbred; the pride of the
+North American Indian enslaved on the plantations of the West
+Indies who died uncomplaining and unbroken.  So Michael.  He
+submitted to the cage and the iron of the chain because they were
+too strong for his muscles and teeth.  He did his slave-task of
+performance and rendered obedience to Jacob Henderson; but he
+neither loved nor feared that master.  And because of this his
+spirit turned in on itself.  He slept much, brooded much, and
+suffered unprotestingly a great loneliness.  Had Henderson made a
+bid for his heart, he would surely have responded; but Henderson
+had a heart only for the fantastic mental gyrations of Swedenborg,
+and merely made his living out of Michael.
+
+Sometimes there were hardships.  Michael accepted them.
+Especially hard did he find railroad travel in winter-time, when,
+on occasion, fresh from the last night's performance in a town, he
+remained for hours in his crate on a truck waiting for the train
+that would take him to the next town of performance.  There was a
+night on a station platform in Minnesota, when two dogs of a
+troupe, on the next truck to his, froze to death.  He was himself
+well frosted, and the cold bit abominably into his shoulder
+wounded by the leopard; but a better constitution and better
+general care of him enabled him to survive.
+
+Compared with other show animals, he was well treated.  And much
+of the ill-treatment accorded other animals on the same turn with
+him he did not comprehend or guess.  One turn, with which he
+played for three months, was a scandal amongst all vaudeville
+performers.  Even the hardiest of them heartily disliked the turn
+and the man, although Duckworth, and Duckworth's Trained Cats and
+Rats, were an invariable popular success.
+
+"Trained cats!" sniffed dainty little Pearl La Pearle, the
+bicyclist.  "Crushed cats, that's what they are.  All the cat has
+been beaten out of their blood, and they've become rats.  You
+can't tell me.  I know."
+
+"Trained rats!" Manuel Fonseca, the contortionist, exploded in the
+bar-room of the Hotel Annandale, after refusing to drink with
+Duckworth.  "Doped rats, believe me.  Why don't they jump off when
+they crawl along the tight rope with a cat in front and a cat
+behind?  Because they ain't got the life in 'm to jump.  They're
+doped, straight doped when they're fresh, and starved afterward so
+as to making a saving on the dope.  They never are fed.  You can't
+tell me.  I know.  Else why does he use up anywhere to forty or
+fifty rats a week!  I know his express shipments, when he can't
+buy 'm in the towns."
+
+"My Gawd!" protested Miss Merle Merryweather, the Accordion Girl,
+who looked like sixteen on the stage, but who, in private life
+among her grand-children, acknowledged forty-eight.  "My Gawd, how
+the public can fall for it gets my honest-to-Gawd goat.  I looked
+myself yesterday morning early.  Out of thirty rats there were
+seven dead,--starved to death.  He never feeds them.  They're
+dying rats, dying of starvation, when they crawl along that rope.
+That's why they crawl.  If they had a bit of bread and cheese in
+their tummies they'd jump and run to get away from the cats.
+They're dying, they're dying right there on the rope, trying to
+crawl as a dying man would try to crawl away from a tiger that was
+eating him.  And my Gawd!  The bonehead audience sits there and
+applauds the show as an educational act!"
+
+But the audience!  "Wonderful things kindness will do with
+animals," said a member of one, a banker and a deacon.  "Even
+human love can be taught to them by kindness.  The cat and the rat
+have been enemies since the world began.  Yet here, tonight, we
+have seen them doing highly trained feats together, and neither a
+cat committed one hostile or overt act against a rat, nor ever a
+rat showed it was afraid of a cat.  Human kindness!  The power of
+human kindness!"
+
+"The lion and the lamb," said another.  "We have it that when the
+millennium comes the lion and the lamb will lie down together--and
+outside each other, my dear, outside each other.  And this is a
+forecast, a proving up, by man, ahead of the day.  Cats and rats!
+Think of it.  And it shows conclusively the power of kindness.  I
+shall see to it at once that we get pets for our own children, our
+palm branches.  They shall learn kindness early, to the dog, the
+cat, yes, even the rat, and the pretty linnet in its cage."
+
+"But," said his dear, beside him, "you remember what Blake said:
+
+
+"'A Robin Redbreast in a cage
+Puts all heaven in a rage.'"
+
+
+"Ah--but not when it is treated truly with kindness, my dear.  I
+shall immediately order some rabbits, and a canary or two, and--
+what sort of a dog would you prefer our dear little ones to have
+to play with, my sweet?"
+
+And his dear looked at him in all his imperturbable, complacent
+self-consciousness of kindness, and saw herself the little rural
+school-teacher who, with Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Lord Byron as her
+idols, and with the dream of herself writing "Poems of Passion,"
+had come up to Topeka Town to be beaten by the game into marrying
+the solid, substantial business man beside her, who enjoyed
+delight in the spectacle of cats and rats walking the tight-rope
+in amity, and who was blissfully unaware that she was the Robin
+Redbreast in a cage that put all heaven in a rage.
+
+"The rats are bad enough," said Miss Merle Merryweather.  "But
+look how he uses up the cats.  He's had three die on him in the
+last two weeks to my certain knowledge.  They're only alley-cats,
+but they've got feelings.  It's that boxing match that does for
+them."
+
+The boxing match, sure always of a great hand from the audience,
+invariably concluded Duckworth's turn.  Two cats, with small
+boxing-gloves, were put on a table for a friendly bout.
+Naturally, the cats that performed with the rats were too cowed
+for this.  It was the fresh cats he used, the ones with spunk and
+spirit . . . until they lost all spunk and spirit or sickened and
+died.  To the audience it was a side-splitting, playful encounter
+between four-legged creatures who thus displayed a ridiculous
+resemblance to superior, two-legged man.  But it was not playful
+to the cats.  They were always excited into starting a real fight
+with each other off stage just before they were brought on.  In
+the blows they struck were anger and pain and bewilderment and
+fear.  And the gloves just would come off, so that they were
+ripping and tearing at each other, biting as well as making the
+fur fly, like furies, when the curtain went down.  In the eyes of
+the audience this apparent impromptu was always the ultimate
+scream, and the laughter and applause would compel the curtain up
+again to reveal Duckworth and an assistant stage-hand, as if
+caught by surprise, fanning the two belligerents with towels.
+
+But the cats themselves were so continually torn and scratched
+that the wounds never had a chance to heal and became infected
+until they were a mass of sores.  On occasion they died, or, when
+they had become too abjectly spiritless to attack even a rat, were
+set to work on the tight-rope with the doped starved rats that
+were too near dead to run away from them.  And, as Miss Merle
+Merryweather said:  the bonehead audiences, tickled to death,
+applauded Duckworth's Trained Cats and Rats as an educational act!
+
+A big chimpanzee that covered one of the circuits with Michael had
+an antipathy for clothes.  Like a horse that fights the putting on
+of the bridle, and, after it is on, takes no further notice of it,
+so the big chimpanzee fought the putting on the clothes.  Once on,
+it was ready to go out on the stage and through its turn.  But the
+rub was in putting on the clothes.  It took the owner and two
+stage-hands, pulling him up to a ring in the wall and throttling
+him, to dress him--and this, despite the fact that the owner had
+long since knocked out his incisors.
+
+All this cruelty Michael sensed without knowing.  And he accepted
+it as the way of life, as he accepted the daylight and the dark,
+the bite of the frost on bleak and windy station platforms, the
+mysterious land of Otherwhere that he knew in dreams and song, the
+equally mysterious Nothingness into which had vanished Meringe
+Plantation and ships and oceans and men and Steward.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+
+
+For two years Michael sang his way over the United States, to fame
+for himself and to fortune for Jacob Henderson.  There was never
+any time off.  So great was his success, that Henderson refused
+flattering offers to cross the Atlantic to show in Europe.  But
+off-time did come to Michael when Henderson fell ill of typhoid in
+Chicago.
+
+It was a three-months' vacation for Michael, who, well treated but
+still a prisoner, spent it in a caged kennel in Mulcachy's Animal
+Home.  Mulcachy, one of Harris Collins's brightest graduates, had
+emulated his master by setting up in business in Chicago, where he
+ran everything with the same rigid cleanliness, sanitation, and
+scientific cruelty.  Michael received nothing but the excellent
+food and the cleanliness; but, a solitary and brooding prisoner in
+his cage, he could not help but sense the atmosphere of pain and
+terror about him of the animals being broken for the delight of
+men.
+
+Mulcachy had originated aphorisms of his own which he continually
+enunciated, among which were:
+
+"Take it from me, when an animal won't give way to pain, it can't
+be broke.  Pain is the only school-teacher."
+
+"Just as you got to take the buck out of a broncho, you've got to
+take the bite out of a lion."
+
+"You can't break animals with a feather duster.  The thicker the
+skull the thicker the crowbar."
+
+"They'll always beat you in argument.  First thing is to club the
+argument out of them."
+
+"Heart-bonds between trainers and animals!  Son, that's dope for
+the newspaper interviewer.  The only heart-bond I know is a stout
+stick with some iron on the end of it."
+
+"Sure you can make 'm eat outa your hand.  But the thing to watch
+out for is that they don't eat your hand.  A blank cartridge in
+the nose just about that time is the best preventive I know."
+
+There were days when all the air was vexed with roars and squalls
+of ferocity and agony from the arena, until the last animal in the
+cages was excited and ill at ease.  In truth, since it was
+Mulcachy's boast that he could break the best animal living, no
+end of the hardest cases fell to his hand.  He had built a
+reputation for succeeding where others failed, and, endowed with
+fearlessness, callousness, and cunning, he never let his
+reputation wane.  There was nothing he dared not tackle, and, when
+he gave up an animal, the last word was said.  For it, remained
+nothing but to be a cage-animal, in solitary confinement, pacing
+ever up and down, embittered with all the world of man and roaring
+its bitterness to the most delicious enthrillment of the pay-
+spectators.
+
+During the three months spent by Michael in Mulcachy's Animal
+Home, occurred two especially hard cases.  Of course, the daily
+chant of ordinary pain of training went on all the time through
+the working hours, such as of "good" bears and lions and tigers
+that were made amenable under stress, and of elephants derricked
+and gaffed into making the head-stand or into the beating of a
+bass drum.  But the two cases that were exceptional, put a mood of
+depression and fear into all the listening animals, such as humans
+might experience in an ante-room of hell, listening to the
+flailing and the flaying of their fellows who had preceded them
+into the torture-chamber.
+
+The first was of the big Indian tiger.  Free-born in the jungle,
+and free all his days, master, according to his nature and
+prowess, of all other living creatures including his fellow-
+tigers, he had come to grief in the end; and, from the trap to the
+cramped cage, by elephant-back and railroad and steamship, ever in
+the cramped cage, he had journeyed across seas and continents to
+Mulcachy's Animal Home.  Prospective buyers had examined but not
+dared to purchase.  But Mulcachy had been undeterred.  His own
+fighting blood leapt hot at sight of the magnificent striped cat.
+It was a challenge of the brute in him to excel.  And, two weeks
+of hell, for the great tiger and for all the other animals, were
+required to teach him his first lesson.
+
+Ben Bolt he had been named, and he arrived indomitable and
+irreconcilable, though almost paralysed from eight weeks of cramp
+in his narrow cage which had restricted all movement.  Mulcachy
+should have undertaken the job immediately, but two weeks were
+lost by the fact that he had got married and honeymooned for that
+length of time.  And in that time, in a large cage of concrete and
+iron, Ben Bolt had exercised and recovered the use of his muscles,
+and added to his hatred of the two-legged things, puny against him
+in themselves, who by trick and wile had so helplessly imprisoned
+him.
+
+So, on this morning when hell yawned for him, he was ready and
+eager to meet all comers.  They came, equipped with formulas,
+nooses, and forked iron bars.  Five of them tossed nooses in
+through the bars upon the floor of his cage.  He snarled and
+struck at the curling ropes, and for ten minutes was a grand and
+impossible wild creature, lacking in nothing save the wit and the
+patience possessed by the miserable two-legged things.  And then,
+impatient and careless of the inanimate ropes, he paused, snarling
+at the men, with one hind foot resting inside a noose.  The next
+moment, craftily lifted up about the girth of his leg by an iron
+fork, the noose tightened and the bite of it sank home into his
+flesh and pride.  He leaped, he roared, he was a maniac of
+ferocity.  Again and again, almost burning their palms, he tore
+the rope smoking through their hands.  But ever they took in the
+slack and paid it out again, until, ere he was aware, a similar
+noose tightened on his fore-leg.  What he had done was nothing to
+what he now did.  But he was stupid and impatient.  The man-
+creatures were wise and patient, and a third leg and a fourth leg
+were finally noosed, so that, with many men tailing on to the
+ropes, he was dragged ignominiously on his side to the bars, and,
+ignominiously, through the bars were hauled his four legs, his
+chiefest weapons of offence after his terribly fanged jaws.
+
+And then a puny man-creature, Mulcachy himself, dared openly and
+brazenly to enter the cage and approach him.  He sprang to be at
+him, or, rather, strove so to spring, but was withstrained by his
+four legs through the bars which he could not draw back and get
+under him.  And Mulcachy knelt beside him, dared kneel beside him,
+and helped the fifth noose over his head and round his neck.  Then
+his head was drawn to the bars as helplessly as his legs had been
+drawn through.  Next, Mulcachy laid hands on him, on his head, on
+his ears, on his very nose within an inch of his fangs; and he
+could do nothing but snarl and roar and pant for breath as the
+noose shut off his breathing.
+
+Quivering, not with fear but with rage, Ben Bolt perforce endured
+the buckling around his throat of a thick, broad collar of leather
+to which was attached a very stout and a very long trailing rope.
+After that, when Mulcachy had left the cage, one by one the five
+nooses were artfully manipulated off his legs and his neck.
+Again, after this prodigious indignity, he was free--within his
+cage.  He went up into the air.  With returning breath he roared
+his rage.  He struck at the trailing rope that offended his
+nerves, clawed at the trap of the collar that encased his neck,
+fell, rolled over, offended his body-nerves more and more by
+entangling contacts with the rope, and for half an hour exhausted
+himself in the futile battle with the inanimate thing.  Thus
+tigers are broken.
+
+At the last, wearied, even with sensations of sickness from the
+nervous strain put upon himself by his own anger, he lay down in
+the middle of the floor, lashing his tail, hating with his eyes,
+and accepting the clinging thing about his neck which he had
+learned he could not get rid of.
+
+To his amazement, if such a thing be possible in the mental
+processes of a tiger, the rear door to his cage was thrown open
+and left open.  He regarded the aperture with belligerent
+suspicion.  No one and no threatening danger appeared in the
+doorway.  But his suspicion grew.  Always, among these man-
+animals, occurred what he did not know and could not comprehend.
+His preference was to remain where he was, but from behind,
+through the bars of the cage, came shouts and yells, the lash of
+whips, and the painful thrusts of the long iron forks.  Dragging
+the rope behind him, with no thought of escape, but in the hope
+that he would get at his tormentors, he leaped into the rear
+passage that ran behind the circle of permanent cages.  The
+passage way was deserted and dark, but ahead he saw light.  With
+great leaps and roars, he rushed in that direction, arousing a
+pandemonium of roars and screams from the animals in the cages.
+
+He bounded through the light, and into the light, dazzled by the
+brightness of it, and crouched down, with long, lashing tail, to
+orient himself to the situation.  But it was only another and
+larger cage that he was in, a very large cage, a big, bright
+performing-arena that was all cage.  Save for himself, the arena
+was deserted, although, overhead, suspended from the roof-bars,
+were block-and-tackle and seven strong iron chairs that drew his
+instant suspicion and caused him to roar at them.
+
+For half an hour he roamed the arena, which was the greatest area
+of restricted freedom he had known in the ten weeks of his
+captivity.  Then, a hooked iron rod, thrust through the bars,
+caught and drew the bight of his trailing rope into the hands of
+the men outside.  Immediately ten of them had hold of it, and he
+would have charged up to the bars at them had not, at that moment,
+Mulcachy entered the arena through a door on the opposite side.
+No bars stood between Ben Bolt and this creature, and Ben Bolt
+charged him.  Even as he charged he was aware of suspicion in that
+the small, fragile man-creature before him did not flee or crouch
+down, but stood awaiting him.
+
+Ben Bolt never reached him.  First, with an access of caution, he
+craftily ceased from his charge, and, crouching, with lashing
+tail, studied the man who seemed so easily his.  Mulcachy was
+equipped with a long-lashed whip and a sharp-pronged fork of iron.
+
+In his belt, loaded with blank cartridges, was a revolver.
+
+Bellying closer to the ground, Ben Bolt advanced upon him,
+creeping slowly like a cat stalking a mouse.  When he came to his
+next pause, which was within certain leaping distance, he crouched
+lower, gathered himself for the leap, then turned his head to
+regard the men at his back outside the cage.  The trailing rope in
+their hands, to his neck, he had forgotten.
+
+"Now you might as well be good, old man," Mulcachy addressed him
+in soft, caressing tones, taking a step toward him and holding in
+advance the iron fork.
+
+This merely incensed the huge, magnificent creature.  He rumbled a
+low, tense growl, flattened his ears back, and soared into the
+air, his paws spread so that the claws stood out like talons, his
+tail behind him as stiff and straight as a rod.  Neither did the
+man crouch or flee, nor did the beast attain to him.  At the
+height of his leap the rope tightened taut on his neck, causing
+him to describe a somersault and fall heavily to the floor on his
+side.
+
+Before he could regain his feet, Mulcachy was upon him, shouting
+to his small audience:  "Here's where we pound the argument out of
+him!"  And pound he did, on the nose with the butt of the whip,
+and jab he did, with the iron fork to the ribs.  He rained a
+hurricane of blows and jabs on the animal's most sensitive parts.
+Ever Ben Bolt leaped to retaliate, but was thrown by the ten men
+tailed on to the rope, and, each time, even as he struck the floor
+on his side, Mulcachy was upon him, pounding, smashing, jabbing.
+His pain was exquisite, especially that of his tender nose.  And
+the creature who inflicted the pain was as fierce and terrible as
+he, even more so because he was more intelligent.  In but few
+minutes, dazed by the pain, appalled by his inability to rend and
+destroy the man who inflicted it, Ben Bolt lost his courage.  He
+fled ignominiously before the little, two-legged creature who was
+more terrible than himself who was a full-grown Royal Bengal
+tiger.  He leaped high in the air in sheer panic; he ran here and
+there, with lowered head, to avoid the rain of pain.  He even
+charged the sides of the arena, springing up and vainly trying to
+climb the slippery vertical bars.
+
+Ever, like an avenging devil, Mulcachy pursued and smashed and
+jabbed, gritting through his teeth:  "You will argue, will you?
+I'll teach you what argument is!  There!  Take that!  And that!
+And that!"
+
+"Now I've got him afraid of me, and the rest ought to be easy," he
+announced, resting off and panting hard from his exertions, while
+the great tiger crouched and quivered and shrank back from him
+against the base of the arena-bars.  "Take a five-minute spell,
+you fellows, and we'll got our breaths."
+
+Lowering one of the iron chairs, and attaching it firmly in its
+place on the floor, Mulcachy prepared for the teaching of the
+first trick.  Ben Bolt, jungle-born and jungle-reared, was to be
+compelled to sit in the chair in ludicrous and tragic imitation of
+man-creatures.  But Mulcachy was not quite ready.  The first
+lesson of fear of him must be reiterated and driven home.
+
+Stepping to a near safe distance, he lashed Ben Bolt on the nose.
+He repeated it.  He did it a score of times, and scores of times.
+Turn his head as he would, ever Ben Bolt received the bite of the
+whip on his fearfully bruised nose; for Mulcachy was as expert as
+a stage-driver in his manipulation of the whip, and unerringly the
+lash snapped and cracked and stung Ben Bolt's nose wherever Ben
+Bolt at the moment might have it.
+
+When it became maddeningly unendurable, he sprang, only to be
+jerked back by the ten strong men who held the rope to his neck.
+And wrath, and ferocity, and intent to destroy, passed out utterly
+from the tiger's inflamed brain, until he knew fear, again and
+again, always fear and only fear, utter and abject fear, of this
+human mite who searched him with such pain.
+
+Then the lesson of the first trick was taken up.  Mulcachy tapped
+the chair sharply with the butt of the whip to draw the animal's
+attention to it, then flicked the whip-lash sharply on his nose.
+At the same moment, an attendant, through the bars behind, drove
+an iron fork into his ribs to force him away from the bars and
+toward the chair.  He crouched forward, then shrank back against
+the side-bars.  Again the chair was rapped, his nose was lashed,
+his ribs were jabbed, and he was forced by pain toward the chair.
+This went on interminably--for a quarter of an hour, for half an
+hour, for an hour; for the men-animals had the patience of gods
+while he was only a jungle-brute.  Thus tigers are broken.  And
+the verb means just what it means.  A performing animal is BROKEN.
+Something BREAKS in an animal of the wild ere such an animal
+submits to do tricks before pay-audiences.
+
+Mulcachy ordered an assistant to enter the arena with him.  Since
+he could not compel the tiger directly to sit in the chair, he
+must employ other means.  The rope about Ben Bolt's neck was
+passed up through the bars and rove through the block-and-tackle.
+At signal from Mulcachy, the ten men hauled away.  Snarling,
+struggling, choking, in a fresh madness of terror at this new
+outrage, Ben Bolt was slowly hoisted by his neck up from the
+floor, until, quite clear of it, whirling, squirming, battling,
+suspended by his neck like a man being hanged, his wind was shut
+off and he began to suffocate.  He coiled and twisted, the
+splendid muscles of his body enabling him almost to tie knots in
+it.
+
+The block-and-tackle, running like a trolley on the overhead
+track, made it possible for the assistant to seize his tail and
+drag him through the air till he was above the chair.  His
+helpless body guided thus by the tail, his chest jabbed by the
+iron fork in Mulcachy's hands, the rope was suddenly lowered, and
+Ben Bolt, with swimming brain, found himself seated in the chair.
+On the instant he leaped for the floor, received a blow on the
+nose from the heavy whip-handle, and had a blank cartridge fired
+straight into his nostril.  His madness of pain and fear was
+multiplied.  He sprang away in flight, but Mulcachy's voice rang
+out, "Hoist him!" and he slowly rose in the air again, hanging by
+his neck, and began to strangle.
+
+Once more he was swung into position by his tail, jabbed in the
+chest, and lowered suddenly on the run--but so suddenly, with a
+frantic twist of his body on his part, that he fell violently
+across the chair on his belly.  What little wind was left him from
+the strangling, seemed to have been ruined out of him by the
+violence of the fall.  The glare in his eyes was maniacal and
+swimming.  He panted frightfully, and his head rolled back and
+forth.  Slaver dripped from his mouth, blood ran from his nose.
+
+"Hoist away!" Mulcachy shouted.
+
+And again, struggling frantically as the tightening collar shut
+off his wind, Ben Bolt was slowly lifted into the air.  So wildly
+did he struggle that, ere his hind feet were off the floor, he
+pranced back and forth, so that when he was heaved clear his body
+swung like a huge pendulum.  Over the chair, he was dropped, and
+for a fraction of a second the posture was his of a man sitting in
+a chair.  Then he uttered a terrible cry and sprang.
+
+It was neither snarl, nor growl, nor roar, that cry, but a sheer
+scream, as if something had broken inside of him.  He missed
+Mulcachy by inches, as another blank cartridge exploded up his
+other nostril and as the men with the rope snapped him back so
+abruptly as almost to break his neck.
+
+This time, lowered quickly, he sank into the chair like a half-
+empty sack of meal, and continued so to sink, until, crumpling at
+the middle, his great tawny head falling forward, he lay on the
+floor unconscious.  His tongue, black and swollen, lolled out of
+his mouth.  As buckets of water were poured on him he groaned and
+moaned.  And here ended the first lesson.
+
+"It's all right," Mulcachy said, day after day, as the teaching
+went on.  "Patience and hard work will pull off the trick.  I've
+got his goat.  He's afraid of me.  All that's required is time,
+and time adds to value with an animal like him."
+
+Not on that first day, nor on the second, nor on the third, did
+the requisite something really break inside Ben Bolt.  But at the
+end of a fortnight it did break.  For the day came when Mulcachy
+rapped the chair with his whip-butt, when the attendant through
+the bars jabbed the iron fork into Ben Bolt's ribs, and when Ben
+Bolt, anything but royal, slinking like a beaten alley-cat, in
+pitiable terror, crawled over to the chair and sat down in it like
+a man.  He now was an "educated" tiger.  The sight of him, so
+sitting, tragically travestying man, has been considered, and is
+considered, "educative" by multitudinous audiences.
+
+The second case, that of St. Elias, was a harder one, and it was
+marked down against Mulcachy as one of his rare failures, though
+all admitted that it was an unavoidable failure.  St. Elias was a
+huge monster of an Alaskan bear, who was good-natured and even
+facetious and humorous after the way of bears.  But he had a will
+of his own that was correspondingly as stubborn as his bulk.  He
+could be persuaded to do things, but he would not tolerate being
+compelled to do things.  And in the trained-animal world, where
+turns must go off like clockwork, is little or no space for
+persuasion.  An animal must do its turn, and do it promptly.
+Audiences will not brook the delay of waiting while a trainer
+tries to persuade a crusty or roguish beast to do what the
+audience has paid to see it do.
+
+So St. Elias received his first lesson in compulsion.  It was also
+his last lesson, and it never progressed so far as the training-
+arena, for it took place in his own cage.
+
+Noosed in the customary way, his four legs dragged through the
+bars, and his head, by means of a "choke" collar, drawn against
+the bars, he was first of all manicured.  Each one of his great
+claws was cut off flush with his flesh.  The men outside did this.
+Then Mulcachy, on the inside, punched his nose.  Not lightly as it
+sounds was this operation.  The punch was a perforation.
+Thrusting the instrument into the huge bear's nostril, Mulcachy
+cut a clean round chunk of living meat out of one side of it.
+Mulcachy knew the bear business.  At all times, to make an
+untrained bear obey, one must be fast to some sensitive portion of
+the bear.  The ears, the nose, and the eyes are the accessible
+sensitive parts, and, the eyes being out of the question, remain
+the nose and the ears as the parts to which to make fast.
+
+Through the perforation Mulcachy immediately clamped a metal ring.
+To the ring he fastened a long "lunge"-rope, which was well named.
+Any unruly lunge, at any time during all the subsequent life of
+St. Elias, could thus be checked by the man who held the lunge-
+rope.  His destiny was patent and ordained.  For ever, as long as
+he lived and breathed, would he be a prisoner and slave to the
+rope in the ring in his nostril.
+
+The nooses were slipped, and St. Elias was at liberty, within the
+confines of his cage, to get acquainted with the ring in his nose.
+With his powerful fore-paws, standing erect and roaring, he
+proceeded to get acquainted with the ring.  It certainly was not a
+thing persuasible.  It was living fire.  And he tore at it with
+his paws as he would have torn at the stings of bees when raiding
+a honey-tree.  He tore the thing out, ripping the ring clear
+through the flesh and transforming the round perforation into a
+ragged chasm of pain.
+
+Mulcachy cursed.  "Here's where hell coughs," he said.  The nooses
+were introduced again.  Again St. Elias, helpless on his side
+against and partly through the bars, had his nose punched.  This
+time it was the other nostril.  And hell coughed.  As before, the
+moment he was released, he tore the ring out through his flesh.
+
+Mulcachy was disgusted.  "Listen to reason, won't you?" he
+objurgated, as, this time, the reason he referred to was the
+introduction of the ring clear through both nostrils, higher up,
+and through the central dividing wall of cartilage.  But St. Elias
+was unreasonable.  Unlike Ben Bolt, there was nothing inside of
+him weak enough, or nervous enough, or high-strung enough, to
+break.  The moment he was free he ripped the ring away with half
+of his nose along with it.  Mulcachy punched St. Elias's right
+ear.  St. Elias tore his right ear to shreds.  Mulcachy punched
+his left ear.  He tore his left ear to shreds.  And Mulcachy gave
+in.  He had to.  As he said plaintively:
+
+"We're beaten.  There ain't nothing left to make fast to."
+
+Later, when St. Elias was condemned to be a "cage-animal" all his
+days, Mulcachy was wont to grumble:
+
+"He was the most unreasonable animal!  Couldn't do a thing with
+him.  Couldn't ever get anything to make fast to."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+
+
+It was in the Orpheum Theatre, of Oakland, California; and Harley
+Kennan was in the act of reaching under his seat for his hat, when
+his wife said:
+
+"Why, this isn't the interval.  There's one more turn yet."
+
+"A dog turn," he answered, and thereby explained; for it was his
+practice to leave a theatre during the period of the performance
+of an animal-act.
+
+Villa Kennan glanced hastily at the programme.
+
+"Of course," she said, then added:  "But it's a singing dog.  A
+dog Caruso.  And it points out that there is no one on the stage
+with the dog.  Let us stay for once, and see how he compares with
+Jerry."
+
+"Some poor brute tormented into howling," Harley grumbled.
+
+"But it has the stage to itself," Villa urged.  "Besides, if it is
+painful, then we can go out.  I'll go out with you.  But I just
+would like to see how much better Jerry sings than does he.  And
+it says an Irish terrier, too."
+
+So Harley Kennan remained.  The two burnt-cork comedians finished
+their turn and their three encores, and the curtain behind them
+went up on a full set of an empty stage.  A rough-coated Irish
+terrier entered at a sedate walk, sedately walked forward to the
+centre, nearly to the footlights, and faced the leader of the
+orchestra.  As the programme had stated, he had the stage to
+himself
+
+The orchestra played the opening strains of "Sweet Bye and Bye."
+The dog yawned and sat down.  But the orchestra was thoroughly
+instructed to play the opening strains over and over, until the
+dog responded, and then to follow on with him.  By the third time,
+the dog opened his mouth and began.  It was not a mere howling.
+For that matter, it was too mellow to be classified as a howl at
+all.  Nor was it merely rhythmic.  The notes the dog sang were of
+the air, and they were correct.
+
+But Villa Kennan scarcely heard.
+
+"He has Jerry beaten a mile," Harley muttered to her.
+
+"Listen," she replied, in tense whispers.  "Did you ever see that
+dog before?"
+
+Harley shook his head.
+
+"You have seen him before," she insisted.  "Look at that crinkled
+ear.  Think!  Think back!  Remember!"
+
+Still her husband shook his head.
+
+"Remember the Solomons," she pressed.  "Remember the Ariel.
+Remember when we came back from Malaita, where we picked Jerry up,
+to Tulagi, that he had a brother there, a nigger-chaser on a
+schooner."
+
+"And his name was Michael--go on."
+
+"And he had that self-same crinkled ear," she hurried.  "And he
+was rough-coated.  And he was full brother to Jerry.  And their
+father and mother were Terrence and Biddy of Meringe.  And Jerry
+is our Sing Song Silly.  And this dog sings.  And he has a
+crinkled ear.  And his name is Michael."
+
+"Impossible," said Harley.
+
+"It is when the impossible comes true that life proves worth
+while," she retorted.  "And this is one of those worth-whiles of
+impossibles.  I know it."
+
+Still the man of him said impossible, and still the woman of her
+insisted that this was an impossible come true.  By this time the
+dog on the stage was singing "God Save the King."
+
+"That shows I am right," Villa contended.  "No American, in
+America, would teach a dog 'God Save the King.'  An Englishman
+originally owned that dog and taught it.  The Solomons are
+British."
+
+"That's a far cry," he smiled.  "But what gets me is that ear.  I
+remember it now.  I remember the day when we were on the beach at
+Tulagi with Jerry, and when his brother came ashore from the
+Eugenie in a whaleboat.  And his brother had that self-same,
+loppy, crinkled ear."
+
+"And more," Villa argued.  "How many singing dogs have we ever
+known!  Only one--Jerry.  Evidently such a type occurs rarely.
+The same family would more likely produce similar types than
+different families.  The family of Terrence and Biddy produced
+Jerry.  And this is Michael."
+
+"He WAS rough-coated, along with a crinkly ear," Harley meditated
+back.  "I see him distinctly as he stood up in the bow of the
+whaleboat and as he ran along the beach side by side with Jerry."
+
+"If Jerry should to-morrow run side by side with him you would be
+convinced?" she queried.
+
+"It was their trick, and the trick of Terrence and Biddy before
+them," he agreed.  "But it's a far cry from the Solomons to the
+United States."
+
+"Jerry is such a far cry," she replied.  "And if Jerry won from
+the Solomons to California, then is there anything more remarkable
+in Michael so winning?--Oh, listen!"
+
+For the dog on the stage, now responding to its one encore, was
+singing "Home, Sweet Home."  This finished, Jacob Henderson, to
+tumultuous applause., came on the stage from the wings and joined
+the dog in bowing.  Villa and Harley sat in silence for a moment.
+Then Villa said, apropos of nothing:
+
+"I have been sitting here and feeling very grateful for one
+particular thing."
+
+He waited.
+
+"It is that we are so abominably wealthy," she concluded.
+
+"Which means that you want the dog, must have him, and are going
+to got him, just because I can afford to do it for you," he
+teased.
+
+"Because you can't afford not to," she answered.  "You must know
+he is Jerry's brother.  At least, you must have a sneaking
+suspicion . . . ?"
+
+"I have," he nodded.  "The thing that can't sometimes does, and
+there is a chance that this may be one of those times.  Of course,
+it isn't Michael; but, on the other hand, what's to prevent it
+from being Michael?  Let us go behind and find out."
+
+
+"More agents of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
+Animals," was Jacob Henderson's thought, as the man and woman,
+accompanied by the manager of the theatre, were shown into his
+tiny dressing-room.  Michael, on a chair and half asleep, took no
+notice of them.  While Harley talked with Henderson, Villa
+investigated Michael; and Michael scarcely opened his eyes ere he
+closed them again.  Too sour on the human world, and too glum in
+his own soured nature, he was anything save his old courtly self
+to chance humans who broke in upon him to pat his head, and say
+silly things, and go their way never to be seen by him again.
+
+Villa Kennan, with a pang of disappointment at such rebuff,
+forwent her overtures for the moment, and listened to what tale
+Jacob Henderson could tell of his dog.  Harry Del Mar, a trained-
+animal man, had picked the dog up somewhere on the Pacific Coast,
+most probably in San Francisco, she learned; but, having taken the
+dog east with him, Harry Del Mar had died by accident in New York
+before telling anybody anything about the animal.  That was all,
+except that Henderson had paid two thousand dollars to one Harris
+Collins, and had found the investment the finest he had ever made.
+
+Villa turned back to the dog.
+
+"Michael," she called, caressingly, almost in a whisper.
+
+And Michael's eyes partly opened, the base-muscles of his ears
+stiffened, and his body quivered.
+
+"Michael," she repeated.
+
+This time raising his head, the eyes open and the ears stiffly
+erect, Michael looked at her.  Not since on the beach at Tulagi
+had he heard that name uttered.  Across the years and the seas the
+word came to him out of the past.  Its effect was electrical, for
+on the instant all the connotations of "Michael" flooded his
+consciousness.  He saw again Captain Kellar, of the Eugenie, who
+had last called him it, and MISTER Haggin, and Derby, and Bob of
+Meringe Plantation, and Biddy and Terrence, and, not least among
+these shades of the vanished past, his brother Jerry.
+
+But was it the vanished past?  The name which had ceased for
+years, had come back.  It had entered the room along with this man
+and woman.  All this he did not reason; but indubitably, as if he
+had so reasoned, he acted upon it.
+
+He jumped from the chair and ran to the woman.  He smelled her
+hand, and smelled her as she patted him.  Then, as he recognized
+her, he went wild.  He sprang away, dashing around and around the
+room, sniffing under the washstand and smelling out the corners.
+As in a frenzy he was back to the woman, whimpering eagerly as she
+strove to pet him.  The next moment, stiff in a frenzy, he was
+away again, scurrying about the room and still whimpering.
+
+Jacob Henderson looked on with mild disapproval.
+
+"He never cuts up that way," he said.  "He is a very quiet dog.
+Maybe it is a fit he is going to have, though he never has fits."
+
+No one understood, not even Villa Kennan.  But Michael understood.
+He was looking for that vanished world which had rushed back upon
+him at sound of his old-time name.  If this name could come to him
+out of the Nothingness, as this woman had whom once he had seen
+treading the beach at Tulagi, then could all other things of
+Tulagi and the Nothingness come to him.  As she was there, before
+him in the living flesh, uttering his name, so might Captain
+Kellar, and MISTER Haggin, and Jerry be there, somewhere in the
+very room or just outside the door.
+
+He ran to the door, whimpering as he scratched at it.
+
+"Maybe he thinks there is something outside," said Jacob
+Henderson, opening the door for him.
+
+And Michael did so think.  As a matter of course, through that
+open door, he was prepared to have the South-Pacific Ocean flow
+in, bearing on its bosom schooners and ships, islands and reefs,
+and all men and animals and things he once had known and still
+remembered.
+
+But no past flowed in through the door.  Outside was the usual
+present.  He came back dejectedly to the woman, who still called
+him Michael as she petted him.  She, at any rate, was real.  Next
+he carefully smelled and identified the man with the beach of
+Tulagi and the deck of the Ariel, and again his excitement began
+to mount.
+
+"Oh, Harley, I know it is he!" Villa cried.  "Can't you test him?
+Can't you prove him?"
+
+"But how?" Harley pondered.  "He seems to recognize his name.  It
+excites him.  And though he never knew us very well, he seems to
+remember us and to be excited by us, too.  If only he could talk .
+. . "
+
+"Oh, talk!  Talk!" Villa pleaded with Michael, catching both sides
+of his head and jaws in her hands and swaying him back and forth.
+
+"Be careful, madam," Jacob Henderson warned.  "He is a very sour
+dog; and he don't let people take such liberties."
+
+"He does me," she laughed, half-hysterically.  "Because he knows
+me. . . . Harley!"  She broke off as the great idea dawned on her.
+"I have a test.  Listen!  Remember, Jerry was a nigger-chaser
+before we got him.  And Michael was a nigger-chaser.  You talk in
+beche-de-mer.  Appear angry with some black boy, and see how it
+will affect him."
+
+"I'll have to remember hard to resurrect any beche-de-mer," Harley
+said, nodding approval of the suggestion.
+
+"At the same time I'll distract him," she rushed on.
+
+Sitting down and bending forward to Michael so that his head was
+buried in her arms and breast, she began swaying him and crooning
+to him as was her wont with Jerry.  Nor did he resent the liberty
+she took, and, like Jerry, he yielded to her crooning and softly
+began to croon with her.  She signalled Harley with her eyes.
+
+"My word!" he began in tones of wrath.  "What name you fella boy
+stop 'm along this fella place?  You make 'm me cross along you
+any amount!"
+
+And at the words Michael bristled, dragged himself clear of the
+woman's detaining hands, and, with a snarl, whirled about to get a
+look at the black boy who must have just then entered the room and
+aroused the white god's ire.  But there was no black boy.  He
+looked on, still bristling, to the door.  Harley transferred his
+own gaze to the door, and Michael knew, beyond all doubt, that
+outside the door was standing a Solomons nigger.
+
+"Hey!  Michael!" Harley shouted.  "Chase 'm that black fella boy
+overside!"
+
+With a roaring snarl, Michael flung himself at the door.  Such was
+the fury and weight of his onslaught that the latch flew loose and
+the door swung open.  The emptiness of the space which he had
+expected to see occupied, was appalling, and he shrank down, sick
+and dizzy with the baffling apparitional past that thus vexed his
+consciousness.
+
+"And now," said Harley to Jacob Henderson, "we will talk business
+. . . "
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+
+
+When the train arrived at Glen Ellen, in the Valley of the Moon,
+it was Harley Kennan himself, at the side-door of the baggage-car,
+who caught hold of Michael and swung him to the ground.  For the
+first time Michael had performed a railroad journey uncrated.
+Merely with collar and chain had he travelled up from Oakland.  In
+the waiting automobile he found Villa Kennan, and, chain removed,
+sat beside her and between her and Harley
+
+As the machine purred along the two miles of road that wound up
+the side of Sonoma Mountain, Michael scarcely looked at the
+forest-trees and vistas of wandering glades.  He had been in the
+United States three years, during which time he had been kept a
+close prisoner.  Cage and crate and chain had been his portion,
+and narrow rooms, baggage cars, and station platforms.  The
+nearest he had come to the country was when chained to benches in
+the various parks while Jacob Henderson studied Swedenborg.  So
+that trees and hills and fields had ceased to mean anything.  They
+were something inaccessible, as inaccessible as the blue of the
+sky or the drifting cloud-fleeces.  Thus did he regard the trees
+and hills and fields, if the negative act of not regarding a thing
+at all can be considered a state of mind.
+
+"Don't seem to be enthusiastic over the ranch, eh, Michael?"
+Harley remarked.
+
+He looked up at sound of his old name, and made acknowledgment by
+flattening his ears a quivering trifle and by touching his nose
+against Harley's shoulder.
+
+"Nor does he seem demonstrative," was Villa's judgment.  "At
+least, nothing like Jerry,"
+
+"Wait till they meet," Harley smiled in anticipation.  "Jerry will
+furnish enough excitement for both of them."
+
+"If they remember each other after all this time," said Villa.  "I
+wonder if they will."
+
+"They did at Tulagi," he reminded her.  "And they were full grown
+and hadn't seen each other since they were puppies.  Remember how
+they barked and scampered all about the beach.  Michael was the
+hurly-burly one.  At least he made twice as much noise."
+
+"But he seems dreadfully grown-up and subdued now."
+
+"Three years ought to have subdued him," Harley insisted.
+
+But Villa shook her head.
+
+As the machine drew up at the house and Kennan first stepped out,
+a dog's whimperingly joyous bark of welcome struck Michael as not
+altogether unfamiliar.  The joyous bark turned to a suspicious and
+jealous snarl as Jerry scented the other dog's presence from
+Harley's caressing hand.  The next moment he had traced the
+original source of the scent into the limousine and sprung in
+after it.  With snarl and forward leap Michael met the snarling
+rush less than half-way, and was rolled over on the bottom of the
+car.
+
+The Irish terrier, under all circumstances amenable to the control
+of the master as are few breeds of dogs, was instantly manifest in
+Jerry and Michael an Harley Kennan's voice rang out.  They
+separated, and, despite the rumbling of low growling in their
+throats, refrained from attacking each other as they plunged out
+to the ground.  The little set-to had occurred in so few seconds,
+or fractions of seconds, that they had not begun to betray
+recognition of each other until they were out of the machine.
+They were still comically stiff-legged and bristly as they aloofly
+sniffed noses.
+
+"They know each other!" Villa cried.  "Let's wait and see what
+they will do."
+
+As for Michael, he accepted, without surprise, the indubitable
+fact that Jerry had come back out of the Nothingness.  Things of
+this sort had begun to happen rapidly, but it was not the things
+themselves, but the connotations of them, that almost stunned him.
+If the man and woman, whom he had last seen at Tulagi, and,
+likewise, Jerry, had come back from the Nothingness, then could
+come, and might come at any moment, the beloved Steward.
+
+Instead of responding to Jerry, Michael sniffed and glanced about
+in quest of Steward.  Jerry's first expression of greeting and
+friendliness took the form of a desire to run.  He barked
+invitation to his brother, scampered away half a dozen jumps,
+scampered back, and dabbed playfully at Michael with one fore-paw
+in added emphasis of invitation ere he scampered away again.
+
+For so many years had Michael not run with another dog, that at
+first Jerry's invitation had little meaning to him.  Nevertheless,
+such running was an habitual expression of happiness and
+friendliness in dogdom, and especially strong had been his
+inheritance of it from Terrence and Biddy, the noted love-runners
+of the Solomons.
+
+The next time Jerry dabbed at him with a paw, barked, and scurried
+away in an enticing semicircle, Michael started involuntarily
+though slowly after him.  But Michael did not bark; and, after
+half a dozen leaps, he came to a full stop and looked to Villa and
+Harley for permission.
+
+"All right, Michael," Harley called heartily, deliberately turning
+his shoulder in the non-interest of consent as he extended his
+hand to help Villa from the machine.
+
+Michael sprang away again, and was numbly aware of an ancient joy
+as he shouldered Jerry who shouldered against him as they ran side
+by side.  But most of the joy was Jerry's, as was the wildest of
+the skurrying and the racing and the shouldering, of the body-
+wriggling, and ear-pricking, and yelping cries.  Also, Jerry
+barked; and Michael did not bark.
+
+"He used to bark," said Villa.
+
+"Much more than Jerry," Harley supplemented.
+
+"Then they have taken the bark out of him," she concluded.  "He
+must have gone through terrible experiences to have lost his
+bark."
+
+
+The green California spring merged into tawny summer, as Jerry,
+ever running afield, made Michael acquainted with the farthest and
+highest reaches of the Kennan ranch in the Valley of the Moon.
+The pageant of the wild flowers vanished until all that lingered
+on the burnt hillsides were orange poppies faded to palest gold,
+and Mariposa lilies, wind-blown on slender stems amidst the
+desiccated grasses, that smouldered like ornate spotted moths
+fluttering in rest for a space between flight and flight.
+
+And Michael, a follower always where the exuberant Jerry led,
+sought throughout the passing year for what he could not find.
+
+"Looking for something, looking for something," Harley would say
+to Villa.  "It is not alive.  It is not here.  Now just what is it
+he is always looking for?"
+
+Steward it was, and Michael never found him.  The Nothingness held
+him and would not yield him up, although, could Michael have
+journeyed a ten-days' steamer-journey into the South Pacific to
+the Marquesas, Steward he would have found, and, along with him,
+Kwaque and the Ancient Mariner, all three living like lotus-eaters
+on the beach-paradise of Taiohae.  Also, in and about their grass-
+thatched bungalow under the lofty avocado trees, Michael would
+have found other pet--cats, and kittens, and pigs, donkeys and
+ponies, a pair of love-birds, and a mischievous monkey or two; but
+never a dog and never a cockatoo.  For Dag Daughtry, with violence
+of language, had laid a taboo upon dogs.  After Killeny Boy, he
+averred, there should be no other dog.  And Kwaque, without
+averring anything at all, resolutely refrained from possessing
+himself of the white cockatoos brought ashore by the sailors off
+the trading schooners.
+
+But Michael was long in giving over his search for Steward, and,
+running the mountain trails or scrambling and sliding down into
+the deep canyons, was ever expectant and ready for Steward to step
+forth before him, or to pick up the unmistakable scent that would
+lead him to him.
+
+"Looking for something, looking for something," Harley Kennan
+would chant curiously, as he rode beside Villa and observed
+Michael's unending search.  "Now Jerry's after rabbits, and fox-
+trails; but you'll notice they don't interest Michael much.
+They're not what he's after.  He behaves like one who has lost a
+great treasure and doesn't know where he lost it nor where to look
+for it."
+
+Much Michael learned from Jerry of the varied life of the forest
+and fields.  To run with Jerry seemed the one pleasure he took,
+for he never played.  Play had passed out of him.  He was not
+precisely morose or gloomy from his years on the trained-animal
+stage and in Harris Collins's college of pain, but he was sobered,
+subdued.  The spring and the spontaneity had gone out of him.
+Just as the leopard had claw-marked his shoulder so that damp and
+frosty weather made the pain of the old wound come back, so was
+his mind marked by what he had gone through.  He liked Jerry, was
+glad to be with him and to run with him; but it was Jerry who was
+ever in the lead, who ever raised the hue and cry of hunting
+pursuit, who barked indignation and eager yearning at a tree'd
+squirrel in refuge forty feet above the ground.  Michael looked on
+and listened, but took no part in such antics of enthusiasm.
+
+In the same way he looked on when Jerry fought fearful comic
+battles with Norman Chief, the great Percheron stallion.  It was
+only play, for Jerry and Norman Chief were tried friends; and,
+though the huge horse, ears laid back, mouth open to bite, pursued
+Jerry in mad gyrations all about the paddock, it was with no
+thought of inflicting hurt, but merely to act up to his part in
+the sham battle.  Yet no invitation of Jerry's could induce
+Michael to join in the fun.  He contented himself with sitting
+down outside the rails and looking on.
+
+"Why play?" might Michael have asked, who had had all play taken
+out of him.
+
+But when it came to serious work, he was there even ahead of
+Jerry.  On account of foot-and-mouth disease and of hog-cholera,
+strange dogs were taboo on the Kennan ranch.  It did not take
+Michael long to learn this, and stray dogs got short shrift from
+him.  With never a warning bark nor growl, in deadly silence, he
+rushed them, slashed and bit them, rolled them over and over in
+the dust, and drove them from the place.  It was like nigger-
+chasing, a service to perform for the gods whom he loved and who
+willed such chasing.
+
+No wild passion of love, such as he had had for Steward, did he
+bear Villa and Harley, but he did develop for them a great, sober
+love.  He did not go out of his way to express it with overtures
+of wrigglings and squirmings and whimpering yelpings.  Jerry could
+be depended upon for that.  But he was always seriously glad to be
+with Villa and Harley and to receive recognition from them next
+after Jerry.  Some of his deepest moments of content, before the
+fireplace, were to sit beside Villa or Harley and lean his head
+against a knee and have a hand, on occasion, drop down on his head
+or gently twist his crinkled ear.
+
+Jerry was even guilty of playing with children who happened at
+times to be under the Kennan aegis.  Michael endured children for
+as long as they left him alone.  If they waxed familiar, he would
+warn them with a bristling of his neck-hair and a throaty rumbling
+and get up and stalk away.
+
+"I can't understand it," Villa would say.  "He was the fullest of
+play, and spirits, and all foolishness.  He was much sillier and
+much more excitable than Jerry and certainly noisier.  He must
+have some terrible story to tell, if only he could, of all that
+happened between Tulagi and the time we found him on the Orpheum
+stage."
+
+"And that may be the least little hint of it," Harley would reply,
+pointing to Michael's shoulder where the leopard had scarred it on
+the day Jack, the Airedale, and Sara, the little green monkey, had
+died.
+
+"He used to bark, I know he used to bark," Villa would continue.
+"Why doesn't he bark now?"
+
+And Harley would point to the scarred shoulder and say, "That may
+account for it, and most possibly a hundred other things like it
+of which we cannot see the marks."
+
+But the time was to come when they were to hear him bark again--
+not once, but twice.  And both times were to be but an earnest of
+another and graver time when, without barking at all, he would
+express in action the measure of his love and worship of them who
+had taken him from the crate and the footlights and given him the
+freedom of the Valley of the Moon.
+
+And in the meantime, running endlessly with Jerry over the ranch,
+he learned all the ways of it and all the life of it from the
+chickenyards and the duck-ponds to the highest pitch of Sonoma
+Mountain.  He learned where the wild deer, in their season, were
+to be found; when they raided the prune-orchard, the vineyards,
+and the apple-trees; when they sought the deepest canyons and most
+secret coverts; and when they stamped out in open glades and on
+bare hillsides and crashed and clattered their antlers together in
+combat.  Under Jerry's leadership, always running second and after
+on the narrow trails as a subdued dog should, he learned the ways
+and habits of the foxes, the coons, the weasels, and the ring-tail
+cats that seemed compounded of cat and coon and weasel.  He came
+to know the ground-nesting birds and the difference between the
+customs of the valley quail, the mountain quail, and the
+pheasants.  The traits and lairs of the domestic cats gone wild he
+also learned, as did he learn the wild loves of mountain farm-dogs
+with the free-roving coyotes.
+
+He knew of the presence of the mountain lion, adrift down from
+Mendocino County, ere the first shorthorn calf was slain, and came
+home from the encounter, torn and bleeding, to attest what he had
+discovered and to be the cause of Harley Kennan riding trail next
+day with a rifle across his pommel.  Likewise Michael came to know
+what Harley Kennan never did know and always denied as existing on
+his ranch--the one rocky outcrop, in the dense heart of the
+mountain forest, where a score of rattlesnakes denned through the
+winters and warmed themselves in the sun.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+
+
+Winter came on in its delectable way in the Valley of the Moon.
+The last Mariposa lily vanished from the burnt grasses as the
+California Indian summer dreamed itself out in purple mists on the
+windless air.  Soft rain-showers first broke the spell.  Snow fell
+on the summit of Sonoma Mountain.  At the ranch house the morning
+air was crisp and brittle, yet midday made the shade welcome, and
+in the open, under the winter sun, roses bloomed and oranges,
+grape-fruit, and lemons turned to golden yellow ripeness.  Yet, a
+thousand feet beneath, on the floor of the valley, the mornings
+were white with frost.
+
+And Michael barked twice.  The first time was when Harley Kennan,
+astride a hot-blooded sorrel colt, tried to make it leap a narrow
+stream.  Villa reined in her steed at the crest beyond, and,
+looking back into the little valley, waited for the colt to
+receive its lesson.  Michael waited, too, but closer at hand.  At
+first he lay down, panting from his run, by the stream-edge.  But
+he did not know horses very well, and soon his anxiety for the
+welfare of Harley Kennan brought him to his feet.
+
+Harley was gentle and persuasive and all patience as he strove to
+make the colt take the leap.  The urge of voice and rein was of
+the mildest; but the animal balked the take-off each time, and the
+hot thoroughbredness in its veins made it sweat and lather.  The
+velvet of young grass was torn up by its hoofs, and its terror of
+the stream was such, that, when fetched to the edge at a canter,
+it stiffened and crouched to an abrupt stop, then reared on its
+hind-legs.  Which was too much for Michael.
+
+He sprang at the horse's head as it came down with fore-feet to
+earth, and as he sprang he barked.  In his bark was censure and
+menace, and, as the horse reared again, he leaped into the air
+after it, his teeth clipping together as he just barely missed its
+nose.
+
+Villa rode back down the slope to the opposite bank of the stream.
+
+"Mercy!" she cried.  "Listen to him!  He's actually barking."
+
+"He thinks the colt is trying to do some damage to me," Harley
+said.  "That's his provocation.  He hasn't forgotten how to bark.
+He's reading the colt a lecture."
+
+"If he gets him by the nose it will be more than a lecture," Villa
+warned.  "Be careful, Harley, or he will."
+
+"Now, Michael, lie down and be good," Harley commanded.  "It's all
+right, I tell you.  It's an right.  Lie down."
+
+Michael sank down obediently, but protestingly; and he had eyes
+only for the horse's antics, while all his muscles were gathered
+tensely to spring in case the horse threatened injury to Harley
+again.
+
+"I can't give in to him now, or he never will jump anything,"
+Harley said to his wife, as he whirled about to gallop back to a
+distance.  "Either I lift him over or I take a cropper."
+
+He came back at full speed, and the colt, despite himself, unable
+to stop, lifted into the leap that would avoid the stream he
+feared, so that he cleared it with a good two yards to spare on
+the other side.
+
+The next time Michael barked was when Harley, on the same hot-
+blood mount, strove to close a poorly hung gate on the steep pitch
+of a mountain wood-road.  Michael endured the danger to his man-
+god as long as he could, then flew at the colt's head in a frenzy
+of barking.
+
+"Anyway, his barking helped," Harley conceded, as he managed to
+close the gate.  "Michael must certainly have told the colt that
+he'd give him what-for if he didn't behave."
+
+"At any rate, he's not tongue-tied," Villa laughed, "even if he
+isn't very loquacious."
+
+And Michael's loquacity never went farther.  Only on these two
+occasions, when his master-god seemed to be in peril, was he known
+to bark.  He never barked at the moon, nor at hillside echoes, nor
+at any prowling thing.  A particular echo, to be heard directly
+from the ranch-house, was an unfailing source of exercise for
+Jerry's lungs.  At such times that Jerry barked, Michael, with a
+bored expression, would lie down and wait until the duet was over.
+Nor did he bark when he attacked strange dogs that strayed upon
+the ranch.
+
+"He fights like a veteran," Harley remarked, after witnessing one
+such encounter.  "He's cold-blooded.  There's no excitement in
+him."
+
+"He's old before his time," Villa said.  "There is no heart of
+play left in him, and no desire for speech.  Just the same I know
+he loves me, and you--"
+
+"Without having to be voluble about it," her husband completed for
+her.
+
+"You can see it shining in those quiet eyes of his," she
+supplemented.
+
+"Reminds me of one of the survivors of Lieutenant Greeley's
+Expedition I used to know," he agreed.  "He was an enlisted
+soldier and one of the handful of survivors.  He had been through
+so much that he was just as subdued as Michael and just as
+taciturn.  He bored most people, who could not understand him.  Of
+course, the truth was the other way around.  They bored him.  They
+knew so little of life that he knew the last word of.  And one
+could scarcely get any word out of him.  It was not that he had
+forgotten how to speak, but that he could not see any reason for
+speaking when nobody could understand.  He was really crusty from
+too-bitter wise experience.  But all you had to do was look at him
+in his tremendous repose and know that he had been through the
+thousand hells, including all the frozen ones.  His eyes had the
+same quietness of Michael's.  And they had the same wisdom.  I'd
+give almost anything to know how he got his shoulder scarred.  It
+must have been a tiger or a lion."
+
+
+The man, like the mountain lion whom Michael had encountered up
+the mountain, had strayed down from the wilds of Mendocino County,
+following the ruggedest mountain stretches, and, at night,
+crossing the farmed valley spaces where the presence of man was a
+danger to him.  Like the mountain lion, the man was an enemy to
+man, and all men were his enemies, seeking his life which he had
+forfeited in ways more terrible than the lion which had merely
+killed calves for food.
+
+Like the mountain lion, the man was a killer.  But, unlike the
+lion, his vague description and the narrative of his deeds was in
+all the newspapers, and mankind was a vast deal more interested in
+him than in the lion.  The lion had slain calves in upland
+pastures.  But the man, for purposes of robbery, had slain an
+entire family--the postmaster, his wife, and their three children,
+in the upstairs over the post office in the mountain village of
+Chisholm.
+
+For two weeks the man had eluded and exceeded pursuit.  His last
+crossing had been from the mountains of the Russian River, across
+wide-farmed Santa Rosa Valley, to Sonoma Mountain.  For two days
+he had laired and rested, sleeping much, in the wildest and most
+inaccessible precincts of the Kennan Ranch.  With him he had
+carried coffee stolen from the last house he had raided.  One of
+Harley Kennan's angora goats had furnished him with meat.  Four
+times he had slept the clock around from exhaustion, rousing on
+occasion, like any animal, to eat voraciously of the goat-meat, to
+drink large quantities of the coffee hot or cold, and to sink down
+into heavy but nightmare-ridden sleep.
+
+And in the meantime civilization, with its efficient organization
+and intricate inventions, including electricity, had closed in on
+him.  Electricity had surrounded him.  The spoken word had located
+him in the wild canyons of Sonoma Mountain and fringed the
+mountain with posses of peace-officers and detachments of armed
+farmers.  More terrible to them than any mountain lion was a man-
+killing man astray in their landscape.  The telephone on the
+Kennan Ranch, and the telephones on all other ranches abutting on
+Sonoma Mountain, had rung often and transmitted purposeful
+conversations and arrangements.
+
+So it happened, when the posses had begun to penetrate the
+mountain, and when the man was compelled to make a daylight dash
+down into the Valley of the Moon to cross over to the mountain
+fastnesses that lay between it and Napa Valley, that Harley Kennan
+rode out on the hot-blooded colt he was training.  He was not in
+pursuit of the man who had slain the postmaster of Chisholm and
+his family.  The mountain was alive with man-hunters, as he well
+knew, for a score had bedded and eaten at the ranch house the
+night before.  So the meeting of Harley Kennan with the man was
+unplanned and eventful.
+
+It was not the first meeting with men the man had had that day.
+During the preceding night he had noted the campfires of several
+posses.  At dawn, attempting to break forth down the south-western
+slopes of the mountain toward Petaluma, he had encountered not
+less than five separate detachments of dairy-ranchers all armed
+with Winchesters and shotguns.  Breaking back to cover, the chase
+hot on his heels, he had run full tilt into a party of village
+youths from Glen Ellen and Caliente.  Their squirrel and deer
+rifles had missed him, but his back had been peppered with
+birdshot in a score of places, the leaden pellets penetrating
+maddeningly in a score of places just under the skin.
+
+In the rush of his retreat down the canyon slope, he had plunged
+into a bunch of shorthorn steers, who, far more startled than he,
+had rolled him on the forest floor, trampled over him in their
+panic, and smashed his rifle under their hoofs.  Weaponless,
+desperate, stinging and aching from his superficial wounds and
+bruises, he had circled the forest slopes along deer-paths,
+crossed two canyons, and begun to descend the horse-trail he found
+in the third canyon.
+
+It was on this trail, going down, that he met the reporter coming
+up.  The reporter was--well, just a reporter, from the city,
+knowing only city ways, who had never before engaged in a man-
+hunt.  The livery horse he had rented down in the valley was a
+broken-kneed, jaded, and spiritless creature, that stood calmly
+while its rider was dragged from its back by the wild-looking and
+violently impetuous man who sprang out around a sharp turn of the
+trail.  The reporter struck at his assailant once with his riding-
+whip.  Then he received a beating, such as he had often written up
+about sailor-rows and saloon-frequenters in his cub-reporter days,
+but which for the first time it was his lot to experience.
+
+To the man's disgust he found the reporter unarmed save for a
+pencil and a wad of copy paper.  Out of his disappointment in not
+securing a weapon, he beat the reporter up some more, left him
+wailing among the ferns, and, astride the reporter's horse, urging
+it on with the reporter's whip, continued down the trail.
+
+Jerry, ever keenest on the hunting, had ranged farther afield than
+Michael as the pair of them accompanied Harley Kennan on his early
+morning ride.  Even so, Michael, at the heels of his master's
+horse, did not see nor understand the beginning of the
+catastrophe.  For that matter, neither did Harley.  Where a steep,
+eight-foot bank came down to the edge of the road along which he
+was riding, Harley and the hot-blood colt were startled by an
+eruption through the screen of manzanita bushes above.  Looking
+up, he saw a reluctant horse and a forceful rider plunging in mid-
+air down upon him.  In that flashing glimpse, even as he reined
+and spurred to make his own horse leap sidewise out from under,
+Harley Kennan observed the scratched skin and torn clothing, the
+wild-burning eyes, and the haggardness under the scraggly growth
+of beard, of the man-hunted man.
+
+The livery horse was justifiably reluctant to make that leap out
+and down the bank.  Too painfully aware of the penalty its broken
+knees and rheumatic joints must pay, it dug its hoofs into the
+steep slope of moss and only sprang out and clear in the air in
+order to avoid a fall.  Even so, its shoulder impacted against the
+shoulder of the whirling colt below it, overthrowing the latter.
+Harley Kennan's leg, caught under against the earth, snapped, and
+the colt, twisted and twisting as it struck the ground, snapped
+its backbone.
+
+To his utter disgust, the man, pursued by an armed countryside,
+found Harley Kennan, his latest victim, like the reporter, to be
+weaponless.  Dismounted, he snarled in his rage and disappointment
+and deliberately kicked the helpless man in the side.  He had
+drawn back his foot for the second kick, when Michael took a hand-
+-or a leg, rather, sinking his teeth into the calf of the back-
+drawn leg about to administer the kick.
+
+With a curse the man jerked his leg clear, Michael's teeth
+ribboning flesh and trousers.
+
+"Good boy, Michael!" Harley applauded from where he lay helplessly
+pinioned under his horse.  "Hey!  Michael!" he continued, lapsing
+back into beche-de-mer, "chase 'm that white fella marster to hell
+outa here along bush!"
+
+"I'll kick your head off for that," the man gritted at Harley
+through his teeth.
+
+Savage as were his acts and utterance, the man was nearly ready to
+cry.  The long pursuit, his hand against all mankind and all
+mankind against him, had begun to break his stamina.  He was
+surrounded by enemies.  Even youths had risen up and peppered his
+back with birdshot, and beef cattle had trod him underfoot and
+smashed his rifle.  Everything conspired against him.  And now it
+was a dog that had slashed down his leg.  He was on the death-
+road.  Never before had this impressed him with such clear
+certainty.  Everything was against him.  His desire to cry was
+hysterical, and hysteria, in a desperate man, is prone to express
+itself in terrible savage ways.  Without rhyme or reason he was
+prepared to carry out his threat to kick Harley Kennan to death.
+Not that Kennan had done anything to him.  On the contrary, it was
+he who had attacked Kennan, hurling him down on the road and
+breaking his leg under his horse.  But Harley Kennan was a man,
+and all mankind was his enemy; and, in killing Kennan, in some
+vague way it appeared to him that he was avenging himself, at
+least in part, on mankind in general.  Going down himself in
+death, he would drag what he could with him into the red ruin.
+
+But ere he could kick the man on the ground, Michael was back upon
+him.  His other calf and trousers' leg were ribboned as he tore
+clear.  Then, catching Michael in mid-leap with a kick that
+reached him under the chest, he sent him flying through the air
+off the road and down the slope.  As mischance would have it,
+Michael did not reach the ground.  Crashing through a scrub
+manzanita bush, his body was caught and pinched in an acute fork a
+yard above the ground.
+
+"Now," the man announced grimly to Harley, "I'm going to do what I
+said.  I'm just going to kick your head clean off."
+
+"And I haven't done a thing to you," Harley parleyed.  "I don't so
+much mind being murdered, but I'd like to know what I'm being
+murdered for."
+
+"Chasing me for my life," the man snarled, as he advanced.  "I
+know your kind.  You've all got it in for me, and I ain't got a
+chance except to give you yours.  I'll take a whole lot of it out
+on you."
+
+Kennan was thoroughly aware of the gravity of his peril.  Helpless
+himself, a man-killing lunatic was about to kill him and to kill
+him most horribly.  Michael, a prisoner in the bush, hanging head-
+downward in the manzanita from his loins squeezed in the fork, and
+struggling vainly, could not come to his defence.
+
+The man's first kick, aimed at Harley's face, he blocked with his
+fore-arm; and, before the man could make a second kick, Jerry
+erupted on the scene.  Nor did he need encouragement or direction
+from his love-master.  He flashed at the man, sinking his teeth
+harmlessly into the slack of the man's trousers at the waist-band
+above the hip, but by his weight dragging him half down to the
+ground.
+
+And upon Jerry the man turned with an increase of madness.  In
+truth all the world was against him.  The very landscape rained
+dogs upon him.  But from above, from the slopes of Sonoma
+Mountain, the cries and calls of the trailing poses caught his
+ear, and deflected his intention.  They were the pursuing death,
+and it was from them he must escape.  With another kick at Jerry,
+hurling him clear, he leaped astride the reporter's horse which
+had continued to stand, without movement or excitement, in utter
+apathy, where he had dismounted from it.
+
+The horse went into a reluctant and stiff-legged gallop, while
+Jerry followed, snarling and growling wrath at so high a pitch
+that almost he squalled.
+
+"It's all right, Michael," Harley soothed.  "Take it easy.  Don't
+hurt yourself.  The trouble's over.  Anybody'll happen along any
+time now and get us out of this fix."
+
+But the smaller branch of the two composing the fork broke, and
+Michael fell to the ground, landing in momentary confusion on his
+head and shoulders.  The next moment he was on his feet and
+tearing down the road in the direction of Jerry's noisy pursuit.
+Jerry's noise broke in a sharp cry of pain that added wings to
+Michael's feet.  Michael passed him rolling helplessly on the
+road.  What had happened was that the livery horse, in its stiff-
+jointed, broken-kneed gallop, had stumbled, nearly fallen, and, in
+its sprawling recovery, had accidentally stepped on Jerry,
+bruising and breaking his fore-leg.
+
+And the man, looking back and seeing Michael close upon him,
+decided that it was still another dog attacking him.  But he had
+no fear of dogs.  It was men, with their rifles and shot-guns,
+that might bring him to ultimate grief.  Nevertheless, the pain of
+his bleeding legs, lacerated by Jerry and Michael, maintained his
+rage against dogs.
+
+"More dogs," was his bitter thought, as he leaned out and brought
+his whip down across Michael's face.
+
+To his surprise, the dog did not wince under the blow.  Nor for
+that matter did he yelp or cry out from the pain.  Nor did he bark
+or growl or snarl.  He closed in as though he had not received the
+blow, and as though the whip was not brandished above him.  As
+Michael leaped for his right leg he swung the whip down, striking
+him squarely on the muzzle midway between nose and eyes.
+Deflected by the blow, Michael dropped back to earth and ran on
+with his longest leaps to catch up and make his next spring.
+
+But the man had noticed another thing.  At such close range,
+bringing his whip down, he could not help noting that Michael had
+kept his eyes open under the blow.  Neither had he winced nor
+blinked as the whip slashed down on him.  The thing was uncanny.
+It was something new in the way of dogs.  Michael sprang again,
+the man timed him again with the whip, and he saw the uncanny
+thing repeated.  By neither wince nor blink had the dog
+acknowledged the blow.
+
+And then an entirely new kind of fear came upon the man.  Was this
+the end for him, after all he had gone through?  Was this deadly
+silent, rough-coated terrier the thing destined to destroy him
+where men had failed?  He did not even know that the dog was real.
+Might it not be some terrible avenger, out of the mystery beyond
+life, placed to beset him and finish him finally on this road that
+he was convinced was surely the death-road?  The dog was not real.
+It could not be real.  The dog did not live that could take a
+full-arm whip-slash without wince or flinch.
+
+Twice again, as the dog sprang, he deflected it with accurately
+delivered blows.  And the dog came on with the same surety and
+silence.  The man surrendered to his terror, clapping heels to his
+horse's old ribs, beating it over the head and under the belly
+with the whip until it galloped as it had not galloped in years.
+Even on that apathetic steed the terror descended.  It was not
+terror of the dog, which it knew to be only a dog, but terror of
+the rider.  In the past its knees had been broken and its joints
+stiffened for ever, by drunken-mad riders who had hired him from
+the stables.  And here was another such drunken-mad rider--for the
+horse sensed the man's terror--who ached his ribs with the weight
+of his heels and beat him cruelly over face and nose and ears.
+
+The best speed of the horse was not very great, not great enough
+to out-distance Michael, although it was fast enough to give the
+latter only infrequent opportunities to spring for the man's leg.
+But each spring was met by the unvarying whip-blow that by its
+very weight deflected him in the air.  Though his teeth each time
+clipped together perilously close to the man's leg, each time he
+fell back to earth he had to gather himself together and run at
+his own top speed in order to overtake the terror-stricken man on
+the crazy-galloping horse.
+
+Enrico Piccolomini saw the chase and was himself in at the finish;
+and the affair, his one great adventure in the world, gave him
+wealth as well as material for conversation to the end of his
+days.  Enrico Piccolomini was a wood-chopper on the Kennan Ranch.
+On a rounded knoll, overlooking the road, he had first heard the
+galloping hoofs of the horse and the crack of the whip-blows on
+its body.  Next, he had seen the running battle of the man, the
+horse, and the dog.  When directly beneath him, not twenty feet
+distant, he saw the dog leap, in its queer silent way, straight up
+and in to the down-smash of the whip, and sink its teeth in the
+rider's leg.  He saw the dog, with its weight, as it fell back to
+earth, drag the man half out of the saddle.  He saw the man, in an
+effort to recover his balance, put his own weight on the bridle-
+reins.  And he saw the horse, half-rearing, half-tottering and
+stumbling, overthrow the last shred of the man's balance so that
+he followed the dog to the ground.
+
+"And then they are like two dogs, like two beasts," Piccolomini
+was wont to tell in after-years over a glass of wine in his little
+hotel in Glen Ellen.  "The dog lets go the man's leg and jumps for
+the man's throat.  And the man, rolling over, is at the dog's
+throat.  Both his hands--so--he fastens about the throat of this
+dog.  And the dog makes no sound.  He never makes sound, before or
+after.  After the two hands of the man stop his breath he can not
+make sound.  But he is not that kind of a dog.  He will not make
+sound anyway.  And the horse stands and looks on, and the horse
+coughs.  It is very strange all that I see.
+
+"And the man is mad.  Only a madman will do what I see him do.  I
+see the man show his teeth like any dog, and bite the dog on the
+paw, on the nose, on the body.  And when he bites the dog on the
+nose, the dog bites him on the check.  And the man and the dog
+fight like hell, and the dog gets his hind legs up like a cat.
+And like a cat he tears the man's shirt away from his chest, and
+tears the skin of the chest with his claws till it is all red with
+bleeding.  And the man yow-yowls, and makes noises like a wild
+mountain lion.  And always he chokes the dog.  It is a hell of a
+fight.
+
+"And the dog is Mister Kennan's dog, a fine man, and I have worked
+for him two years.  So I will not stand there and see Mister
+Kennan's dog all killed to pieces by the man who fights like a
+mountain lion.  I run down the hill, but I am excited and forget
+my axe.  I run down the hill, maybe from this door to that door,
+twenty feet or maybe thirty feet.  And it is nearly all finished
+for the dog.  His tongue is a long ways out, and his eyes like
+covered with cobwebs; but still he scratches the man's chest with
+his hind-feet and the man yow-yowls like a hen of the mountains.
+
+"What can I do?  I have forgotten the axe.  The man will kill the
+dog.  I look for a big rock.  There are no rocks.  I look for a
+club.  I cannot find a club.  And the man is killing the dog.  I
+tell you what I do.  I am no fool.  I kick the man.  My shoes are
+very heavy--not like shoes I wear now.  They are the shoes of the
+woodchopper, very thick on the sole with hard leather, with many
+iron nails.  I kick the man on the side of the face, on the neck,
+right under the ear.  I kick once.  It is a good kick.  It is
+enough.  I know the place--right under the ear.
+
+"And the man lets go of the dog.  He shuts his eyes, and opens his
+mouth, and lies very still.  And the dog begins once more to
+breathe.  And with the breath comes the life, and right away he
+wants to kill the man.  But I say 'No,' though I am very much
+afraid of the dog.  And the man begins to become alive.  He opens
+his eyes and he looks at me like a mountain lion.  And his mouth
+makes a noise like a mountain lion.  And I am afraid of him like I
+am afraid of the dog.  What am I to do?  I have forgotten the axe.
+I tell you what I do.  I kick the man once again under the ear.
+Then I take my belt, and my bandana handkerchief, and I tie him.
+I tie his hands.  I tie his legs, too.  And all the time I am
+saying 'No,' to the dog, and that he must leave the man alone.
+And the dog looks.  He knows I am his friend and am tying the man.
+And he does not bite me, though I am very much afraid.  The dog is
+a terrible dog.  Do I not know?  Have I not seen him take a strong
+man out of the saddle?--a man that is like a mountain lion?
+
+"And then the men come.  They all have guns-rifles, shotguns,
+revolvers, pistols.  And I think, first, that justice is very
+quick in the United States.  Only just now have I kicked a man in
+the head, and, one-two-three, just like that, men come with guns
+to take me to jail for kicking a man in the head.  At first I do
+not understand.  The many men are angry with me.  They call me
+names, and say bad things; but they do not arrest me.  Ah!  I
+begin to understand!  I hear them talk about three thousand
+dollars.  I have robbed them of three thousand dollars.  It is not
+true.  I say so.  I say never have I robbed a man of one cent.
+Then they laugh.  And I feel better and I understand better.  The
+three thousand dollars is the reward of the Government for this
+man I have tied up with my belt and my bandana.  And the three
+thousand dollars is mine because I kicked the man in the head and
+tied his hands and his feet.
+
+"So I do not work for Mister Kennan any more.  I am a rich man.
+Three thousand dollars, all mine, from the Government, and Mister
+Kennan sees that it is paid to me by the Government and not robbed
+from me by the men with the guns.  Just because I kicked the man
+in the head who was like a mountain lion!  It is fortune.  It is
+America.  And I am glad that I have left Italy and come to chop
+wood on Mister Kennan's ranch.  And I start this hotel in Glen
+Ellen with the three thousand dollars.  I know there is large
+money in the hotel business.  When I was a little boy, did not my
+father have a hotel in Napoli?  I have now two daughters in high
+school.  Also I own an automobile."
+
+
+"Mercy me, the whole ranch is a hospital!" cried Villa Kennan, two
+days later, as she came out on the broad sleeping-porch and
+regarded Harley and Jerry stretched out, the one with his leg in
+splints, the other with his leg in a plaster cast.  "Look at
+Michael," she continued.  "You're not the only ones with broken
+bones.  I've only just discovered that if his nose isn't broken,
+it ought to be, from the blow he must have received on it.  I've
+had hot compresses on it for the last hour.  Look at it!"
+
+Michael, who had followed in at her invitation, betrayed a
+ridiculously swollen nose as he sniffed noses with Jerry, wagged
+his bobtail to Harley in greeting, and was greeted in turn with a
+blissful hand laid on his head.
+
+"Must have got it in the fight," Harley said.  "The fellow struck
+him with the whip many times, so Piccolomini says, and, naturally,
+it would be right across the nose when he jumped for him."
+
+"And Piccolomini says he never cried out when he was struck, but
+went on running and jumping," Villa took up enthusiastically.
+"Think of it!  A dog no bigger than Michael dragging out of the
+saddle a man-killing outlaw whom scores of officers could not
+catch!"
+
+"So far as we are concerned, he did better than that," Harley
+commented quietly.  "If it hadn't been for Michael, and for Jerry,
+too--if it hadn't been for the pair of them, I do verily believe
+that that lunatic would have kicked my head off as he promised."
+
+"The blessed pair of them!" Villa cried, with shining eyes, as her
+hand flashed out to her husband's in a quick press of heart-
+thankfulness.  "The last word has not been said upon the wonder of
+dogs," she added, as, with a quick winking of her eyelashes to
+overcome the impending moistness, she controlled her emotion.
+
+"The last word of the wonder of dogs will never be said," Harley
+spoke, returning the pressure of her hand and releasing it in
+order to help her.
+
+"And just for that were going to say something right now," she
+smiled.  "Jerry, and Michael, and I.  We've been practising it in
+secret for a surprise for you.  You just lie there and listen.
+It's the Doxology.  Don't Laugh.  No pun intended."
+
+She bent forward from the stool on which she sat, and drew Michael
+to her so that he sat between her knees, her two hands holding his
+head and jowls, his nose half-buried in her hair.
+
+"Now Jerry!" she called sharply, as a singing teacher might call,
+so that Jerry turned his head in attention, looked at her, smiled
+understanding with his eyes, and waited.
+
+It was Villa who started and pitched the Doxology, but quickly the
+two dogs joined with their own soft, mellow howling, if howling it
+may be called when it was so soft and mellow and true.  And all
+that had vanished into the Nothingness was in the minds of the two
+dogs as they sang, and they sang back through the Nothingness to
+the land of Otherwhere, and ran once again with the Lost Pack, and
+yet were not entirely unaware of the present and of the
+indubitable two-legged god who was called Villa and who sang with
+them and loved them.
+
+"No reason we shouldn't make a quartette of it," remarked Harley
+Kennan, as with his own voice he joined in.
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg Etext Michael, Brother of Jerry by Jack London
+
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