Project Gutenberg Etext Michael, Brother of Jerry by Jack London
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Michael, Brother of Jerry
by Jack London
May, 1999 [Etext #1730]
Project Gutenberg Etext Michael, Brother of Jerry by Jack London
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This etext was prepared by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
from the 1917 Mills & Boon edition.
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 i