Jerry of the Islands / London, Jack, 1876-1916

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Title: Jerry of the Islands

Author: Jack London

Release Date: January 19, 2005  [eBook #1161]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)


***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JERRY OF THE ISLANDS***




Transcribed from the 1917 Mills & Boon edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





JERRY OF THE ISLANDS


FOREWORD


It is a misfortune to some fiction-writers that fiction and unveracity in
the average person's mind mean one and the same thing.  Several years ago
I published a South Sea novel.  The action was placed in the Solomon
Islands.  The action was praised by the critics and reviewers as a highly
creditable effort of the imagination.  As regards reality--they said
there wasn't any.  Of course, as every one knew, kinky-haired cannibals
no longer obtained on the earth's surface, much less ran around with
nothing on, chopping off one another's heads, and, on occasion, a white
man's head as well.

Now listen.  I am writing these lines in Honolulu, Hawaii.  Yesterday, on
the beach at Waikiki, a stranger spoke to me.  He mentioned a mutual
friend, Captain Kellar.  When I was wrecked in the Solomons on the
blackbirder, the _Minota_, it was Captain Kellar, master of the
blackbirder, the _Eugenie_, who rescued me.  The blacks had taken Captain
Kellar's head, the stranger told me.  He knew.  He had represented
Captain Kellar's mother in settling up the estate.

Listen.  I received a letter the other day from Mr. C. M. Woodford,
Resident Commissioner of the British Solomons.  He was back at his post,
after a long furlough to England, where he had entered his son into
Oxford.  A search of the shelves of almost any public library will bring
to light a book entitled, "A Naturalist Among the Head Hunters."  Mr. C.
M. Woodford is the naturalist.  He wrote the book.

To return to his letter.  In the course of the day's work he casually and
briefly mentioned a particular job he had just got off his hands.  His
absence in England had been the cause of delay.  The job had been to make
a punitive expedition to a neighbouring island, and, incidentally, to
recover the heads of some mutual friends of ours--a white-trader, his
white wife and children, and his white clerk.  The expedition was
successful, and Mr. Woodford concluded his account of the episode with a
statement to the effect: "What especially struck me was the absence of
pain and terror in their faces, which seemed to express, rather, serenity
and repose"--this, mind you, of men and women of his own race whom he
knew well and who had sat at dinner with him in his own house.

Other friends, with whom I have sat at dinner in the brave, rollicking
days in the Solomons have since passed out--by the same way.  My
goodness!  I sailed in the teak-built ketch, the _Minota_, on a
blackbirding cruise to Malaita, and I took my wife along.  The hatchet-
marks were still raw on the door of our tiny stateroom advertising an
event of a few months before.  The event was the taking of Captain
Mackenzie's head, Captain Mackenzie, at that time, being master of the
Minota.  As we sailed in to Langa-Langa, the British cruiser, the
_Cambrian_, steamed out from the shelling of a village.

It is not expedient to burden this preliminary to my story with further
details, which I do make asseveration I possess a-plenty.  I hope I have
given some assurance that the adventures of my dog hero in this novel are
real adventures in a very real cannibal world.  Bless you!--when I took
my wife along on the cruise of the _Minota_, we found on board a nigger-
chasing, adorable Irish terrier puppy, who was smooth-coated like Jerry,
and whose name was Peggy.  Had it not been for Peggy, this book would
never have been written.  She was the chattel of the _Minota's_ splendid
skipper.  So much did Mrs. London and I come to love her, that Mrs.
London, after the wreck of the _Minota_, deliberately and shamelessly
stole her from the _Minota's_ skipper.  I do further admit that I did,
deliberately and shamelessly, compound my wife's felony.  We loved Peggy
so!  Dear royal, glorious little dog, buried at sea off the east coast of
Australia!

I must add that Peggy, like Jerry, was born at Meringe Lagoon, on Meringe
Plantation, which is of the Island of Ysabel, said Ysabel Island lying
next north of Florida Island, where is the seat of government and where
dwells the Resident Commissioner, Mr. C. M. Woodford.  Still further and
finally, I knew Peggy's mother and father well, and have often known the
warm surge in the heart of me at the sight of that faithful couple
running side by side along the beach.  Terrence was his real name.  Her
name was Biddy.

JACK LONDON
WAIKIKI BEACH,
HONOLULU, OAHU, T.H.
June 5, 1915





CHAPTER I


Not until _Mister_ Haggin abruptly picked him up under one arm and
stepped into the sternsheets of the waiting whaleboat, did Jerry dream
that anything untoward was to happen to him.  _Mister_ Haggin was Jerry's
beloved master, and had been his beloved master for the six months of
Jerry's life.  Jerry did not know _Mister_ Haggin as "master," for
"master" had no place in Jerry's vocabulary, Jerry being a smooth-coated,
golden-sorrel Irish terrier.

But in Jerry's vocabulary, "_Mister_ Haggin" possessed all the
definiteness of sound and meaning that the word "master" possesses in the
vocabularies of humans in relation to their dogs.  "_Mister_ Haggin" was
the sound Jerry had always heard uttered by Bob, the clerk, and by Derby,
the foreman on the plantation, when they addressed his master.  Also,
Jerry had always heard the rare visiting two-legged man-creatures such as
came on the _Arangi_, address his master as _Mister_ Haggin.

But dogs being dogs, in their dim, inarticulate, brilliant, and heroic-
worshipping ways misappraising humans, dogs think of their masters, and
love their masters, more than the facts warrant.  "Master" means to them,
as "_Mister_" Haggin meant to Jerry, a deal more, and a great deal more,
than it means to humans.  The human considers himself as "master" to his
dog, but the dog considers his master "God."

Now "God" was no word in Jerry's vocabulary, despite the fact that he
already possessed a definite and fairly large vocabulary.  "_Mister_
Haggin" was the sound that meant "God."  In Jerry's heart and head, in
the mysterious centre of all his activities that is called consciousness,
the sound, "_Mister_ Haggin," occupied the same place that "God" occupies
in human consciousness.  By word and sound, to Jerry, "_Mister_ Haggin"
had the same connotation that "God" has to God-worshipping humans.  In
short, _Mister_ Haggin was Jerry's God.

And so, when _Mister_ Haggin, or God, or call it what one will with the
limitations of language, picked Jerry up with imperative abruptness,
tucked him under his arm, and stepped into the whaleboat, whose black
crew immediately bent to the oars, Jerry was instantly and nervously
aware that the unusual had begun to happen.  Never before had he gone out
on board the _Arangi_, which he could see growing larger and closer to
each lip-hissing stroke of the oars of the blacks.

Only an hour before, Jerry had come down from the plantation house to the
beach to see the _Arangi_ depart.  Twice before, in his half-year of
life, had he had this delectable experience.  Delectable it truly was,
running up and down the white beach of sand-pounded coral, and, under the
wise guidance of Biddy and Terrence, taking part in the excitement of the
beach and even adding to it.

There was the nigger-chasing.  Jerry had been born to hate niggers.  His
first experiences in the world as a puling puppy, had taught him that
Biddy, his mother, and his father Terrence, hated niggers.  A nigger was
something to be snarled at.  A nigger, unless he were a house-boy, was
something to be attacked and bitten and torn if he invaded the compound.
Biddy did it.  Terrence did it.  In doing it, they served their
God--_Mister_ Haggin.  Niggers were two-legged lesser creatures who
toiled and slaved for their two-legged white lords, who lived in the
labour barracks afar off, and who were so much lesser and lower that they
must not dare come near the habitation of their lords.

And nigger-chasing was adventure.  Not long after he had learned to
sprawl, Jerry had learned that.  One took his chances.  As long as
_Mister_ Haggin, or Derby, or Bob, was about, the niggers took their
chasing.  But there were times when the white lords were not about.  Then
it was "'Ware niggers!"  One must dare to chase only with due precaution.
Because then, beyond the white lord's eyes, the niggers had a way, not
merely of scowling and muttering, but of attacking four-legged dogs with
stones and clubs.  Jerry had seen his mother so mishandled, and, ere he
had learned discretion, alone in the high grass had been himself club-
mauled by Godarmy, the black who wore a china door-knob suspended on his
chest from his neck on a string of sennit braided from cocoanut fibre.
More.  Jerry remembered another high-grass adventure, when he and his
brother Michael had fought Owmi, another black distinguishable for the
cogged wheels of an alarm clock on his chest.  Michael had been so
severely struck on his head that for ever after his left ear had remained
sore and had withered into a peculiar wilted and twisted upward cock.

Still more.  There had been his brother Patsy, and his sister Kathleen,
who had disappeared two months before, who had ceased and no longer were.
The great god, _Mister_ Haggin, had raged up and down the plantation.  The
bush had been searched.  Half a dozen niggers had been whipped.  And
_Mister_ Haggin had failed to solve the mystery of Patsy's and Kathleen's
disappearance.  But Biddy and Terrence knew.  So did Michael and Jerry.
The four-months' old Patsy and Kathleen had gone into the cooking-pot at
the barracks, and their puppy-soft skins had been destroyed in the fire.
Jerry knew this, as did his father and mother and brother, for they had
smelled the unmistakable burnt-meat smell, and Terrence, in his rage of
knowledge, had even attacked Mogom the house-boy, and been reprimanded
and cuffed by _Mister_ Haggin, who had not smelled and did not
understand, and who had always to impress discipline on all creatures
under his roof-tree.

But on the beach, when the blacks, whose terms of service were up came
down with their trade-boxes on their heads to depart on the _Arangi_, was
the time when nigger-chasing was not dangerous.  Old scores could be
settled, and it was the last chance, for the blacks who departed on the
_Arangi_ never came back.  As an instance, this very morning Biddy,
remembering a secret mauling at the hands of Lerumie, laid teeth into his
naked calf and threw him sprawling into the water, trade-box, earthly
possessions and all, and then laughed at him, sure in the protection of
_Mister_ Haggin who grinned at the episode.

Then, too, there was usually at least one bush-dog on the _Arangi_ at
which Jerry and Michael, from the beach, could bark their heads off.
Once, Terrence, who was nearly as large as an Airedale and fully as lion-
hearted--Terrence the Magnificent, as Tom Haggin called him--had caught
such a bush-dog trespassing on the beach and given him a delightful
thrashing, in which Jerry and Michael, and Patsy and Kathleen, who were
at the time alive, had joined with many shrill yelps and sharp nips.
Jerry had never forgotten the ecstasy of the hair, unmistakably doggy in
scent, which had filled his mouth at his one successful nip.  Bush-dogs
were dogs--he recognized them as his kind; but they were somehow
different from his own lordly breed, different and lesser, just as the
blacks were compared with _Mister_ Haggin, Derby, and Bob.

But Jerry did not continue to gaze at the nearing _Arangi_.  Biddy, wise
with previous bitter bereavements, had sat down on the edge of the sand,
her fore-feet in the water, and was mouthing her woe.  That this
concerned him, Jerry knew, for her grief tore sharply, albeit vaguely, at
his sensitive, passionate heart.  What it presaged he knew not, save that
it was disaster and catastrophe connected with him.  As he looked back at
her, rough-coated and grief-stricken, he could see Terrence hovering
solicitously near her.  He, too, was rough-coated, as was Michael, and as
Patsy and Kathleen had been, Jerry being the one smooth-coated member of
the family.

Further, although Jerry did not know it and Tom Haggin did, Terrence was
a royal lover and a devoted spouse.  Jerry, from his earliest
impressions, could remember the way Terrence had of running with Biddy,
miles and miles along the beaches or through the avenues of cocoanuts,
side by side with her, both with laughing mouths of sheer delight.  As
these were the only dogs, besides his brothers and sisters and the
several eruptions of strange bush-dogs that Jerry knew, it did not enter
his head otherwise than that this was the way of dogs, male and female,
wedded and faithful.  But Tom Haggin knew its unusualness.  "Proper
affinities," he declared, and repeatedly declared, with warm voice and
moist eyes of appreciation.  "A gentleman, that Terrence, and a
four-legged proper man.  A man-dog, if there ever was one, four-square as
the legs on the four corners of him.  And prepotent!  My word!  His
blood'd breed true for a thousand generations, and the cool head and the
kindly brave heart of him."

Terrence did not voice his sorrow, if sorrow he had; but his hovering
about Biddy tokened his anxiety for her.  Michael, however, yielding to
the contagion, sat beside his mother and barked angrily out across the
increasing stretch of water as he would have barked at any danger that
crept and rustled in the jungle.  This, too, sank to Jerry's heart,
adding weight to his sure intuition that dire fate, he knew not what, was
upon him.

For his six months of life, Jerry knew a great deal and knew very little.
He knew, without thinking about it, without knowing that he knew, why
Biddy, the wise as well as the brave, did not act upon all the message
that her heart voiced to him, and spring into the water and swim after
him.  She had protected him like a lioness when the big _puarka_ (which,
in Jerry's vocabulary, along with grunts and squeals, was the combination
of sound, or word, for "pig") had tried to devour him where he was
cornered under the high-piled plantation house.  Like a lioness, when the
cook-boy had struck him with a stick to drive him out of the kitchen, had
Biddy sprung upon the black, receiving without wince or whimper one
straight blow from the stick, and then downing him and mauling him among
his pots and pans until dragged (for the first time snarling) away by the
unchiding _Mister_ Haggin, who; however, administered sharp words to the
cook-boy for daring to lift hand against a four-legged dog belonging to a
god.

Jerry knew why his mother did not plunge into the water after him.  The
salt sea, as well as the lagoons that led out of the salt sea, were
taboo.  "Taboo," as word or sound, had no place in Jerry's vocabulary.
But its definition, or significance, was there in the quickest part of
his consciousness.  He possessed a dim, vague, imperative knowingness
that it was not merely not good, but supremely disastrous, leading to the
mistily glimpsed sense of utter endingness for a dog, for any dog, to go
into the water where slipped and slid and noiselessly paddled, sometimes
on top, sometimes emerging from the depths, great scaly monsters, huge-
jawed and horribly-toothed, that snapped down and engulfed a dog in an
instant just as the fowls of _Mister_ Haggin snapped and engulfed grains
of corn.

Often he had heard his father and mother, on the safety of the sand, bark
and rage their hatred of those terrible sea-dwellers, when, close to the
beach, they appeared on the surface like logs awash.  "Crocodile" was no
word in Jerry's vocabulary.  It was an image, an image of a log awash
that was different from any log in that it was alive.  Jerry, who heard,
registered, and recognized many words that were as truly tools of thought
to him as they were to humans, but who, by inarticulateness of birth and
breed, could not utter these many words, nevertheless in his mental
processes, used images just as articulate men use words in their own
mental processes.  And after all, articulate men, in the act of thinking,
willy nilly use images that correspond to words and that amplify words.

Perhaps, in Jerry's brain, the rising into the foreground of
consciousness of an image of a log awash connoted more intimate and
fuller comprehension of the thing being thought about, than did the word
"crocodile," and its accompanying image, in the foreground of a human's
consciousness.  For Jerry really did know more about crocodiles than the
average human.  He could smell a crocodile farther off and more
differentiatingly than could any man, than could even a salt-water black
or a bushman smell one.  He could tell when a crocodile, hauled up from
the lagoon, lay without sound or movement, and perhaps asleep, a hundred
feet away on the floor mat of jungle.

He knew more of the language of crocodiles than did any man.  He had
better means and opportunities of knowing.  He knew their many noises
that were as grunts and slubbers.  He knew their anger noises, their fear
noises, their food noises, their love noises.  And these noises were as
definitely words in his vocabulary as are words in a human's vocabulary.
And these crocodile noises were tools of thought.  By them he weighed and
judged and determined his own consequent courses of action, just like any
human; or, just like any human, lazily resolved upon no course of action,
but merely noted and registered a clear comprehension of something that
was going on about him that did not require a correspondence of action on
his part.

And yet, what Jerry did not know was very much.  He did not know the size
of the world.  He did not know that this Meringe Lagoon, backed by high,
forested mountains and fronted and sheltered by the off-shore coral
islets, was anything else than the entire world.  He did not know that it
was a mere fractional part of the great island of Ysabel, that was again
one island of a thousand, many of them greater, that composed the Solomon
Islands that men marked on charts as a group of specks in the vastitude
of the far-western South Pacific.

It was true, there was a somewhere else or a something beyond of which he
was dimly aware.  But whatever it was, it was mystery.  Out of it, things
that had not been, suddenly were.  Chickens and puarkas and cats, that he
had never seen before, had a way of abruptly appearing on Meringe
Plantation.  Once, even, had there been an eruption of strange
four-legged, horned and hairy creatures, the images of which, registered
in his brain, would have been identifiable in the brains of humans with
what humans worded "goats."

It was the same way with the blacks.  Out of the unknown, from the
somewhere and something else, too unconditional for him to know any of
the conditions, instantly they appeared, full-statured, walking about
Meringe Plantation with loin-cloths about their middles and bone bodkins
through their noses, and being put to work by _Mister_ Haggin, Derby, and
Bob.  That their appearance was coincidental with the arrival of the
_Arangi_ was an association that occurred as a matter of course in
Jerry's brain.  Further, he did not bother, save that there was a
companion association, namely, that their occasional disappearances into
the beyond was likewise coincidental with the _Arangi's_ departure.

Jerry did not query these appearances and disappearances.  It never
entered his golden-sorrel head to be curious about the affair or to
attempt to solve it.  He accepted it in much the way he accepted the
wetness of water and the heat of the sun.  It was the way of life and of
the world he knew.  His hazy awareness was no more than an awareness of
something--which, by the way, corresponds very fairly with the hazy
awareness of the average human of the mysteries of birth and death and of
the beyondness about which they have no definiteness of comprehension.

For all that any man may gainsay, the ketch _Arangi_, trader and
blackbirder in the Solomon Islands, may have signified in Jerry's mind as
much the mysterious boat that traffics between the two worlds, as, at one
time, the boat that Charon sculled across the Styx signified to the human
mind.  Out of the nothingness men came.  Into the nothingness they went.
And they came and went always on the _Arangi_.

And to the _Arangi_, this hot-white tropic morning, Jerry went on the
whaleboat under the arm of his _Mister_ Haggin, while on the beach Biddy
moaned her woe, and Michael, not sophisticated, barked the eternal
challenge of youth to the Unknown.





CHAPTER II


From the whaleboat, up the low side of the _Arangi_, and over her six-
inch rail of teak to her teak deck, was but a step, and Tom Haggin made
it easily with Jerry still under his arm.  The deck was cluttered with an
exciting crowd.  Exciting the crowd would have been to untravelled humans
of civilization, and exciting it was to Jerry; although to Tom Haggin and
Captain Van Horn it was a mere commonplace of everyday life.

The deck was small because the _Arangi_ was small.  Originally a teak-
built, gentleman's yacht, brass-fitted, copper-fastened, angle-ironed,
sheathed in man-of-war copper and with a fin-keel of bronze, she had been
sold into the Solomon Islands' trade for the purpose of blackbirding or
nigger-running.  Under the law, however, this traffic was dignified by
being called "recruiting."

The _Arangi_ was a labour-recruit ship that carried the new-caught,
cannibal blacks from remote islands to labour on the new plantations
where white men turned dank and pestilential swamp and jungle into rich
and stately cocoanut groves.  The _Arangi's_ two masts were of Oregon
cedar, so scraped and hot-paraffined that they shone like tan opals in
the glare of sun.  Her excessive sail plan enabled her to sail like a
witch, and, on occasion, gave Captain Van Horn, his white mate, and his
fifteen black boat's crew as much as they could handle.  She was sixty
feet over all, and the cross beams of her crown deck had not been
weakened by deck-houses.  The only breaks--and no beams had been cut for
them--were the main cabin skylight and companionway, the booby hatch
for'ard over the tiny forecastle, and the small hatch aft that let down
into the store-room.

And on this small deck, in addition to the crew, were the "return"
niggers from three far-flung plantations.  By "return" was meant that
their three years of contract labour was up, and that, according to
contract, they were being returned to their home villages on the wild
island of Malaita.  Twenty of them--familiar, all, to Jerry--were from
Meringe; thirty of them came from the Bay of a Thousand Ships, in the
Russell Isles; and the remaining twelve were from Pennduffryn on the east
coast of Guadalcanar.  In addition to these--and they were all on deck,
chattering and piping in queer, almost elfish, falsetto voices--were the
two white men, Captain Van Horn and his Danish mate, Borckman, making a
total of seventy-nine souls.

"Thought your heart 'd failed you at the last moment," was Captain Van
Horn's greeting, a quick pleasure light glowing into his eyes as they
noted Jerry.

"It was sure near to doin' it," Tom Haggin answered.  "It's only for you
I'd a done it, annyways.  Jerry's the best of the litter, barrin'
Michael, of course, the two of them bein' all that's left and no better
than them that was lost.  Now that Kathleen was a sweet dog, the spit of
Biddy if she'd lived.--Here, take 'm."

With a jerk of abruptness, he deposited Jerry in Van Horn's arms and
turned away along the deck.

"An' if bad luck comes to him I'll never forgive you, Skipper," he flung
roughly over his shoulder.

"They'll have to take my head first," the skipper chuckled.

"An' not unlikely, my brave laddy buck," Haggin growled.  "Meringe owes
Somo four heads, three from the dysentery, an' another wan from a tree
fallin' on him the last fortnight.  He was the son of a chief at that."

"Yes, and there's two heads more that the _Arangi_ owes Somo," Van Horn
nodded.  "You recollect, down to the south'ard last year, a chap named
Hawkins was lost in his whaleboat running the Arli Passage?"  Haggin,
returning along the deck, nodded.  "Two of his boat's crew were Somo
boys.  I'd recruited them for Ugi Plantation.  With your boys, that makes
six heads the _Arangi_ owes.  But what of it?  There's one salt-water
village, acrost on the weather coast, where the _Arangi_ owes eighteen.  I
recruited them for Aolo, and being salt-water men they put them on the
_Sandfly_ that was lost on the way to the Santa Cruz.  They've got a jack-
pot over there on the weather coast--my word, the boy that could get my
head would be a second Carnegie!  A hundred and fifty pigs and shell
money no end the village's collected for the chap that gets me and
delivers."

"And they ain't--yet," Haggin snorted.

"No fear," was the cheerful retort.

"You talk like Arbuckle used to talk," Haggin censured.  "Manny's the
time I've heard him string it off.  Poor old Arbuckle.  The most sure and
most precautious chap that ever handled niggers.  He never went to sleep
without spreadin' a box of tacks on the floor, and when it wasn't them it
was crumpled newspapers.  I remember me well, bein' under the same roof
at the time on Florida, when a big tomcat chased a cockroach into the
papers.  And it was blim, blam, blim, six times an' twice over, with his
two big horse-pistols, an' the house perforated like a cullender.
Likewise there was a dead tom-cat.  He could shoot in the dark with never
an aim, pullin' trigger with the second finger and pointing with the
first finger laid straight along the barrel.

"No, sir, my laddy buck.  He was the bully boy with the glass eye.  The
nigger didn't live that'd lift his head.  But they got 'm.  They got 'm.
He lasted fourteen years, too.  It was his cook-boy.  Hatcheted 'm before
breakfast.  An' it's well I remember our second trip into the bush after
what was left of 'm."

"I saw his head after you'd turned it over to the Commissioner at
Tulagi," Van Horn supplemented.

"An' the peaceful, quiet, everyday face of him on it, with almost the
same old smile I'd seen a thousand times.  It dried on 'm that way over
the smokin' fire.  But they got 'm, if it did take fourteen years.
There's manny's the head that goes to Malaita, manny's the time untooken;
but, like the old pitcher, it's tooken in the end."

"But I've got their goat," the captain insisted.  "When trouble's
hatching, I go straight to them and tell them what.  They can't get the
hang of it.  Think I've got some powerful devil-devil medicine."

Tom Haggin thrust out his hand in abrupt good-bye, resolutely keeping his
eyes from dropping to Jerry in the other's arms.

"Keep your eye on my return boys," he cautioned, as he went over the
side, "till you land the last mother's son of 'm.  They've got no cause
to love Jerry or his breed, an' I'd hate ill to happen 'm at a nigger's
hands.  An' in the dark of the night 'tis like as not he can do a fare-
you-well overside.  Don't take your eye off 'm till you're quit of the
last of 'm."

At sight of big _Mister_ Haggin deserting him and being pulled away in
the whaleboat, Jerry wriggled and voiced his anxiety in a low, whimpering
whine.  Captain Van Horn snuggled him closer in his arm with a caress of
his free hand.

"Don't forget the agreement," Tom Haggin called back across the widening
water.  "If aught happens you, Jerry's to come back to me."

"I'll make a paper to that same and put it with the ship's articles," was
Van Horn's reply.

Among the many words possessed by Jerry was his own name; and in the talk
of the two men he had recognised it repeatedly, and he was aware,
vaguely, that the talk was related to the vague and unguessably terrible
thing that was happening to him.  He wriggled more determinedly, and Van
Horn set him down on the deck.  He sprang to the rail with more quickness
than was to be expected of an awkward puppy of six months, and not the
quick attempt of Van Horn to cheek him would have succeeded.  But Jerry
recoiled from the open water lapping the _Arangi's_ side.  The taboo was
upon him.  It was the image of the log awash that was not a log but that
was alive, luminous in his brain, that checked him.  It was not reason on
his part, but inhibition which had become habit.

He plumped down on his bob tail, lifted golden muzzle skyward, and
emitted a long puppy-wail of dismay and grief.

"It's all right, Jerry, old man, brace up and be a man-dog," Van Horn
soothed him.

But Jerry was not to be reconciled.  While this indubitably was a white-
skinned god, it was not his god.  _Mister_ Haggin was his god, and a
superior god at that.  Even he, without thinking about it at all,
recognized that.  His _Mister_ Haggin wore pants and shoes.  This god on
the deck beside him was more like a black.  Not only did he not wear
pants, and was barefooted and barelegged, but about his middle, just like
any black, he wore a brilliant-coloured loin-cloth, that, like a kilt,
fell nearly to his sunburnt knees.

Captain Van Horn was a handsome man and a striking man, although Jerry
did not know it.  If ever a Holland Dutchman stepped out of a Rembrandt
frame, Captain Van Horn was that one, despite the fact that he was New
York born, as had been his knickerbocker ancestors before him clear back
to the time when New York was not New York but New Amsterdam.  To
complete his costume, a floppy felt hat, distinctly Rembrandtish in
effect, perched half on his head and mostly over one ear; a sixpenny,
white cotton undershirt covered his torso; and from a belt about his
middle dangled a tobacco pouch, a sheath-knife, filled clips of
cartridges, and a huge automatic pistol in a leather holster.

On the beach, Biddy, who had hushed her grief, lifted it again when she
heard Jerry's wail.  And Jerry, desisting a moment to listen, heard
Michael beside her, barking his challenge, and saw, without being
conscious of it, Michael's withered ear with its persistent upward cock.
Again, while Captain Van Horn and the mate, Borckman, gave orders, and
while the _Arangi's_ mainsail and spanker began to rise up the masts,
Jerry loosed all his heart of woe in what Bob told Derby on the beach was
the "grandest vocal effort" he had ever heard from any dog, and that,
except for being a bit thin, Caruso didn't have anything on Jerry.  But
the song was too much for Haggin, who, as soon as he had landed, whistled
Biddy to him and strode rapidly away from the beach.

At sight of her disappearing, Jerry was guilty of even more Caruso-like
effects, which gave great joy to a Pennduffryn return boy who stood
beside him.  He laughed and jeered at Jerry with falsetto chucklings that
were more like the jungle-noises of tree-dwelling creatures, half-bird
and half-man, than of a man, all man, and therefore a god.  This served
as an excellent counter-irritant.  Indignation that a mere black should
laugh at him mastered Jerry, and the next moment his puppy teeth, sharp-
pointed as needles, had scored the astonished black's naked calf in long
parallel scratches from each of which leaped the instant blood.  The
black sprang away in trepidation, but the blood of Terrence the
Magnificent was true in Jerry, and, like his father before him, he
followed up, slashing the black's other calf into a ruddy pattern.

At this moment, anchor broken out and headsails running up, Captain Van
Horn, whose quick eye had missed no detail of the incident, with an order
to the black helmsman turned to applaud Jerry.

"Go to it, Jerry!" he encouraged.  "Get him!  Shake him down!  Sick him!
Get him!  Get him!"

The black, in defence, aimed a kick at Jerry, who, leaping in instead of
away--another inheritance from Terrence--avoided the bare foot and
printed a further red series of parallel lines on the dark leg.  This was
too much, and the black, afraid more of Van Horn than of Jerry, turned
and fled for'ard, leaping to safety on top of the eight Lee-Enfield
rifles that lay on top of the cabin skylight and that were guarded by one
member of the boat's crew.  About the skylight Jerry stormed, leaping up
and falling back, until Captain Van Horn called him off.

"Some nigger-chaser, that pup, _some_ nigger-chaser!" Van Horn confided
to Borckman, as he bent to pat Jerry and give him due reward of praise.

And Jerry, under this caressing hand of a god, albeit it did not wear
pants, forgot for a moment longer the fate that was upon him.

"He's a lion-dog--more like an Airedale than an Irish terrier," Van Horn
went on to his mate, still petting.  "Look at the size of him already.
Look at the bone of him.  Some chest that.  He's got the endurance.  And
he'll be some dog when he grows up to those feet of his."

Jerry had just remembered his grief and was starting a rush across the
deck to the rail to gaze at Meringe growing smaller every second in the
distance, when a gust of the South-east Trade smote the sails and pressed
the _Arangi_ down.  And down the deck, slanted for the moment to forty-
five degrees, Jerry slipped and slid, vainly clawing at the smooth
surface for a hold.  He fetched up against the foot of the mizzenmast,
while Captain Van Horn, with the sailor's eye for the coral patch under
his bow, gave the order "Hard a-lee!"

Borckman and the black steersman echoed his words, and, as the wheel spun
down, the _Arangi_, with the swiftness of a witch, rounded into the wind
and attained a momentary even keel to the flapping of her headsails and a
shifting of headsheets.

Jerry, still intent on Meringe, took advantage of the level footing to
recover himself and scramble toward the rail.  But he was deflected by
the crash of the mainsheet blocks on the stout deck-traveller, as the
mainsail, emptied of the wind and feeling the wind on the other side,
swung crazily across above him.  He cleared the danger of the mainsheet
with a wild leap (although no less wild had been Van Horn's leap to
rescue him), and found himself directly under the mainboom with the huge
sail looming above him as if about to fall upon him and crush him.

It was Jerry's first experience with sails of any sort.  He did not know
the beasts, much less the way of them, but, in his vivid recollection,
when he had been a tiny puppy, burned the memory of the hawk, in the
middle of the compound, that had dropped down upon him from out of the
sky.  Under that colossal threatened impact he crouched down to the deck.
Above him, falling upon him like a bolt from the blue, was a winged hawk
unthinkably vaster than the one he had encountered.  But in his crouch
was no hint of cower.  His crouch was a gathering together, an assembling
of all the parts of him under the rule of the spirit of him, for the
spring upward to meet in mid career this monstrous, menacing thing.

But, the succeeding fraction of a moment, so that Jerry, leaping, missed
even the shadow of it, the mainsail, with a second crash of blocks on
traveller, had swung across and filled on the other tack.

Van Horn had missed nothing of it.  Before, in his time, he had seen
young dogs frightened into genuine fits by their first encounters with
heaven-filling, sky-obscuring, down-impending sails.  This was the first
dog he had seen leap with bared teeth, undismayed, to grapple with the
huge unknown.

With spontaneity of admiration, Van Horn swept Jerry from the deck and
gathered him into his arms.





CHAPTER III


Jerry quite forgot Meringe for the time being.  As he well remembered,
the hawk had been sharp of beak and claw.  This air-flapping, thunder-
crashing monster needed watching.  And Jerry, crouching for the spring
and ever struggling to maintain his footing on the slippery, heeling
deck, kept his eyes on the mainsail and uttered low growls at any display
of movement on its part.

The _Arangi_ was beating out between the coral patches of the narrow
channel into the teeth of the brisk trade wind.  This necessitated
frequent tacks, so that, overhead, the mainsail was ever swooping across
from port tack to starboard tack and back again, making air-noises like
the swish of wings, sharply rat-tat-tatting its reef points and loudly
crashing its mainsheet gear along the traveller.  Half a dozen times, as
it swooped overhead, Jerry leaped for it, mouth open to grip, lips
writhed clear of the clean puppy teeth that shone in the sun like gems of
ivory.

Failing in every leap, Jerry achieved a judgment.  In passing, it must be
noted that this judgment was only arrived at by a definite act of
reasoning.  Out of a series of observations of the thing, in which it had
threatened, always in the same way, a series of attacks, he had found
that it had not hurt him nor come in contact with him at all.
Therefore--although he did not stop to think that he was thinking--it was
not the dangerous, destroying thing he had first deemed it.  It might be
well to be wary of it, though already it had taken its place in his
classification of things that appeared terrible but were not terrible.
Thus, he had learned not to fear the roar of the wind among the palms
when he lay snug on the plantation-house veranda, nor the onslaught of
the waves, hissing and rumbling into harmless foam on the beach at his
feet.

Many times, in the course of the day, alertly and nonchalantly, almost
with a quizzical knowingness, Jerry cocked his head at the mainsail when
it made sudden swooping movements or slacked and tautened its crashing
sheet-gear.  But he no longer crouched to spring for it.  That had been
the first lesson, and quickly mastered.

Having settled the mainsail, Jerry returned in mind to Meringe.  But
there was no Meringe, no Biddy and Terrence and Michael on the beach; no
_Mister_ Haggin and Derby and Bob; no beach: no land with the palm-trees
near and the mountains afar off everlastingly lifting their green peaks
into the sky.  Always, to starboard or to port, at the bow or over the
stern, when he stood up resting his fore-feet on the six-inch rail and
gazing, he saw only the ocean, broken-faced and turbulent, yet orderly
marching its white-crested seas before the drive of the trade.

Had he had the eyes of a man, nearly two yards higher than his own from
the deck, and had they been the trained eyes of a man, sailor-man at
that, Jerry could have seen the low blur of Ysabel to the north and the
blur of Florida to the south, ever taking on definiteness of detail as
the _Arangi_ sagged close-hauled, with a good full, port-tacked to the
south-east trade.  And had he had the advantage of the marine glasses
with which Captain Van Horn elongated the range of his eyes, he could
have seen, to the east, the far peaks of Malaita lifting life-shadowed
pink cloud-puffs above the sea-rim.

But the present was very immediate with Jerry.  He had early learned the
iron law of the immediate, and to accept what _was_ when it was, rather
than to strain after far other things.  The sea was.  The land no longer
was.  The _Arangi_ certainly was, along with the life that cluttered her
deck.  And he proceeded to get acquainted with what was--in short, to
know and to adjust himself to his new environment.

His first discovery was delightful--a wild-dog puppy from the Ysabel
bush, being taken back to Malaita by one of the Meringe return boys.  In
age they were the same, but their breeding was different.  The wild-dog
was what he was, a wild-dog, cringing and sneaking, his ears for ever
down, his tail for ever between his legs, for ever apprehending fresh
misfortune and ill-treatment to fall on him, for ever fearing and
resentful, fending off threatened hurt with lips curling malignantly from
his puppy fangs, cringing under a blow, squalling his fear and his pain,
and ready always for a treacherous slash if luck and safety favoured.

The wild-dog was maturer than Jerry, larger-bodied, and wiser in
wickedness; but Jerry was blue-blooded, right-selected, and valiant.  The
wild-dog had come out of a selection equally rigid; but it was a
different sort of selection.  The bush ancestors from whom he had
descended had survived by being fear-selected.  They had never
voluntarily fought against odds.  In the open they had never attacked
save when the prey was weak or defenceless.  In place of courage, they
had lived by creeping, and slinking, and hiding from danger.  They had
been selected blindly by nature, in a cruel and ignoble environment,
where the prize of living was to be gained, in the main, by the cunning
of cowardice, and, on occasion, by desperateness of defence when in a
corner.

But Jerry had been love-selected and courage-selected.  His ancestors had
been deliberately and consciously chosen by men, who, somewhere in the
forgotten past, had taken the wild-dog and made it into the thing they
visioned and admired and desired it to be.  It must never fight like a
rat in a corner, because it must never be rat-like and slink into a
corner.  Retreat must be unthinkable.  The dogs in the past who retreated
had been rejected by men.  They had not become Jerry's ancestors.  The
dogs selected for Jerry's ancestors had been the brave ones, the
up-standing and out-dashing ones, who flew into the face of danger and
battled and died, but who never gave ground.  And, since it is the way of
kind to beget kind, Jerry was what Terrence was before him, and what
Terrence's forefathers had been for a long way back.

So it was that Jerry, when he chanced upon the wild-dog stowed shrewdly
away from the wind in the lee-corner made by the mainmast and the cabin
skylight, did not stop to consider whether the creature was bigger or
fiercer than he.  All he knew was that it was the ancient enemy--the wild-
dog that had not come in to the fires of man.  With a wild paean of joy
that attracted Captain Van Horn's all-hearing ears and all-seeing eyes,
Jerry sprang to the attack.  The wild puppy gained his feet in full
retreat with incredible swiftness, but was caught by the rush of Jerry's
body and rolled over and over on the sloping deck.  And as he rolled, and
felt sharp teeth pricking him, he snapped and snarled, alternating snarls
with whimperings and squallings of terror, pain, and abject humility.

And Jerry was a gentleman, which is to say he was a gentle dog.  He had
been so selected.  Because the thing did not fight back, because it was
abject and whining, because it was helpless under him, he abandoned the
attack, disengaging himself from the top of the tangle into which he had
slid in the lee scuppers.  He did not think about it.  He did it because
he was so made.  He stood up on the reeling deck, feeling excellently
satisfied with the delicious, wild-doggy smell of hair in his mouth and
consciousness, and in his ears and consciousness the praising cry of
Captain Van Horn: "Good boy, Jerry!  You're the goods, Jerry!  Some dog,
eh!  _Some_ dog!"

As he stalked away, it must be admitted that Jerry displayed pride in
himself, his gait being a trifle stiff-legged, the cocking of his head
back over his shoulder at the whining wild-dog having all the
articulateness of: "Well, I guess I gave you enough this time.  You'll
keep out of my way after this."

Jerry continued the exploration of his new and tiny world that was never
at rest, for ever lifting, heeling, and lunging on the rolling face of
the sea.  There were the Meringe return boys.  He made it a point to
identify all of them, receiving, while he did so, scowls and mutterings,
and reciprocating with cocky bullyings and threatenings.  Being so
trained, he walked on his four legs superior to them, two-legged though
they were; for he had moved and lived always under the aegis of the great
two-legged and be-trousered god, _Mister_ Haggin.

Then there were the strange return boys, from Pennduffryn and the Bay of
a Thousand Ships.  He insisted on knowing them all.  He might need to
know them in some future time.  He did not think this.  He merely
equipped himself with knowledge of his environment without any awareness
of provision or without bothering about the future.

In his own way of acquiring knowledge, he quickly discovered, just as on
the plantation house-boys were different from field-boys, that on the
_Arangi_ there was a classification of boys different from the return
boys.  This was the boat's crew.  The fifteen blacks who composed it were
closer than the others to Captain Van Horn.  They seemed more directly to
belong to the _Arangi_ and to him.  They laboured under him at word of
command, steering at the wheel, pulling and hauling on ropes, healing
water upon the deck from overside and scrubbing with brooms.

Just as Jerry had learned from _Mister_ Haggin that he must be more
tolerant of the house-boys than of the field-boys if they trespassed on
the compound, so, from Captain Van Horn, he learned that he must be more
tolerant of the boat's crew than of the return boys.  He had less license
with them, more license with the others.  As long as Captain Van Horn did
not want his boat's crew chased, it was Jerry's duty not to chase.  On
the other hand he never forgot that he was a white-god's dog.  While he
might not chase these particular blacks, he declined familiarity with
them.  He kept his eye on them.  He had seen blacks as tolerated as
these, lined up and whipped by _Mister_ Haggin.  They occupied an
intermediate place in the scheme of things, and they were to be watched
in case they did not keep their place.  He accorded them room, but he did
not accord them equality.  At the best, he could be stand-offishly
considerate of them.

He made thorough examination of the galley, a rude affair, open on the
open deck, exposed to wind and rain and storm, a small stove that was not
even a ship's stove, on which somehow, aided by strings and wedges,
commingled with much smoke, two blacks managed to cook the food for the
four-score persons on board.

Next, he was interested by a strange proceeding on the part of the boat's
crew.  Upright pipes, serving as stanchions, were being screwed into the
top of the _Arangi's_ rail so that they served to support three strands
of barbed wire that ran completely around the vessel, being broken only
at the gangway for a narrow space of fifteen inches.  That this was a
precaution against danger, Jerry sensed without a passing thought to it.
All his life, from his first impressions of life, had been passed in the
heart of danger, ever-impending, from the blacks.  In the plantation
house at Meringe, always the several white men had looked askance at the
many blacks who toiled for them and belonged to them.  In the
living-room, where were the eating-table, the billiard-table, and the
phonograph, stood stands of rifles, and in each bedroom, beside each bed,
ready to hand, had been revolvers and rifles.  As well, _Mister_ Haggin
and Derby and Bob had always carried revolvers in their belts when they
left the house to go among their blacks.

Jerry knew these noise-making things for what they were--instruments of
destruction and death.  He had seen live things destroyed by them, such
as puarkas, goats, birds, and crocodiles.  By means of such things the
white-gods by their will crossed space without crossing it with their
bodies, and destroyed live things.  Now he, in order to damage anything,
had to cross space with his body to get to it.  He was different.  He was
limited.  All impossible things were possible to the unlimited,
two-legged white-gods.  In a way, this ability of theirs to destroy
across space was an elongation of claw and fang.  Without pondering it,
or being conscious of it, he accepted it as he accepted the rest of the
mysterious world about him.

Once, even, had Jerry seen his _Mister_ Haggin deal death at a distance
in another noise-way.  From the veranda he had seen him fling sticks of
exploding dynamite into a screeching mass of blacks who had come raiding
from the Beyond in the long war canoes, beaked and black, carved and
inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which they had left hauled up on the beach
at the door of Meringe.

Many precautions by the white-gods had Jerry been aware of, and so,
sensing it almost in intangible ways, as a matter of course he accepted
this barbed-wire fence on the floating world as a mark of the persistence
of danger.  Disaster and death hovered close about, waiting the chance to
leap upon life and drag it down.  Life had to be very alive in order to
live was the law Jerry had learned from the little of life he knew.

Watching the rigging up of the barbed wire, Jerry's next adventure was an
encounter with Lerumie, the return boy from Meringe, who, only that
morning, on the beach embarking, had been rolled by Biddy, along with his
possessions into the surf.  The encounter occurred on the starboard side
of the skylight, alongside of which Lerumie was standing as he gazed into
a cheap trade-mirror and combed his kinky hair with a hand-carved comb of
wood.

Jerry, scarcely aware of Lerumie's presence, was trotting past on his way
aft to where Borckman, the mate, was superintending the stringing of the
barbed wire to the stanchions.  And Lerumie, with a side-long look to see
if the deed meditated for his foot was screened from observation, aimed a
kick at the son of his four-legged enemy.  His bare foot caught Jerry on
the sensitive end of his recently bobbed tail, and Jerry, outraged, with
the sense of sacrilege committed upon him, went instantly wild.

Captain Van Horn, standing aft on the port quarter, gauging the slant of
the wind on the sails and the inadequate steering of the black at the
wheel, had not seen Jerry because of the intervening skylight.  But his
eyes had taken in the shoulder movement of Lerumie that advertised the
balancing on one foot while the other foot had kicked.  And from what
followed, he divined what had already occurred.

Jerry's outcry, as he sprawled, whirled, sprang, and slashed, was a
veritable puppy-scream of indignation.  He slashed ankle and foot as he
received the second kick in mid-air; and, although he slid clear down the
slope of deck into the scuppers, he left on the black skin the red
tracery of his puppy-needle teeth.  Still screaming his indignation, he
clawed his way back up the steep wooden hill.

Lerumie, with another side-long look, knew that he was observed and that
he dare not go to extremes.  He fled along the skylight to escape down
the companionway, but was caught by Jerry's sharp teeth in his calf.
Jerry, attacking blindly, got in the way of the black's feet.  A long,
stumbling fall, accelerated by a sudden increase of wind in the sails,
ensued, and Lerumie, vainly trying to catch his footing, fetched up
against the three strands of barbed wire on the lee rail.

The deck-full of blacks shrieked their merriment, and Jerry, his rage
undiminished, his immediate antagonist out of the battle, mistaking
himself as the object of the laughter of the blacks, turned upon them,
charging and slashing the many legs that fled before him.  They dropped
down the cabin and forecastle companionways, ran out the bowsprit, and
sprang into the rigging till they were perched everywhere in the air like
monstrous birds.  In the end, the deck belonged to Jerry, save for the
boat's crew; for he had already learned to differentiate.  Captain Van
Horn was hilariously vocal of his praise, calling Jerry to him and giving
him man-thumps of joyful admiration.  Next, the captain turned to his
many passengers and orated in _beche_-_de_-_mer_ English.

"Hey!  You fella boy!  I make 'm big fella talk.  This fella dog he
belong along me.  One fella boy hurt 'm that fella dog--my word!--me
cross too much along that fella boy.  I knock 'm seven bells outa that
fella boy.  You take 'm care leg belong you.  I take 'm care dog belong
me.  Savve?"

And the passengers, still perched in the air, with gleaming black eyes
and with querulerus chirpings one to another, accepted the white man's
law.  Even Lerumie, variously lacerated by the barbed wire, did not scowl
nor mutter threats.  Instead, and bringing a roar of laughter from his
fellows and a twinkle into the skipper's eyes, he rubbed questing fingers
over his scratches and murmured: "My word!  Some big fella dog that
fella!"

It was not that Jerry was unkindly.  Like Biddy and Terrence, he was
fierce and unafraid; which attributes were wrapped up in his heredity.
And, like Biddy and Terrence, he delighted in nigger-chasing, which, in
turn, was a matter of training.  From his earliest puppyhood he had been
so trained.  Niggers were niggers, but white men were gods, and it was
the white-gods who had trained him to chase niggers and keep them in
their proper lesser place in the world.  All the world was held in the
hollow of the white man's hands.  The niggers--well, had not he seen them
always compelled to remain in their lesser place?  Had he not seen them,
on occasion, triced up to the palm-trees of the Meringe compound and
their backs lashed to ribbons by the white-gods?  Small wonder that a
high-born Irish terrier, in the arms of love of the white-god, should
look at niggers through white-god's eyes, and act toward niggers in the
way that earned the white-god's reward of praise.

It was a busy day for Jerry.  Everything about the _Arangi_ was new and
strange, and so crowded was she that exciting things were continually
happening.  He had another encounter with the wild-dog, who treacherously
attacked him in flank from ambuscade.  Trade boxes belonging to the
blacks had been irregularly piled so that a small space was left between
two boxes in the lower tier.  From this hole, as Jerry trotted past in
response to a call from the skipper, the wild-dog sprang, scratched his
sharp puppy-teeth into Jerry's yellow-velvet hide, and scuttled back into
his lair.

Again Jerry's feelings were outraged.  He could understand flank attack.
Often he and Michael had played at that, although it had only been
playing.  But to retreat without fighting from a fight once started was
alien to Jerry's ways and nature.  With righteous wrath he charged into
the hole after his enemy.  But this was where the wild-dog fought to best
advantage--in a corner.  When Jerry sprang up in the confined space he
bumped his head on the box above, and the next moment felt the snarling
impact of the other's teeth against his own teeth and jaw.

There was no getting at the wild-dog, no chance to rush against him whole
heartedly, with generous full weight in the attack.  All Jerry could do
was to crawl and squirm and belly forward, and always he was met by a
snarling mouthful of teeth.  Even so, he would have got the wild-dog in
the end, had not Borckman, in passing, reached in and dragged Jerry out
by a hind-leg.  Again came Captain Van Horn's call, and Jerry, obedient,
trotted on aft.

A meal was being served on deck in the shade of the spanker, and Jerry,
sitting between the two men received his share.  Already he had made the
generalization that of the two, the captain was the superior god, giving
many orders that the mate obeyed.  The mate, on the other hand, gave
orders to the blacks, but never did he give orders to the captain.
Furthermore, Jerry was developing a liking for the captain, so he
snuggled close to him.  When he put his nose into the captain's plate, he
was gently reprimanded.  But once, when he merely sniffed at the mate's
steaming tea-cup, her received a snub on the nose from the mate's grimy
forefinger.  Also, the mate did not offer him food.

Captain Van Horn gave him, first of all, a pannikin of oatmeal mush,
generously flooded with condensed cream and sweetened with a heaping
spoonful of sugar.  After that, on occasion, he gave him morsels of
buttered bread and slivers of fried fish from which he first carefully
picked the tiny bones.

His beloved _Mister_ Haggin had never fed him from the table at meal
time, and Jerry was beside himself with the joy of this delightful
experience.  And, being young, he allowed his eagerness to take
possession of him, so that soon he was unduly urging the captain for more
pieces of fish and of bread and butter.  Once, he even barked his demand.
This put the idea into the captain's head, who began immediately to teach
him to "speak."

At the end of five minutes he had learned to speak softly, and to speak
only once--a low, mellow, bell-like bark of a single syllable.  Also, in
this first five minutes, he had learned to "sit down," as distinctly
different from "lie down"; and that he must sit down whenever he spoke,
and that he must speak without jumping or moving from the sitting
position, and then must wait until the piece of food was passed to him.

Further, he had added three words to his vocabulary.  For ever after,
"speak" would mean to him "speak," and "sit down" would mean "sit down"
and would not mean "lie down."  The third addition to his vocabulary was
"Skipper."  That was the name he had heard the mate repeatedly call
Captain Van Horn.  And just as Jerry knew that when a human called
"Michael," that the call referred to Michael and not to Biddy, or
Terrence, or himself, so he knew that _Skipper_ was the name of the two-
legged white master of this new floating world.

"That isn't just a dog," was Van Horn's conclusion to the mate.  "There's
a sure enough human brain there behind those brown eyes.  He's six months
old.  Any boy of six years would be an infant phenomenon to learn in five
minutes all that he's just learned.  Why, Gott-fer-dang, a dog's brain
has to be like a man's.  If he does things like a man, he's got to think
like a man."





CHAPTER IV


The companionway into the main cabin was a steep ladder, and down this,
after his meal, Jerry was carried by the captain.  The cabin was a long
room, extending for the full width of the _Arangi_ from a lazarette aft
to a tiny room for'ard.  For'ard of this room, separated by a tight
bulkhead, was the forecastle where lived the boat's crew.  The tiny room
was shared between Van Horn and Borckman, while the main cabin was
occupied by the three-score and odd return boys.  They squatted about and
lay everywhere on the floor and on the long low bunks that ran the full
length of the cabin along either side.

In the little stateroom the captain tossed a blanket on the floor in a
corner, and he did not find it difficult to get Jerry to understand that
that was his bed.  Nor did Jerry, with a full stomach and weary from so
much excitement, find it difficult to fall immediately asleep.

An hour later he was awakened by the entrance of Borckman.  When he
wagged his stub of a tail and smiled friendly with his eyes, the mate
scowled at him and muttered angrily in his throat.  Jerry made no further
overtures, but lay quietly watching.  The mate had come to take a drink.
In truth, he was stealing the drink from Van Horn's supply.  Jerry did
not know this.  Often, on the plantation, he had seen the white men take
drinks.  But there was something somehow different in the manner of
Borckman's taking a drink.  Jerry was aware, vaguely, that there was
something surreptitious about it.  What was wrong he did not know, yet he
sensed the wrongness and watched suspiciously.

After the mate departed, Jerry would have slept again had not the
carelessly latched door swung open with a bang.  Opening his eyes,
prepared for any hostile invasion from the unknown, he fell to watching a
large cockroach crawling down the wall.  When he got to his feet and
warily stalked toward it, the cockroach scuttled away with a slight
rustling noise and disappeared into a crack.  Jerry had been acquainted
with cockroaches all his life, but he was destined to learn new things
about them from the particular breed that dwelt on the _Arangi_.

After a cursory examination of the stateroom he wandered out into the
cabin.  The blacks, sprawled about everywhere, but, conceiving it to be
his duty to his _Skipper_, Jerry made it a point to identify each one.
They scowled and uttered low threatening noises when he sniffed close to
them.  One dared to menace him with a blow, but Jerry, instead of
slinking away, showed his teeth and prepared to spring.  The black
hastily dropped the offending hand to his side and made soothing,
penitent noises, while others chuckled; and Jerry passed on his way.  It
was nothing new.  Always a blow was to be expected from blacks when white
men were not around.  Both the mate and the captain were on deck, and
Jerry, though unafraid, continued his investigations cautiously.

But at the doorless entrance to the lazarette aft, he threw caution to
the winds and darted in in pursuit of the new scent that came to his
nostrils.  A strange person was in the low, dark space whom he had never
smelled.  Clad in a single shift and lying on a coarse grass-mat spread
upon a pile of tobacco cases and fifty-pound tins of flour, was a young
black girl.

There was something furtive and lurking about her that Jerry did not fail
to sense, and he had long since learned that something was wrong when any
black lurked or skulked.  She cried out with fear as he barked an alarm
and pounced upon her.  Even though his teeth scratched her bare arm, she
did not strike at him.  Not did she cry out again.  She cowered down and
trembled and did not fight back.  Keeping his teeth locked in the hold he
had got on her flimsy shift, he shook and dragged at her, all the while
growling and scolding for her benefit and yelping a high clamour to bring
Skipper or the mate.

In the course of the struggle the girl over-balanced on the boxes and
tins and the entire heap collapsed.  This caused Jerry to yelp a more
frenzied alarm, while the blacks, peering in from the cabin, laughed with
cruel enjoyment.

When Skipper arrived, Jerry wagged his stump tail and, with ears laid
back, dragged and tugged harder than ever at the thin cotton of the
girl's garment.  He expected praise for what he had done, but when
Skipper merely told him to let go, he obeyed with the realization that
this lurking, fear-struck creature was somehow different, and must be
treated differently, from other lurking creatures.

Fear-struck she was, as it is given to few humans to be and still live.
Van Horn called her his parcel of trouble, and he was anxious to be rid
of the parcel, without, however, the utter annihilation of the parcel.  It
was this annihilation which he had saved her from when he bought her in
even exchange for a fat pig.

Stupid, worthless, spiritless, sick, not more than a dozen years old, no
delight in the eyes of the young men of her village, she had been
consigned by her disappointed parents to the cooking-pot.  When Captain
Van Horn first encountered her had been when she was the central figure
in a lugubrious procession on the banks of the Balebuli River.

Anything but a beauty--had been his appraisal when he halted the
procession for a pow-wow.  Lean from sickness, her skin mangy with the
dry scales of the disease called _bukua_, she was tied hand and foot and,
like a pig, slung from a stout pole that rested on the shoulders of the
bearers, who intended to dine off of her.  Too hopeless to expect mercy,
she made no appeal for help, though the horrible fear that possessed her
was eloquent in her wild-staring eyes.

In the universal beche-de-mer English, Captain Van Horn had learned that
she was not regarded with relish by her companions, and that they were on
their way to stake her out up to her neck in the running water of the
Balebuli.  But first, before they staked her, their plan was to dislocate
her joints and break the big bones of the arms and legs.  This was no
religious rite, no placation of the brutish jungle gods.  Merely was it a
matter of gastronomy.  Living meat, so treated, was made tender and
tasty, and, as her companions pointed out, she certainly needed to be put
through such a process.  Two days in the water, they told the captain,
ought to do the business.  Then they would kill her, build the fire, and
invite in a few friends.

After half an hour of bargaining, during which Captain Van Horn had
insisted on the worthlessness of the parcel, he had bought a fat pig
worth five dollars and exchanged it for her.  Thus, since he had paid for
the pig in trade goods, and since trade goods were rated at a hundred per
cent. profit, the girl had actually cost him two dollars and fifty cents.

And then Captain Van Horn's troubles had begun.  He could not get rid of
the girl.  Too well he knew the natives of Malaita to turn her over to
them anywhere on the island.  Chief Ishikola of Su'u had offered five
twenties of drinking coconuts for her, and Bau, a bush chief, had offered
two chickens on the beach at Malu.  But this last offer had been
accompanied by a sneer, and had tokened the old rascal's scorn of the
girl's scrawniness.  Failing to connect with the missionary brig, the
_Western_ _Cross_, on which she would not have been eaten, Captain Van
Horn had been compelled to keep her in the cramped quarters of the
_Arangi_ against a problematical future time when he would be able to
turn her over to the missionaries.

But toward him the girl had no heart of gratitude because she had no
brain of understanding.  She, who had been sold for a fat pig, considered
her pitiful role in the world to be unchanged.  Eatee she had been.  Eatee
she remained.  Her destination merely had been changed, and this big
fella white marster of the _Arangi_ would undoubtedly be her destination
when she had sufficiently fattened.  His designs on her had been
transparent from the first, when he had tried to feed her up.  And she
had outwitted him by resolutely eating no more than would barely keep her
alive.

As a result, she, who had lived in the bush all her days and never so
much as set foot in a canoe, rocked and rolled unendingly over the broad
ocean in a perpetual nightmare of fear.  In the beche-de-mer that was
current among the blacks of a thousand islands and ten thousand dialects,
the _Arangi's_ procession of passengers assured her of her fate.  "My
word, you fella Mary," one would say to her, "short time little bit that
big fella white marster kai-kai along you."  Or, another: "Big fella
white marster kai-kai along you, my word, belly belong him walk about too
much."

Kai-kai was the beche-de-mer for "eat."  Even Jerry knew that.  "Eat" did
not obtain in his vocabulary; but kai-kai did, and it meant all and more
than "eat," for it served for both noun and verb.

But the girl never replied to the jeering of the blacks.  For that
matter, she never spoke at all, not even to Captain Van Horn, who did not
so much as know her name.

It was late afternoon, after discovering the girl in the lazarette, when
Jerry again came on deck.  Scarcely had Skipper, who had carried him up
the steep ladder, dropped him on deck than Jerry made a new
discovery--land.  He did not see it, but he smelled it.  His nose went up
in the air and quested to windward along the wind that brought the
message, and he read the air with his nose as a man might read a
newspaper--the salt smells of the seashore and of the dank muck of
mangrove swamps at low tide, the spicy fragrances of tropic vegetation,
and the faint, most faint, acrid tingle of smoke from smudgy fires.

The trade, which had laid the _Arangi_ well up under the lee of this
outjutting point of Malaita, was now failing, so that she began to roll
in the easy swells with crashings of sheets and tackles and thunderous
flappings of her sails.  Jerry no more than cocked a contemptuous
quizzical eye at the mainsail anticking above him.  He knew already the
empty windiness of its threats, but he was careful of the mainsheet
blocks, and walked around the traveller instead of over it.

While Captain Van Horn, taking advantage of the calm to exercise the
boat's crew with the fire-arms and to limber up the weapons, was passing
out the Lee-Enfields from their place on top the cabin skylight, Jerry
suddenly crouched and began to stalk stiff-legged.  But the wild-dog,
three feet from his lair under the trade-boxes, was not unobservant.  He
watched and snarled threateningly.  It was not a nice snarl.  In fact, it
was as nasty and savage a snarl as all his life had been nasty and
savage.  Most small creatures were afraid of that snarl, but it had no
deterrent effect on Jerry, who continued his steady stalking.  When the
wild-dog sprang for the hole under the boxes, Jerry sprang after, missing
his enemy by inches.  Tossing overboard bits of wood, bottles and empty
tins, Captain Van Horn ordered the eight eager boat's crew with rifles to
turn loose.  Jerry was excited and delighted with the fusillade, and
added his puppy yelpings to the noise.  As the empty brass cartridges
were ejected, the return boys scrambled on the deck for them, esteeming
them as very precious objects and thrusting them, still warm, into the
empty holes in their ears.  Their ears were perforated with many of these
holes, the smallest capable of receiving a cartridge, while the larger
ones contained-clay pipes, sticks of tobacco, and even boxes of matches.
Some of the holes in the ear-lobes were so huge that they were plugged
with carved wooden cylinders three inches in diameter.

Mate and captain carried automatics in their belts, and with these they
turned loose, shooting away clip after clip to the breathless admiration
of the blacks for such marvellous rapidity of fire.  The boat's crew were
not even fair shots, but Van Horn, like every captain in the Solomons,
knew that the bush natives and salt-water men were so much worse shots,
and knew that the shooting of his boat's crew could be depended upon--if
the boat's crew itself did not turn against the ship in a pinch.

At first, Borckman's automatic jammed, and he received a caution from Van
Horn for his carelessness in not keeping it clean and thin-oiled.  Also,
Borckman was twittingly asked how many drinks he had taken, and if that
was what accounted for his shooting being under his average.  Borckman
explained that he had a touch of fever, and Van Horn deferred stating his
doubts until a few minutes later, squatting in the shade of the spanker
with Jerry in his arms, he told Jerry all about it.

"The trouble with him is the schnapps, Jerry," he explained.  "Gott-fer-
dang, it makes me keep all my watches and half of his.  And he says it's
the fever.  Never believe it, Jerry.  It's the schnapps--just the plain s-
c-h-n-a-p-p-s schnapps.  An' he's a good sailor-man, Jerry, when he's
sober.  But when he's schnappy he's sheer lunatic.  Then his noddle goes
pinwheeling and he's a blighted fool, and he'd snore in a gale and suffer
for sleep in a dead calm.--Jerry, you're just beginning to pad those four
little soft feet of yours into the world, so take the advice of one who
knows and leave the schnapps alone.  Believe me, Jerry, boy--listen to
your father--schnapps will never buy you anything."

Whereupon, leaving Jerry on deck to stalk the wild-dog, Captain Van Horn
went below into the tiny stateroom and took a long drink from the very
bottle from which Borckman was stealing.

The stalking of the wild-dog became a game, at least to Jerry, who was so
made that his heart bore no malice, and who hugely enjoyed it.  Also, it
gave him a delightful consciousness of his own mastery, for the wild-dog
always fled from him.  At least so far as dogs were concerned, Jerry was
cock of the deck of the _Arangi_.  It did not enter his head to query how
his conduct affected the wild-dog, though, in truth, he led that
individual a wretched existence.  Never, except when Jerry was below, did
the wild one dare venture more than several feet from his retreat, and he
went about in fear and trembling of the fat roly-poly puppy who was
unafraid of his snarl.

In the late afternoon, Jerry trotted aft, after having administered
another lesson to the wild-dog, and found Skipper seated on the deck,
back against the low rail, knees drawn up, and gazing absently off to
leeward.  Jerry sniffed his bare calf--not that he needed to identify it,
but just because he liked to, and in a sort of friendly greeting.  But
Van Horn took no notice, continuing to stare out across the sea.  Nor was
he aware of the puppy's presence.

Jerry rested the length of his chin on Skipper's knee and gazed long and
earnestly into Skipper's face.  This time Skipper knew, and was
pleasantly thrilled; but still he gave no sign.  Jerry tried a new tack.
Skipper's hand drooped idly, half open, from where the forearm rested on
the other knee.  Into the part-open hand Jerry thrust his soft golden
muzzle to the eyes and remained quite still.  Had he been situated to
see, he would have seen a twinkle in Skipper's eyes, which had been
withdrawn from the sea and were looking down upon him.  But Jerry could
not see.  He kept quiet a little longer, and then gave a prodigious
sniff.

This was too much for Skipper, who laughed with such genial heartiness as
to lay Jerry's silky ears back and down in self-deprecation of affection
and pleadingness to bask in the sunshine of the god's smile.  Also,
Skipper's laughter set Jerry's tail wildly bobbing.  The half-open hand
closed in a firm grip that gathered in the slack of the skin of one side
of Jerry's head and jowl.  Then the hand began to shake him back and
forth with such good will that he was compelled to balance back and forth
on all his four feet.

It was bliss to Jerry.  Nay, more, it was ecstasy.  For Jerry knew there
was neither anger nor danger in the roughness of the shake, and that it
was play of the sort that he and Michael had indulged in.  On occasion,
he had so played with Biddy and lovingly mauled her about.  And, on very
rare occasion, _Mister_ Haggin had lovingly mauled him about.  It was
speech to Jerry, full of unmistakable meaning.

As the shake grew rougher, Jerry emitted his most ferocious growl, which
grew more ferocious with the increasing violence of the shaking.  But
that, too, was play, a making believe to hurt the one he liked too well
to hurt.  He strained and tugged at the grip, trying to twist his jowl in
the slack of skin so as to reach a bite.

When Skipper, with a quick thrust, released him and shoved him clear, he
came back, all teeth and growl, to be again caught and shaken.  The play
continued, with rising excitement to Jerry.  Once, too quick for Skipper,
he caught his hand between teeth; but he did not bring them together.
They pressed lovingly, denting the skin, but there was no bite in them.

The play grew rougher, and Jerry lost himself in the play.  Still
playing, he grew so excited that all that had been feigned became actual.
This was battle a struggle against the hand that seized and shook him and
thrust him away.  The make-believe of ferocity passed out of his growls;
the ferocity in them became real.  Also, in the moments when he was
shoved away and was springing back to the attack, he yelped in
high-pitched puppy hysteria.  And Captain Van Horn, realizing, suddenly,
instead of clutching, extended his hand wide open in the peace sign that
is as ancient as the human hand.  At the same time his voice rang out the
single word, "Jerry!"  In it was all the imperativeness of reproof and
command and all the solicitous insistence of love.

Jerry knew and was checked back to himself.  He was instantly contrite,
all soft humility, ears laid back with pleadingness for forgiveness and
protestation of a warm throbbing heart of love.  Instantly, from an open-
mouthed, fang-bristling dog in full career of attack, he melted into a
bundle of softness and silkiness, that trotted to the open hand and
kissed it with a tongue that flashed out between white gleaming teeth
like a rose-red jewel.  And the next moment he was in Skipper's arms,
jowl against cheek, and the tongue was again flashing out in all the
articulateness possible for a creature denied speech.  It was a veritable
love-feast, as dear to one as to the other.

"Gott-fer-dang!" Captain Van Horn crooned.  "You're nothing but a bunch
of high-strung sensitiveness, with a golden heart in the middle and a
golden coat wrapped all around.  Gott-fer-dang, Jerry, you're gold, pure
gold, inside and out, and no dog was ever minted like you in all the
world.  You're heart of gold, you golden dog, and be good to me and love
me as I shall always be good to you and love you for ever and for ever."

And Captain Van Horn, who ruled the _Arangi_ in bare legs, a loin cloth,
and a sixpenny under-shirt, and ran cannibal blacks back and forth in the
blackbird trade with an automatic strapped to his body waking and
sleeping and with his head forfeit in scores of salt-water villages and
bush strongholds, and who was esteemed the toughest skipper in the
Solomons where only men who are tough may continue to live and esteem
toughness, blinked with sudden moisture in his eyes, and could not see
for the moment the puppy that quivered all its body of love in his arms
and kissed away the salty softness of his eyes.





CHAPTER V


And swift tropic night smote the _Arangi_, as she alternately rolled in
calms and heeled and plunged ahead in squalls under the lee of the
cannibal island of Malaita.  It was a stoppage of the south-east trade
wind that made for variable weather, and that made cooking on the exposed
deck galley a misery and sent the return boys, who had nothing to wet but
their skins, scuttling below.

The first watch, from eight to twelve, was the mate's; and Captain Van
Horn, forced below by the driving wet of a heavy rain squall, took Jerry
with him to sleep in the tiny stateroom.  Jerry was weary from the
manifold excitements of the most exciting day in his life; and he was
asleep and kicking and growling in his sleep, ere Skipper, with a last
look at him and a grin as he turned the lamp low, muttered aloud: "It's
that wild-dog, Jerry.  Get him.  Shake him.  Shake him hard."

So soundly did Jerry sleep, that when the rain, having robbed the
atmosphere of its last breath of wind, ceased and left the stateroom a
steaming, suffocating furnace, he did not know when Skipper, panting for
air, his loin cloth and undershirt soaked with sweat, arose, tucked
blanket and pillow under his arm, and went on deck.

Jerry only awakened when a huge three-inch cockroach nibbled at the
sensitive and hairless skin between his toes.  He awoke kicking the
offended foot, and gazed at the cockroach that did not scuttle, but that
walked dignifiedly away.  He watched it join other cockroaches that
paraded the floor.  Never had he seen so many gathered together at one
time, and never had he seen such large ones.  They were all of a size,
and they were everywhere.  Long lines of them poured out of cracks in the
walls and descended to join their fellows on the floor.

The thing was indecent--at least, in Jerry's mind, it was not to be
tolerated.  _Mister_ Haggin, Derby, and Bob had never tolerated
cockroaches, and their rules were his rules.  The cockroach was the
eternal tropic enemy.  He sprang at the nearest, pouncing to crush it to
the floor under his paws.  But the thing did what he had never known a
cockroach to do.  It arose in the air strong-flighted as a bird.  And as
if at a signal, all the multitude of cockroaches took wings of flight and
filled the room with their flutterings and circlings.

He attacked the winged host, leaping into the air, snapping at the flying
vermin, trying to knock them down with his paws.  Occasionally he
succeeded and destroyed one; nor did the combat cease until all the
cockroaches, as if at another signal, disappeared into the many cracks,
leaving the room to him.

Quickly, his next thought was: Where is Skipper?  He knew he was not in
the room, though he stood up on his hind-legs and investigated the low
bunk, his keen little nose quivering delightedly while he made little
sniffs of delight as he smelled the recent presence of Skipper.  And what
made his nose quiver and sniff, likewise made his stump of a tail bob
back and forth.

_But_ _where_ _was_ _Skipper_?  It was a thought in his brain that was as
sharp and definite as a similar thought would be in a human brain.  And
it similarly preceded action.  The door had been left hooked open, and
Jerry trotted out into the cabin where half a hundred blacks made queer
sleep-moanings, and sighings, and snorings.  They were packed closely
together, covering the floor as well as the long sweep of bunks, so that
he was compelled to crawl over their naked legs.  And there was no white
god about to protect him.  He knew it, but was unafraid.

Having made sure that Skipper was not in the cabin, Jerry prepared for
the perilous ascent of the steep steps that were almost a ladder, then
recollected the lazarette.  In he trotted and sniffed at the sleeping
girl in the cotton shift who believed that Van Horn was going to eat her
if he could succeed in fattening her.

Back at the ladder-steps, he looked up and waited in the hope that
Skipper might appear from above and carry him up.  Skipper had passed
that way, he knew, and he knew for two reasons.  It was the only way he
could have passed, and Jerry's nose told him that he had passed.  His
first attempt to climb the steps began well.  Not until a third of the
way up, as the _Arangi_ rolled in a sea and recovered with a jerk, did he
slip and fall.  Two or three boys awoke and watched him while they
prepared and chewed betel nut and lime wrapped in green leaves.

Twice, barely started, Jerry slipped back, and more boys, awakened by
their fellows, sat up and enjoyed his plight.  In the fourth attempt he
managed to gain half way up before he fell, coming down heavily on his
side.  This was hailed with low laughter and querulous chirpings that
might well have come from the throats of huge birds.  He regained his
feet, absurdly bristled the hair on his shoulders and absurdly growled
his high disdain of these lesser, two-legged things that came and went
and obeyed the wills of great, white-skinned, two-legged gods such as
Skipper and Mister Haggin.

Undeterred by his heavy fall, Jerry essayed the ladder again.  A
temporary easement of the _Arangi's_ rolling gave him his opportunity, so
that his forefeet were over the high combing of the companion when the
next big roll came.  He held on by main strength of his bent forelegs,
then scrambled over and out on deck.

Amidships, squatting on the deck near the sky-light, he investigated
several of the boat's crew and Lerumie.  He identified them
circumspectly, going suddenly stiff-legged as Lerumie made a low,
hissing, menacing noise.  Aft, at the wheel, he found a black steering,
and, near him, the mate keeping the watch.  Just as the mate spoke to him
and stooped to pat him, Jerry whiffed Skipper somewhere near at hand.
With a conciliating, apologetic bob of his tail, he trotted on up wind
and came upon Skipper on his back, rolled in a blanket so that only his
head stuck out, and sound asleep.

First of all Jerry needs must joyfully sniff him and joyfully wag his
tail.  But Skipper did not awake and a fine spray of rain, almost as thin
as mist, made Jerry curl up and press closely into the angle formed by
Skipper's head and shoulder.  This did awake him, for he uttered "Jerry"
in a low, crooning voice, and Jerry responded with a touch of his cold
damp nose to the other's cheek.  And then Skipper went to sleep again.
But not Jerry.  He lifted the edge of the blanket with his nose and
crawled across the shoulder until he was altogether inside.  This roused
Skipper, who, half-asleep, helped him to curl up.

Still Jerry was not satisfied, and he squirmed around until he lay in the
hollow of Skipper's arm, his head resting on Skipper's shoulder, when,
with a profound sigh of content, he fell asleep.

Several times the noises made by the boat's crew in trimming the sheets
to the shifting draught of air roused Van Horn, and each time,
remembering the puppy, he pressed him caressingly with his hollowed arm.
And each time, in his sleep, Jerry stirred responsively and snuggled
cosily to him.

For all that he was a remarkable puppy, Jerry had his limitations, and he
could never know the effect produced on the hard-bitten captain by the
soft warm contact of his velvet body.  But it made the captain remember
back across the years to his own girl babe asleep on his arm.  And so
poignantly did he remember, that he became wide awake, and many pictures,
beginning, with the girl babe, burned their torment in his brain.  No
white man in the Solomons knew what he carried about with him, waking and
often sleeping; and it was because of these pictures that he had come to
the Solomons in a vain effort to erase them.

First, memory-prodded by the soft puppy in his arm, he saw the girl and
the mother in the little Harlem flat.  Small, it was true, but
tight-packed with the happiness of three that made it heaven.

He saw the girl's flaxen-yellow hair darken to her mother's gold as it
lengthened into curls and ringlets until finally it became two thick long
braids.  From striving not to see these many pictures he came even to
dwelling upon them in the effort so to fill his consciousness as to keep
out the one picture he did not want to see.

He remembered his work, the wrecking car, and the wrecking crew that had
toiled under him, and he wondered what had become of Clancey, his right-
hand man.  Came the long day, when, routed from bed at three in the
morning to dig a surface car out of the wrecked show windows of a drug
store and get it back on the track, they had laboured all day clearing up
a half-dozen smash-ups and arrived at the car house at nine at night just
as another call came in.

"Glory be!" said Clancey, who lived in the next block from him.  He could
see him saying it and wiping the sweat from his grimy face.  "Glory be,
'tis a small matter at most, an' right in our neighbourhood--not a dozen
blocks away.  Soon as it's done we can beat it for home an' let the down-
town boys take the car back to the shop."

"We've only to jack her up for a moment," he had answered.

"What is it?" Billy Jaffers, another of the crew, asked.

"Somebody run over--can't get them out," he said, as they swung on board
the wrecking-car and started.

He saw again all the incidents of the long run, not omitting the delay
caused by hose-carts and a hook-and-ladder running to a cross-town fire,
during which time he and Clancey had joked Jaffers over the dates with
various fictitious damsels out of which he had been cheated by the
night's extra work.

Came the long line of stalled street-cars, the crowd, the police holding
it back, the two ambulances drawn up and waiting their freight, and the
young policeman, whose beat it was, white and shaken, greeting him with:
"It's horrible, man.  It's fair sickening.  Two of them.  We can't get
them out.  I tried.  One was still living, I think."

But he, strong man and hearty, used to such work, weary with the hard day
and with a pleasant picture of the bright little flat waiting him a dozen
blocks away when the job was done, spoke cheerfully, confidently, saying
that he'd have them out in a jiffy, as he stooped and crawled under the
car on hands and knees.

Again he saw himself as he pressed the switch of his electric torch and
looked.  Again he saw the twin braids of heavy golden hair ere his thumb
relaxed from the switch, leaving him in darkness.

"Is the one alive yet?" the shaken policeman asked.

And the question was repeated, while he struggled for will power
sufficient to press on the light.

He heard himself reply, "I'll tell you in a minute."

Again he saw himself look.  For a long minute he looked.

"Both dead," he answered quietly.  "Clancey, pass in a number three jack,
and get under yourself with another at the other end of the truck."

He lay on his back, staring straight up at one single star that rocked
mistily through a thinning of cloud-stuff overhead.  The old ache was in
his throat, the old harsh dryness in mouth and eyes.  And he knew--what
no other man knew--why he was in the Solomons, skipper of the teak-built
yacht _Arangi_, running niggers, risking his head, and drinking more
Scotch whiskey than was good for any man.

Not since that night had he looked with warm eyes on any woman.  And he
had been noted by other whites as notoriously cold toward pickanninnies
white or black.

But, having visioned the ultimate horror of memory, Van Horn was soon
able to fall asleep again, delightfully aware, as he drowsed off, of
Jerry's head on his shoulder.  Once, when Jerry, dreaming of the beach at
Meringe and of _Mister_ Haggin, Biddy, Terrence, and Michael, set up a
low whimpering, Van Horn roused sufficiently to soothe him closer to him,
and to mutter ominously: "Any nigger that'd hurt that pup. . . "

At midnight when the mate touched him on the shoulder, in the moment of
awakening and before he was awake Van Horn did two things automatically
and swiftly.  He darted his right hand down to the pistol at his hip, and
muttered: "Any nigger that'd hurt that pup . . ."

"That'll be Kopo Point abreast," Borckman explained, as both men stared
to windward at the high loom of the land.  "She hasn't made more than ten
miles, and no promise of anything steady."

"There's plenty of stuff making up there, if it'll ever come down," Van
Horn said, as both men transferred their gaze to the clouds drifting with
many breaks across the dim stars.

Scarcely had the mate fetched a blanket from below and turned in on deck,
than a brisk steady breeze sprang up from off the land, sending the
_Arangi_ through the smooth water at a nine-knot clip.  For a time Jerry
tried to stand the watch with Skipper, but he soon curled up and dozed
off, partly on the deck and partly on Skipper's bare feet.

When Skipper carried him to the blanket and rolled him in, he was quickly
asleep again; and he was quickly awake, out of the blanket, and padding
after along the deck as Skipper paced up and down.  Here began another
lesson, and in five minutes Jerry learned it was the will of Skipper that
he should remain in the blanket, that everything was all right, and that
Skipper would be up and down and near him all the time.

At four the mate took charge of the deck.

"Reeled off thirty miles," Van Horn told him.  "But now it is baffling
again.  Keep an eye for squalls under the land.  Better throw the
halyards down on deck and make the watch stand by.  Of course they'll
sleep, but make them sleep on the halyards and sheets."

Jerry roused to Skipper's entrance under the blanket, and, quite as if it
were a long-established custom, curled in between his arm and side, and,
after one happy sniff and one kiss of his cool little tongue, as Skipper
pressed his cheek against him caressingly, dozed off to sleep.

Half an hour later, to all intents and purposes, so far as Jerry could or
could not comprehend, the world might well have seemed suddenly coming to
an end.  What awoke him was the flying leap of Skipper that sent the
blanket one way and Jerry the other.  The deck of the _Arangi_ had become
a wall, down which Jerry slipped through the roaring dark.  Every rope
and shroud was thrumming and screeching in resistance to the fierce
weight of the squall.

"Stand by main halyards!--Jump!" he could hear Skipper shouting loudly;
also he heard the high note of the mainsheet screaming across the sheaves
as Van Horn, bending braces in the dark, was swiftly slacking the sheet
through his scorching palms with a single turn on the cleat.

While all this, along with many other noises, squealings of boat-boys and
shouts of Borckman, was impacting on Jerry's ear-drums, he was still
sliding down the steep deck of his new and unstable world.  But he did
not bring up against the rail where his fragile ribs might well have been
broken.  Instead, the warm ocean water, pouring inboard across the buried
rail in a flood of pale phosphorescent fire, cushioned his fall.  A
raffle of trailing ropes entangled him as he struck out to swim.

And he swam, not to save his life, not with the fear of death upon him.
There was but one idea in his mind.  _Where_ _was_ _Skipper_?  Not that
he had any thought of trying to save Skipper, nor that he might be of
assistance to him.  It was the heart of love that drives one always
toward the beloved.  As the mother in catastrophe tries to gain her babe,
as the Greek who, dying, remembered sweet Argos, as soldiers on a
stricken field pass with the names of their women upon their lips, so
Jerry, in this wreck of a world, yearned toward Skipper.

The squall ceased as abruptly as it had struck.  The _Arangi_ righted
with a jerk to an even keel, leaving Jerry stranded in the starboard
scuppers.  He trotted across the level deck to Skipper, who, standing
erect on wide-spread legs, the bight of the mainsheet still in his hand,
was exclaiming:

"Gott-fer-dang!  Wind he go!  Rain he no come!"

He felt Jerry's cool nose against his bare calf, heard his joyous sniff,
and bent and caressed him.  In the darkness he could not see, but his
heart warmed with knowledge that Jerry's tail was surely bobbing.

Many of the frightened return boys had crowded on deck, and their
plaintive, querulous voices sounded like the sleepy noises of a roost of
birds.  Borckman came and stood by Van Horn's shoulder, and both men,
strung to their tones in the tenseness of apprehension, strove to
penetrate the surrounding blackness with their eyes, while they listened
with all their ears for any message of the elements from sea and air.

"Where's the rain?" Borckman demanded peevishly.  "Always wind first, the
rain follows and kills the wind.  There is no rain."

Van Horn still stared and listened, and made no answer.

The anxiety of the two men was sensed by Jerry, who, too, was on his
toes.  He pressed his cool nose to Skipper's leg, and the rose-kiss of
his tongue brought him the salt taste of sea-water.

Skipper bent suddenly, rolled Jerry with quick toughness into the
blanket, and deposited him in the hollow between two sacks of yams lashed
on deck aft of the mizzenmast.  As an afterthought, he fastened the
blanket with a piece of rope yarn, so that Jerry was as if tied in a
sack.

Scarcely was this finished when the spanker smashed across overhead, the
headsails thundered with a sudden filling, and the great mainsail, with
all the scope in the boom-tackle caused by Van Horn's giving of the
sheet, came across and fetched up to tautness on the tackle with a crash
that shook the vessel and heeled her violently to port.  This second
knock-down had come from the opposite direction, and it was mightier than
the first.

Jerry heard Skipper's voice ring out, first, to the mate: "Stand by main-
halyards!  Throw off the turns!  I'll take care of the tackle!"; and,
next, to some of the boat's crew: "Batto! you fella slack spanker tackle
quick fella!  Ranga! you fella let go spanker sheet!"

Here Van Horn was swept off his legs by an avalanche of return boys who
had cluttered the deck with the first squall.  The squirming mass, of
which he was part, slid down into the barbed wire of the port rail
beneath the surface of the sea.

Jerry was so secure in his nook that he did not roll away.  But when he
heard Skipper's commands cease, and, seconds later, heard his cursings in
the barbed wire, he set up a shrill yelping and clawed and scratched
frantically at the blanket to get out.  Something had happened to
Skipper.  He knew that.  It was all that he knew, for he had no thought
of himself in the chaos of the ruining world.

But he ceased his yelping to listen to a new noise--a thunderous slatting
of canvas accompanied by shouts and cries.  He sensed, and sensed
wrongly, that it boded ill, for he did not know that it was the mainsail
being lowered on the run after Skipper had slashed the boom-tackle across
with his sheath-knife.

As the pandemonium grew, he added his own yelping to it until he felt a
fumbling hand without the blanket.  He stilled and sniffed.  No, it was
not Skipper.  He sniffed again and recognized the person.  It was
Lerumie, the black whom he had seen rolled on the beach by Biddy only the
previous morning, who, still were recently, had kicked him on his stub of
a tail, and who not more than a week before he had seen throw a rock at
Terrence.

The rope yarn had been parted, and Lerumie's fingers were feeling inside
the blanket for him.  Jerry snarled his wickedest.  The thing was
sacrilege.  He, as a white man's dog, was taboo to all blacks.  He had
early learned the law that no nigger must ever touch a white-god's dog.
Yet Lerumie, who was all of evil, at this moment when the world crashed
about their ears, was daring to touch him.

And when the fingers touched him, his teeth closed upon them.  Next, he
was clouted by the black's free hand with such force as to tear his
clenched teeth down the fingers through skin and flesh until the fingers
went clear.

Raging like a tiny fiend, Jerry found himself picked up by the neck, half-
throttled, and flung through the air.  And while flying through the air,
he continued to squall his rage.  He fell into the sea and went under,
gulping a mouthful of salt water into his lungs, and came up strangling
but swimming.  Swimming was one of the things he did not have to think
about.  He had never had to learn to swim, any more than he had had to
learn to breathe.  In fact, he had been compelled to learn to walk; but
he swam as a matter of course.

The wind screamed about him.  Flying froth, driven on the wind's breath,
filled his mouth and nostrils and beat into his eyes, stinging and
blinding him.  In the struggle to breathe he, all unlearned in the ways
of the sea, lifted his muzzle high in the air to get out of the
suffocating welter.  As a result, off the horizontal, the churning of his
legs no longer sustained him, and he went down and under perpendicularly.
Again he emerged, strangling with more salt water in his windpipe.  This
time, without reasoning it out, merely moving along the line of least
resistance, which was to him the line of greatest comfort, he
straightened out in the sea and continued so to swim as to remain
straightened out.

Through the darkness, as the squall spent itself, came the slatting of
the half-lowered mainsail, the shrill voices of the boat's crew, a curse
of Borckman's, and, dominating all, Skipper's voice, shouting:

"Grab the leech, you fella boys!  Hang on!  Drag down strong fella!  Come
in mainsheet two blocks!  Jump, damn you, jump!"





CHAPTER VI


At recognition of Skipper's voice, Jerry, floundering in the stiff and
crisping sea that sprang up with the easement of the wind, yelped eagerly
and yearningly, all his love for his new-found beloved eloquent in his
throat.  But quickly all sounds died away as the _Arangi_ drifted from
him.  And then, in the loneliness of the dark, on the heaving breast of
the sea that he recognized as one more of the eternal enemies, he began
to whimper and cry plaintively like a lost child.

Further, by the dim, shadowy ways of intuition, he knew his weakness in
that merciless sea with no heart of warmth, that threatened the
unknowable thing, vaguely but terribly guessed, namely, death.  As
regarded himself, he did not comprehend death.  He, who had never known
the time when he was not alive, could not conceive of the time when he
would cease to be alive.

Yet it was there, shouting its message of warning through every tissue
cell, every nerve quickness and brain sensitivity of him--a totality of
sensation that foreboded the ultimate catastrophe of life about which he
knew nothing at all, but which, nevertheless, he _felt_ to be the
conclusive supreme disaster.  Although he did not comprehend it, he
apprehended it no less poignantly than do men who know and generalize far
more deeply and widely than mere four-legged dogs.

As a man struggles in the throes of nightmare, so Jerry struggled in the
vexed, salt-suffocating sea.  And so he whimpered and cried, lost child,
lost puppy-dog that he was, only half a year existent in the fair world
sharp with joy and suffering.  And he _wanted_ _Skipper_.  Skipper was a
god.

* * * * *

On board the _Arangi_, relieved by the lowering of her mainsail, as the
fierceness went out of the wind and the cloudburst of tropic rain began
to fall, Van Horn and Borckman lurched toward each other in the
blackness.

"A double squall," said Van Horn.  "Hit us to starboard and to port."

"Must a-split in half just before she hit us," the mate concurred.

"And kept all the rain in the second half--"

Van Horn broke off with an oath.

"Hey!  What's the matter along you fella boy?" he shouted to the man at
the wheel.

For the ketch, under her spanker which had just then been flat-hauled,
had come into the wind, emptying her after-sail and permitting her
headsails to fill on the other tack.  The _Arangi_ was beginning to work
back approximately over the course she had just traversed.  And this
meant that she was going back toward Jerry floundering in the sea.  Thus,
the balance, on which his life titubated, was inclined in his favour by
the blunder of a black steersman.

Keeping the _Arangi_ on the new tack, Van Horn set Borckman clearing the
mess of ropes on deck, himself, squatting in the rain, undertaking to
long-splice the tackle he had cut.  As the rain thinned, so that the
crackle of it on deck became less noisy, he was attracted by a sound from
out over the water.  He suspended the work of his hands to listen, and,
when he recognized Jerry's wailing, sprang to his feet, galvanized into
action.

"The pup's overboard!" he shouted to Borckman.  "Back your jib to
wind'ard!"

He sprang aft, scattering a cluster of return boys right and left.

"Hey!  You fella boat's crew!  Come in spanker sheet!  Flatten her down
good fella!"

He darted a look into the binnacle and took a hurried compass bearing of
the sounds Jerry was making.

"Hard down your wheel!" he ordered the helmsman, then leaped to the wheel
and put it down himself, repeating over and over aloud, "Nor'east by east
a quarter, nor'east by east a quarter."

Back and peering into the binnacle, he listened vainly for another wail
from Jerry in the hope of verifying his first hasty bearing.  But not
long he waited.  Despite the fact that by his manoeuvre the _Arangi_ had
been hove to, he knew that windage and sea-driftage would quickly send
her away from the swimming puppy.  He shouted Borckman to come aft and
haul in the whaleboat, while he hurried below for his electric torch and
a boat compass.

The ketch was so small that she was compelled to tow her one whaleboat
astern on long double painters, and by the time the mate had it hauled in
under the stern, Van Horn was back.  He was undeterred by the barbed
wire, lifting boy after boy of the boat's crew over it and dropping them
sprawling into the boat, following himself, as the last, by swinging over
on the spanker boom, and calling his last instructions as the painters
were cast off.

"Get a riding light on deck, Borckman.  Keep her hove to.  Don't hoist
the mainsail.  Clean up the decks and bend the watch tackle on the main
boom."

He took the steering-sweep and encouraged the rowers with:
"Washee-washee, good fella, washee-washee!"--which is the beche-de-mer
for "row hard."

As he steered, he kept flashing the torch on the boat compass so that he
could keep headed north-east by east a quarter east.  Then he remembered
that the boat compass, on such course, deviated two whole points from the
_Arangi's_ compass, and altered his own course accordingly.

Occasionally he bade the rowers cease, while he listened and called for
Jerry.  He had them row in circles, and work back and forth, up to
windward and down to leeward, over the area of dark sea that he reasoned
must contain the puppy.

"Now you fella boy listen ear belong you," he said, toward the first.
"Maybe one fella boy hear 'm pickaninny dog sing out, I give 'm that
fella boy five fathom calico, two ten sticks tobacco."

At the end of half an hour he was offering "Two ten fathoms calico and
ten ten sticks tobacco" to the boy who first heard "pickaninny dog sing
out."

* * * * *

Jerry was in bad shape.  Not accustomed to swimming, strangled by the
salt water that lapped into his open mouth, he was getting loggy when
first he chanced to see the flash of the captain's torch.  This, however,
he did not connect with Skipper, and so took no more notice of it than he
did of the first stars showing in the sky.  It never entered his mind
that it might be a star nor even that it might not be a star.  He
continued to wail and to strangle with more salt water.  But when he at
length heard Skipper's voice he went immediately wild.  He attempted to
stand up and to rest his forepaws on Skipper's voice coming out of the
darkness, as he would have rested his forepaws on Skipper's leg had he
been near.  The result was disastrous.  Out of the horizontal, he sank
down and under, coming up with a new spasm of strangling.

This lasted for a short time, during which the strangling prevented him
from answering Skipper's cry, which continued to reach him.  But when he
could answer he burst forth in a joyous yelp.  Skipper was coming to take
him out of the stinging, biting sea that blinded his eyes and hurt him to
breathe.  Skipper was truly a god, his god, with a god's power to save.

Soon he heard the rhythmic clack of the oars on the thole-pins, and the
joy in his own yelp was duplicated by the joy in Skipper's voice, which
kept up a running encouragement, broken by objurgations to the rowers.

"All right, Jerry, old man.  All right, Jerry.  All right.--Washee-washee,
you fella boy!--Coming, Jerry, coming.  Stick it out, old man.  Stay with
it.--Washee-washee like hell!--Here we are, Jerry.  Stay with it.  Hang
on, old boy, we'll get you.--Easy . . . easy.  'Vast washee."

And then, with amazing abruptness, Jerry saw the whaleboat dimly emerge
from the gloom close upon him, was blinded by the stab of the torch full
in his eyes, and, even as he yelped his joy, felt and recognized
Skipper's hand clutching him by the slack of the neck and lifting him
into the air.

He landed wet and soppily against Skipper's rain-wet chest, his tail
bobbing frantically against Skipper's containing arm, his body wriggling,
his tongue dabbing madly all over Skipper's chin and mouth and cheeks and
nose.  And Skipper did not know that he was himself wet, and that he was
in the first shock of recurrent malaria precipitated by the wet and the
excitement.  He knew only that the puppy-dog, given him only the previous
morning, was safe back in his arms.

While the boat's crew bent to the oars, he steered with the sweep between
his arm and his side in order that he might hold Jerry with the other
arm.

"You little son of a gun," he crooned, and continued to croon, over and
over.  "You little son of a gun."

And Jerry responded with tongue-kisses, whimpering and crying as is the
way of lost children immediately after they are found.  Also, he shivered
violently.  But it was not from the cold.  Rather was it due to his over-
strung, sensitive nerves.

Again on board, Van Horn stated his reasoning to the mate.

"The pup didn't just calmly walk overboard.  Nor was he washed overboard.
I had him fast and triced in the blanket with a rope yarn."

He walked over, the centre of the boat's crew and of the three-score
return boys who were all on deck, and flashed his torch on the blanket
still lying on the yams.

"That proves it.  The rope-yarn's cut.  The knot's still in it.  Now what
nigger is responsible?"

He looked about at the circle of dark faces, flashing the light on them,
and such was the accusation and anger in his eyes, that all eyes fell
before his or looked away.

"If only the pup could speak," he complained.  "He'd tell who it was."

He bent suddenly down to Jerry, who was standing as close against his
legs as he could, so close that his wet forepaws rested on Skipper's bare
feet.

"You know 'm, Jerry, you known the black fella boy," he said, his words
quick and exciting, his hand moving in questing circles toward the
blacks.

Jerry was all alive on the instant, jumping about, barking with short
yelps of eagerness.

"I do believe the dog could lead me to him," Van Horn confided to the
mate.  "Come on, Jerry, find 'm, sick 'm, shake 'm down.  Where is he,
Jerry?  Find 'm.  Find 'm."

All that Jerry knew was that Skipper wanted something.  He must find
something that Skipper wanted, and he was eager to serve.  He pranced
about aimlessly and willingly for a space, while Skipper's urging cries
increased his excitement.  Then he was struck by an idea, and a most
definite idea it was.  The circle of boys broke to let him through as he
raced for'ard along the starboard side to the tight-lashed heap of trade-
boxes.  He put his nose into the opening where the wild-dog laired, and
sniffed.  Yes, the wild-dog was inside.  Not only did he smell him, but
he heard the menace of his snarl.

He looked up to Skipper questioningly.  Was it that Skipper wanted him to
go in after the wild-dog?  But Skipper laughed and waved his hand to show
that he wanted him to search in other places for something else.

He leaped away, sniffing in likely places where experience had taught him
cockroaches and rats might be.  Yet it quickly dawned on him that it was
not such things Skipper was after.  His heart was wild with desire to
serve, and, without clear purpose, he began sniffing legs of black boys.

This brought livelier urgings and encouragements from Skipper, and made
him almost frantic.  That was it.  He must identify the boat's crew and
the return boys by their legs.  He hurried the task, passing swiftly from
boy to boy, until he came to Lerumie.

And then he forgot that Skipper wanted him to do something.  All he knew
was that it was Lerumie who had broken the taboo of his sacred person by
laying hands on him, and that it was Lerumie who had thrown him
overboard.

With a cry of rage, a flash of white teeth, and a bristle of short neck-
hair, he sprang for the black.  Lerumie fled down the deck, and Jerry
pursued amid the laughter of all the blacks.  Several times, in making
the circuit of the deck, he managed to scratch the flying calves with his
teeth.  Then Lerumie took to the main rigging, leaving Jerry impotently
to rage on the deck beneath him.

About this point the blacks grouped in a semi-circle at a respectful
distance, with Van Horn to the fore beside Jerry.  Van Horn centred his
electric torch on the black in the rigging, and saw the long parallel
scratches on the fingers of the hand that had invaded Jerry's blanket.  He
pointed them out significantly to Borckman, who stood outside the circle
so that no black should be able to come at his back.

Skipper picked Jerry up and soothed his anger with:

"Good boy, Jerry.  You marked and sealed him.  Some dog, you, some big
man-dog."

He turned back to Lerumie, illuminating him as he clung in the rigging,
and his voice was harsh and cold as he addressed him.

"What name belong along you fella boy?" he demanded.

"Me fella Lerumie," came the chirping, quavering answer.

"You come along Pennduffryn?"

"Me come along Meringe."

Captain Van Horn debated the while he fondled the puppy in his arms.
After all, it was a return boy.  In a day, in two days at most, he would
have him landed and be quit of him.

"My word," he harangued, "me angry along you.  Me angry big fella too
much along you.  Me angry along you any amount.  What name you fella boy
make 'm pickaninny dog belong along me walk about along water?"

Lerumie was unable to answer.  He rolled his eyes helplessly, resigned to
receive a whipping such as he had long since bitterly learned white
masters were wont to administer.

Captain Van Horn repeated the question, and the black repeated the
helpless rolling of his eyes.

"For two sticks tobacco I knock 'm seven bells outa you," the skipper
bullied.  "Now me give you strong fella talk too much.  You look 'm eye
belong you one time along this fella dog belong me, I knock 'm seven
bells and whole starboard watch outa you.  Savve?"

"Me savve," Lerumie, plaintively replied; and the episode was closed.

The return boys went below to sleep in the cabin.  Borckman and the
boat's crew hoisted the mainsail and put the _Arangi_ on her course.  And
Skipper, under a dry blanket from below, lay down to sleep with Jerry,
head on his shoulder, in the hollow of his arm.




CHAPTER VII


At seven in the morning, when Skipper rolled him out of the blanket and
got up, Jerry celebrated the new day by chasing the wild-dog back into
his hole and by drawing a snicker from the blacks on deck, when, with a
growl and a flash of teeth, he made Lerumie side-step half a dozen feet
and yield the deck to him.

He shared breakfast with Skipper, who, instead of eating, washed down
with a cup of coffee fifty grains of quinine wrapped in a cigarette
paper, and who complained to the mate that he would have to get under the
blankets and sweat out the fever that was attacking him.  Despite his
chill, and despite his teeth that were already beginning to chatter while
the burning sun extracted the moisture in curling mist-wreaths from the
deck planking, Van Horn cuddled Jerry in his arms and called him
princeling, and prince, and a king, and a son of kings.

For Van Horn had often listened to the recitals of Jerry's pedigree by
Tom Haggin, over Scotch-and-sodas, when it was too pestilentially hot to
go to bed.  And the pedigree was as royal-blooded as was possible for an
Irish terrier to possess, whose breed, beginning with the ancient Irish
wolf-hound, had been moulded and established by man in less than two
generations of men.

There was Terrence the Magnificent--descended, as Van Horn remembered,
from the American-bred Milton Droleen, out of the Queen of County Antrim,
Breda Muddler, which royal bitch, as every one who is familiar with the
stud book knows, goes back as far as the almost mythical Spuds, with
along the way no primrose dallyings with black-and-tan Killeney Boys and
Welsh nondescripts.  And did not Biddy trace to Erin, mother and star of
the breed, through a long descendant out of Breda Mixer, herself an
ancestress of Breda Muddler?  Nor could be omitted from the purple record
the later ancestress, Moya Doolen.

So Jerry knew the ecstasy of loving and of being loved in the arms of his
love-god, although little he knew of such phrases as "king's son" and
"son of kings," save that they connoted love for him in the same way that
Lerumie's hissing noises connoted hate.  One thing Jerry knew without
knowing that he knew, namely, that in the few hours he had been with
Skipper he loved him more than he had loved Derby and Bob, who, with the
exception of Mister Haggin, were the only other white-gods he had ever
known.  He was not conscious of this.  He merely loved, merely acted on
the prompting of his heart, or head, or whatever organic or anatomical
part of him that developed the mysterious, delicious, and insatiable
hunger called "love."

Skipper went below.  He went all unheeding of Jerry, who padded softly at
his heels until the companionway was reached.  Skipper was unheeding of
Jerry because of the fever that wrenched his flesh and chilled his bones,
that made his head seem to swell monstrously, that glazed the world to
his swimming eyes and made him walk feebly and totteringly like a drunken
man or a man very aged.  And Jerry sensed that something was wrong with
Skipper.

Skipper, beginning the babblings of delirium which alternated with silent
moments of control in order to get below and under blankets, descended
the ladder-like stairs, and Jerry, all-yearning, controlled himself in
silence and watched the slow descent with the hope that when Skipper
reached the bottom he would raise his arms and lift him down.  But
Skipper was too far gone to remember that Jerry existed.  He staggered,
with wide-spread arms to keep from falling, along the cabin floor for'ard
to the bunk in the tiny stateroom.

Jerry was truly of a kingly line.  He wanted to call out and beg to be
taken down.  But he did not.  He controlled himself, he knew not why,
save that he was possessed by a nebulous awareness that Skipper must be
considered as a god should be considered, and that this was no time to
obtrude himself on Skipper.  His heart was torn with desire, although he
made no sound, and he continued only to yearn over the companion combing
and to listen to the faint sounds of Skipper's progress for'ard.

But even kings and their descendants have their limitations, and at the
end of a quarter of an hour Jerry was ripe to cease from his silence.
With the going below of Skipper, evidently in great trouble, the light
had gone out of the day for Jerry.  He might have stalked the wild-dog,
but no inducement lay there.  Lerumie passed by unnoticed, although he
knew he could bully him and make him give deck space.  The myriad scents
of the land entered his keen nostrils, but he made no note of them.  Not
even the flopping, bellying mainsail overhead, as the _Arangi_ rolled
becalmed, could draw a glance of quizzical regard from him.

Just as it was tremblingly imperative that Jerry must suddenly squat
down, point his nose at the zenith, and vocalize his heart-rending woe,
an idea came to him.  There is no explaining how this idea came.  No more
can it be explained than can a human explain why, at luncheon to-day, he
selects green peas and rejects string beans, when only yesterday he
elected to choose string beans and to reject green peas.  No more can it
be explained than can a human judge, sentencing a convicted criminal and
imposing eight years imprisonment instead of the five or nine years that
also at the same time floated upward in his brain, explain why he
categorically determined on eight years as the just, adequate punishment.
Since not even humans, who are almost half-gods, can fathom the mystery
of the genesis of ideas and the dictates of choice, appearing in their
consciousness as ideas, it is not to be expected of a more dog to know
the why of the ideas that animate it to definite acts toward definite
ends.

And so Jerry.  Just as he must immediately howl, he was aware that the
idea, an entirely different idea, was there, in the innermost centre of
the quick-thinkingness of him, with all its compulsion.  He obeyed the
idea as a marionette obeys the strings, and started forthwith down the
deck aft in quest of the mate.

He had an appeal to make to Borckman.  Borckman was also a two-legged
white-god.  Easily could Borckman lift him down the precipitous ladder,
which was to him, unaided, a taboo, the violation of which was pregnant
with disaster.  But Borckman had in him little of the heart of love,
which is understanding.  Also, Borckman was busy.  Besides overseeing the
continuous adjustment, by trimming of sails and orders to the helmsman,
of the _Arangi_ to her way on the sea, and overseeing the boat's crew at
its task of washing deck and polishing brasswork, he was engaged in
steadily nipping from a stolen bottle of his captain's whiskey which he
had stowed away in the hollow between the two sacks of yams lashed on
deck aft the mizzenmast.

Borckman was on his way for another nip, after having thickly threatened
to knock seven bells and the ten commandments out of the black at the
wheel for faulty steering, when Jerry appeared before him and blocked the
way to his desire.  But Jerry did not block him as he would have blocked
Lerumie, for instance.  There was no showing of teeth, no bristling of
neck hair.  Instead, Jerry was all placation and appeal, all softness of
pleading in a body denied speech that nevertheless was articulate, from
wagging tail and wriggling sides to flat-laid ears and eyes that almost
spoke, to any human sensitive of understanding.

But Borckman saw in his way only a four-legged creature of the brute
world, which, in his arrogant brutalness he esteemed more brute than
himself.  All the pretty picture of the soft puppy, instinct with
communicativeness, bursting with tenderness of petition, was veiled to
his vision.  What he saw was merely a four-legged animal to be thrust
aside while he continued his lordly two-legged progress toward the bottle
that could set maggots crawling in his brain and make him dream dreams
that he was prince, not peasant, that he was a master of matter rather
than a slave of matter.

And thrust aside Jerry was, by a rough and naked foot, as harsh and
unfeeling in its impact as an inanimate breaking sea on a beach-jut of
insensate rock.  He half-sprawled on the slippery deck, regained his
balance, and stood still and looked at the white-god who had treated him
so cavalierly.  The meanness and unfairness had brought from Jerry no
snarling threat of retaliation, such as he would have offered Lerumie or
any other black.  Nor in his brain was any thought of retaliation.  This
was no Lerumie.  This was a superior god, two-legged, white-skinned, like
Skipper, like Mister Haggin and the couple of other superior gods he had
known.  Only did he know hurt, such as any child knows under the blow of
a thoughtless or unloving mother.

In the hurt was mingled a resentment.  He was keenly aware that there
were two sorts of roughness.  There was the kindly roughness of love,
such as when Skipper gripped him by the jowl, shook him till his teeth
rattled, and thrust him away with an unmistakable invitation to come back
and be so shaken again.  Such roughness, to Jerry, was heaven.  In it was
the intimacy of contact with a beloved god who in such manner elected to
express a reciprocal love.

But this roughness of Borckman was different.  It was the other kind of
roughness in which resided no warm affection, no heart-touch of love.
Jerry did not quite understand, but he sensed the difference and
resented, without expressing in action, the wrongness and unfairness of
it.  So he stood, after regaining balance, and soberly regarded, in a
vain effort to understand, the mate with a bottle-bottom inverted
skyward, the mouth to his lips, the while his throat made gulping
contractions and noises.  And soberly he continued to regard the mate
when he went aft and threatened to knock the "Song of Songs" and the rest
of the Old Testament out of the black helmsman whose smile of teeth was
as humbly gentle and placating as Jerry's had been when he made his
appeal.

Leaving this god as a god unliked and not understood, Jerry sadly trotted
back to the companionway and yearned his head over the combing in the
direction in which he had seen Skipper disappear.  What bit at his
consciousness and was a painful incitement in it, was his desire to be
with Skipper who was not right, and who was in trouble.  He wanted
Skipper.  He wanted to be with him, first and sharply, because he loved
him, and, second and dimly, because he might serve him.  And, wanting
Skipper, in his helplessness and youngness in experience of the world, he
whimpered and cried his heart out across the companion combing, and was
too clean and direct in his sorrow to be deflected by an outburst of
anger against the niggers, on deck and below, who chuckled at him and
derided him.

From the crest of the combing to the cabin floor was seven feet.  He had,
only a few hours before, climbed the precipitous stairway; but it was
impossible, and he knew it, to descend the stairway.  And yet, at the
last, he dared it.  So compulsive was the prod of his heart to gain to
Skipper at any cost, so clear was his comprehension that he could not
climb down the ladder head first, with no grippingness of legs and feet
and muscles such as were possible in the ascent, that he did not attempt
it.  He launched outward and down, in one magnificent and love-heroic
leap.  He knew that he was violating a taboo of life, just as he knew he
was violating a taboo if he sprang into Meringe Lagoon where swam the
dreadful crocodiles.  Great love is always capable of expressing itself
in sacrifice and self-immolation.  And only for love, and for no lesser
reason, could Jerry have made the leap.

He struck on his side and head.  The one impact knocked the breath out of
him; the other stunned him.  Even in his unconsciousness, lying on his
side and quivering, he made rapid, spasmodic movements of his legs as if
running for'ard to Skipper.  The boys looked on and laughed, and when he
no longer quivered and churned his legs they continued to laugh.  Born in
savagery, having lived in savagery all their lives and known naught else,
their sense of humour was correspondingly savage.  To them, the sight of
a stunned and possibly dead puppy was a side-splitting, ludicrous event.

Not until the fourth minute ticked off did returning consciousness enable
Jerry to crawl to his feet and with wide-spread legs and swimming eyes
adjust himself to the _Arangi's_ roll.  Yet with the first glimmerings of
consciousness persisted the one idea that he must gain to Skipper.
Blacks?  In his anxiety and solicitude and love they did not count.  He
ignored the chuckling, grinning, girding black boys, who, but for the
fact that he was under the terrible aegis of the big fella white marster,
would have delighted to kill and eat the puppy who, in the process of
training, was proving a most capable nigger-chaser.  Without a turn of
head or roll of eye, aristocratically positing their non-existingness to
their faces, he trotted for'ard along the cabin floor and into the
stateroom where Skipper babbled maniacally in the bunk.

Jerry, who had never had malaria, did not understand.  But in his heart
he knew great trouble in that Skipper was in trouble.  Skipper did not
recognize him, even when he sprang into the bunk, walked a