Transcribed from the 1917 Mills & Boon edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
MICHAEL, BROTHER OF JERRY
FOREWORD
Very early in my life, possibly because of the insatiable curiosity that
was born in me, I came to dislike the performances of trained animals. It
was my curiosity that spoiled for me this form of amusement, for I was
led to seek behind the performance in order to learn how the performance
was achieved. And what I found behind the brave show and glitter of
performance was not nice. It was a body of cruelty so horrible that I am
confident no normal person exists who, once aware of it, could ever enjoy
looking on at any trained-animal turn.
Now I am not a namby-pamby. By the book reviewers and the namby-pambys I
am esteemed a sort of primitive beast that delights in the spilled blood
of violence and horror. Without arguing this matter of my general
reputation, accepting it at its current face value, let me add that I
have indeed lived life in a very rough school and have seen more than the
average man's share of inhumanity and cruelty, from the forecastle and
the prison, the slum and the desert, the execution-chamber and the lazar-
house, to the battlefield and the military hospital. I have seen
horrible deaths and mutilations. I have seen imbeciles hanged, because,
being imbeciles, they did not possess the hire of lawyers. I have seen
the hearts and stamina of strong men broken, and I have seen other men,
by ill-treatment, driven to permanent and howling madness. I have
witnessed the deaths of old and young, and even infants, from sheer
starvation. I have seen men and women beaten by whips and clubs and
fists, and I have seen the rhinoceros-hide whips laid around the naked
torsos of black boys so heartily that each stroke stripped away the skin
in full circle. And yet, let me add finally, never have I been so
appalled and shocked by the world's cruelty as have I been appalled and
shocked in the midst of happy, laughing, and applauding audiences when
trained-animal turns were being performed on the stage.
One with a strong stomach and a hard head may be able to tolerate much of
the unconscious and undeliberate cruelty and torture of the world that is
perpetrated in hot blood and stupidity. I have such a stomach and head.
But what turns my head and makes my gorge rise, is the cold-blooded,
conscious, deliberate cruelty and torment that is manifest behind ninety-
nine of every hundred trained-animal turns. Cruelty, as a fine art, has
attained its perfect flower in the trained-animal world.
Possessed myself of a strong stomach and a hard head, inured to hardship,
cruelty, and brutality, nevertheless I found, as I came to manhood, that
I unconsciously protected myself from the hurt of the trained-animal turn
by getting up and leaving the theatre whenever such turns came on the
stage. I say "unconsciously." By this I mean it never entered my mind
that this was a programme by which the possible death-blow might be given
to trained-animal turns. I was merely protecting myself from the pain of
witnessing what it would hurt me to witness.
But of recent years my understanding of human nature has become such that
I realize that no normal healthy human would tolerate such performances
did he or she know the terrible cruelty that lies behind them and makes
them possible. So I am emboldened to suggest, here and now, three
things:
First, let all humans inform themselves of the inevitable and eternal
cruelty by the means of which only can animals be compelled to perform
before revenue-paying audiences. Second, I suggest that all men and
women, and boys and girls, who have so acquainted themselves with the
essentials of the fine art of animal-training, should become members of,
and ally themselves with, the local and national organizations of humane
societies and societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals.
And the third suggestion I cannot state until I have made a preamble.
Like hundreds of thousands of others, I have worked in other fields,
striving to organize the mass of mankind into movements for the purpose
of ameliorating its own wretchedness and misery. Difficult as this is to
accomplish, it is still more difficult to persuade the human into any
organised effort to alleviate the ill conditions of the lesser animals.
Practically all of us will weep red tears and sweat bloody sweats as we
come to knowledge of the unavoidable cruelty and brutality on which the
trained-animal world rests and has its being. But not one-tenth of one
per cent. of us will join any organization for the prevention of cruelty
to animals, and by our words and acts and contributions work to prevent
the perpetration of cruelties on animals. This is a weakness of our own
human nature. We must recognize it as we recognize heat and cold, the
opaqueness of the non-transparent, and the everlasting down-pull of
gravity.
And still for us, for the ninety-nine and nine-tenths per cent. of us,
under the easy circumstance of our own weakness, remains another way most
easily to express ourselves for the purpose of eliminating from the world
the cruelty that is practised by some few of us, for the entertainment of
the rest of us, on the trained animals, who, after all, are only lesser
animals than we on the round world's surface. It is so easy. We will
not have to think of dues or corresponding secretaries. We will not have
to think of anything, save when, in any theatre or place of
entertainment, a trained-animal turn is presented before us. Then,
without premeditation, we may express our disapproval of such a turn by
getting up from our seats and leaving the theatre for a promenade and a
breath of fresh air outside, coming back, when the turn is over, to enjoy
the rest of the programme. All we have to do is just that to eliminate
the trained-animal turn from all public places of entertainment. Show
the management that such turns are unpopular, and in a day, in an
instant, the management will cease catering such turns to its audiences.
JACK LONDON
GLEN ELLEN, SONOMA COUNTY, CALIFORNIA,
December 8, 1915
CHAPTER I
But Michael never sailed out of Tulagi, nigger-chaser on the _Eugenie_.
Once in five weeks the steamer _Makambo_ made Tulagi its port of call on
the way from New Guinea and the Shortlands to Australia. And on the
night of her belated arrival Captain Kellar forgot Michael on the beach.
In itself, this was nothing, for, at midnight, Captain Kellar was back on
the beach, himself climbing the high hill to the Commissioner's bungalow
while the boat's crew vainly rummaged the landscape and canoe houses.
In fact, an hour earlier, as the _Makambo's_ anchor was heaving out and
while Captain Kellar was descending the port gang-plank, Michael was
coming on board through a starboard port-hole. This was because Michael
was inexperienced in the world, because he was expecting to meet Jerry on
board this boat since the last he had seen of him was on a boat, and
because he had made a friend.
Dag Daughtry was a steward on the _Makambo_, who should have known better
and who would have known better and done better had he not been
fascinated by his own particular and peculiar reputation. By luck of
birth possessed of a genial but soft disposition and a splendid
constitution, his reputation was that for twenty years he had never
missed his day's work nor his six daily quarts of bottled beer, even, as
he bragged, when in the German islands, where each bottle of beer carried
ten grains of quinine in solution as a specific against malaria.
The captain of the _Makambo_ (and, before that, the captains of the
_Moresby_, the _Masena_, the _Sir Edward Grace_, and various others of
the queerly named Burns Philp Company steamers had done the same) was
used to pointing him out proudly to the passengers as a man-thing novel
and unique in the annals of the sea. And at such times Dag Daughtry,
below on the for'ard deck, feigning unawareness as he went about his
work, would steal side-glances up at the bridge where the captain and his
passengers stared down on him, and his breast would swell pridefully,
because he knew that the captain was saying: "See him! that's Dag
Daughtry, the human tank. Never's been drunk or sober in twenty years,
and has never missed his six quarts of beer per diem. You wouldn't think
it, to look at him, but I assure you it's so. I can't understand. Gets
my admiration. Always does his time, his time-and-a-half and his double-
time over time. Why, a single glass of beer would give me heartburn and
spoil my next good meal. But he flourishes on it. Look at him! Look at
him!"
And so, knowing his captain's speech, swollen with pride in his own
prowess, Dag Daughtry would continue his ship-work with extra vigour and
punish a seventh quart for the day in advertisement of his remarkable
constitution. It was a queer sort of fame, as queer as some men are; and
Dag Daughtry found in it his justification of existence.
Wherefore he devoted his energy and the soul of him to the maintenance of
his reputation as a six-quart man. That was why he made, in odd moments
of off-duty, turtle-shell combs and hair ornaments for profit, and was
prettily crooked in such a matter as stealing another man's dog. Somebody
had to pay for the six quarts, which, multiplied by thirty, amounted to a
tidy sum in the course of the month; and, since that man was Dag
Daughtry, he found it necessary to pass Michael inboard on the _Makambo_
through a starboard port-hole.
On the beach, that night at Tulagi, vainly wondering what had become of
the whaleboat, Michael had met the squat, thick, hair-grizzled ship's
steward. The friendship between them was established almost instantly,
for Michael, from a merry puppy, had matured into a merry dog. Far
beyond Jerry, was he a sociable good fellow, and this, despite the fact
that he had known very few white men. First, there had been Mister
Haggin, Derby and Bob, of Meringe; next, Captain Kellar and Captain
Kellar's mate of the _Eugenie_; and, finally, Harley Kennan and the
officers of the _Ariel_. Without exception, he had found them all
different, and delightfully different, from the hordes of blacks he had
been taught to despise and to lord it over.
And Dag Daughtry had proved no exception from his first greeting of
"Hello, you white man's dog, what 'r' you doin' herein nigger country?"
Michael had responded coyly with an assumption of dignified aloofness
that was given the lie by the eager tilt of his ears and the good-humour
that shone in his eyes. Nothing of this was missed by Dag Daughtry, who
knew a dog when he saw one, as he studied Michael in the light of the
lanterns held by black boys where the whaleboats were landing cargo.
Two estimates the steward quickly made of Michael: he was a likable dog,
genial-natured on the face of it, and he was a valuable dog. Because of
those estimates Dag Daughtry glanced about him quickly. No one was
observing. For the moment, only blacks stood about, and their eyes were
turned seaward where the sound of oars out of the darkness warned them to
stand ready to receive the next cargo-laden boat. Off to the right,
under another lantern, he could make out the Resident Commissioner's
clerk and the _Makambo's_ super-cargo heatedly discussing some error in
the bill of lading.
The steward flung another quick glance over Michael and made up his mind.
He turned away casually and strolled along the beach out of the circle of
lantern light. A hundred yards away he sat down in the sand and waited.
"Worth twenty pounds if a penny," he muttered to himself. "If I couldn't
get ten pounds for him, just like that, with a thank-you-ma'am, I'm a
sucker that don't know a terrier from a greyhound.--Sure, ten pounds, in
any pub on Sydney beach."
And ten pounds, metamorphosed into quart bottles of beer, reared an
immense and radiant vision, very like a brewery, inside his head.
A scurry of feet in the sand, and low sniffings, stiffened him to
alertness. It was as he had hoped. The dog had liked him from the
start, and had followed him.
For Dag Daughtry had a way with him, as Michael was quickly to learn,
when the man's hand reached out and clutched him, half by the jowl, half
by the slack of the neck under the ear. There was no threat in that
reach, nothing tentative nor timorous. It was hearty, all-confident, and
it produced confidence in Michael. It was roughness without hurt,
assertion without threat, surety without seduction. To him it was the
most natural thing in the world thus to be familiarly seized and shaken
about by a total stranger, while a jovial voice muttered: "That's right,
dog. Stick around, stick around, and you'll wear diamonds, maybe."
Certainly, Michael had never met a man so immediately likable. Dag
Daughtry knew, instinctively to be sure, how to get on with dogs. By
nature there was no cruelty in him. He never exceeded in peremptoriness,
nor in petting. He did not overbid for Michael's friendliness. He did
bid, but in a manner that conveyed no sense of bidding. Scarcely had he
given Michael that introductory jowl-shake, when he released him and
apparently forgot all about him.
He proceeded to light his pipe, using several matches as if the wind blew
them out. But while they burned close up to his fingers, and while he
made a simulation of prodigious puffing, his keen little blue eyes, under
shaggy, grizzled brows, intently studied Michael. And Michael, ears
cocked and eyes intent, gazed at this stranger who seemed never to have
been a stranger at all.
If anything, it was disappointment Michael experienced, in that this
delightful, two-legged god took no further notice of him. He even
challenged him to closer acquaintance with an invitation to play, with an
abrupt movement lifting his paws from the ground and striking them down,
stretched out well before, his body bent down from the rump in such a
curve that almost his chest touched the sand, his stump of a tail waving
signals of good nature while he uttered a sharp, inviting bark. And the
man was uninterested, pulling stolidly away at his pipe, in the darkness
following upon the third match.
Never was there a more consummate love-making, with all the base intent
of betrayal, than this cavalier seduction of Michael by the elderly, six-
quart ship's steward. When Michael, not entirely unwitting of the snub
of the man's lack of interest, stirred restlessly with a threat to
depart, he had flung at him gruffly:
"Stick around, dog, stick around."
Dag Daughtry chuckled to himself, as Michael, advancing, sniffed his
trousers' legs long and earnestly. And the man took advantage of his
nearness to study him some more, lighting his pipe and running over the
dog's excellent lines.
"Some dog, some points," he said aloud approvingly. "Say, dog, you could
pull down ribbons like a candy-kid in any bench show anywheres. Only
thing against you is that ear, and I could almost iron it out myself. A
vet. could do it."
Carelessly he dropped a hand to Michael's ear, and, with tips of fingers
instinct with sensuous sympathy, began to manipulate the base of the ear
where its roots bedded in the tightness of skin-stretch over the skull.
And Michael liked it. Never had a man's hand been so intimate with his
ear without hurting it. But these fingers were provocative only of
physical pleasure so keen that he twisted and writhed his whole body in
acknowledgment.
Next came a long, steady, upward pull of the ear, the ear slipping slowly
through the fingers to the very tip of it while it tingled exquisitely
down to its roots. Now to one ear, now to the other, this happened, and
all the while the man uttered low words that Michael did not understand
but which he accepted as addressed to him.
"Head all right, good 'n' flat," Dag Daughtry murmured, first sliding his
fingers over it, and then lighting a match. "An' no wrinkles, 'n' some
jaw, good 'n' punishing, an' not a shade too full in the cheek or too
empty."
He ran his fingers inside Michael's mouth and noted the strength and
evenness of the teeth, measured the breadth of shoulders and depth of
chest, and picked up a foot. In the light of another match he examined
all four feet.
"Black, all black, every nail of them," said Daughtry, "an' as clean feet
as ever a dog walked on, straight-out toes with the proper arch 'n' small
'n' not too small. I bet your daddy and your mother cantered away with
the ribbons in their day."
Michael was for growing restless at such searching examination, but
Daughtry, in the midst of feeling out the lines and build of the thighs
and hocks, paused and took Michael's tail in his magic fingers, exploring
the muscles among which it rooted, pressing and prodding the adjacent
spinal column from which it sprang, and twisting it about in a most
daringly intimate way. And Michael was in an ecstasy, bracing his
hindquarters to one side or the other against the caressing fingers. With
open hands laid along his sides and partly under him, the man suddenly
lifted him from the ground. But before he could feel alarm he was back
on the ground again.
"Twenty-six or -seven--you're over twenty-five right now, I'll bet you on
it, shillings to ha'pennies, and you'll make thirty when you get your
full weight," Dag Daughtry told him. "But what of it? Lots of the
judges fancy the thirty-mark. An' you could always train off a few
ounces. You're all dog n' all correct conformation. You've got the
racing build and the fighting weight, an' there ain't no feathers on your
legs."
"No, sir, Mr. Dog, your weight's to the good, and that ear can be ironed
out by any respectable dog--doctor. I bet there's a hundred men in
Sydney right now that would fork over twenty quid for the right of
calling you his."
And then, just that Michael should not make the mistake of thinking he
was being much made over, Daughtry leaned back, relighted his pipe, and
apparently forgot his existence. Instead of bidding for good will, he
was bent on making Michael do the bidding.
And Michael did, bumping his flanks against Daughtry's knee; nudging his
head against Daughtry's hand, in solicitation for more of the blissful
ear-rubbing and tail-twisting. Daughtry caught him by the jowl instead
and slowly moved his head back and forth as he addressed him:
"What man's dog are you? Maybe you're a nigger's dog, an' that ain't
right. Maybe some nigger's stole you, an' that'd be awful. Think of the
cruel fates that sometimes happens to dogs. It's a damn shame. No white
man's stand for a nigger ownin' the likes of you, an' here's one white
man that ain't goin' to stand for it. The idea! A nigger ownin' you an'
not knowin' how to train you. Of course a nigger stole you. If I laid
eyes on him right now I'd up and knock seven bells and the Saint Paul
chimes out of 'm. Sure thing I would. Just show 'm to me, that's all,
an' see what I'd do to him. The idea of you takin' orders from a nigger
an' fetchin' 'n' carryin' for him! No, sir, dog, you ain't goin' to do
it any more. You're comin' along of me, an' I reckon I won't have to
urge you."
Dag Daughtry stood up and turned carelessly along the beach. Michael
looked after him, but did not follow. He was eager to, but had received
no invitation. At last Daughtry made a low kissing sound with his lips.
So low was it that he scarcely heard it himself and almost took it on
faith, or on the testimony of his lips rather than of his ears, that he
had made it. No human being could have heard it across the distance to
Michael; but Michael heard it, and sprang away after in a great delighted
rush.
CHAPTER II
Dag Daughtry strolled along the beach, Michael at his heels or running
circles of delight around him at every repetition of that strange low lip-
noise, and paused just outside the circle of lantern light where dusky
forms laboured with landing cargo from the whaleboats and where the
Commissioner's clerk and the _Makambo's_ super-cargo still wrangled over
the bill of lading. When Michael would have gone forward, the man
withstrained him with the same inarticulate, almost inaudible kiss.
For Daughtry did not care to be seen on such dog-stealing enterprises and
was planning how to get on board the steamer unobserved. He edged around
outside the lantern shine and went on along the beach to the native
village. As he had foreseen, all the able-bodied men were down at the
boat-landing working cargo. The grass houses seemed lifeless, but at
last, from one of them, came a challenge in the querulous, high-pitched
tones of age:
"What name?"
"Me walk about plenty too much," he replied in the beche-de-mer English
of the west South Pacific. "Me belong along steamer. Suppose 'm you
take 'm me along canoe, washee-washee, me give 'm you fella boy two stick
tobacco."
"Suppose 'm you give 'm me ten stick, all right along me," came the
reply.
"Me give 'm five stick," the six-quart steward bargained. "Suppose 'm
you no like 'm five stick then you fella boy go to hell close up."
There was a silence.
"You like 'm five stick?" Daughtry insisted of the dark interior.
"Me like 'm," the darkness answered, and through the darkness the body
that owned the voice approached with such strange sounds that the steward
lighted a match to see.
A blear-eyed ancient stood before him, balancing on a single crutch. His
eyes were half-filmed over by a growth of morbid membrane, and what was
not yet covered shone red and irritated. His hair was mangy, standing
out in isolated patches of wispy grey. His skin was scarred and wrinkled
and mottled, and in colour was a purplish blue surfaced with a grey
coating that might have been painted there had it not indubitably grown
there and been part and parcel of him.
A blighted leper--was Daughtry's thought as his quick eyes leapt from
hands to feet in quest of missing toe- and finger-joints. But in those
items the ancient was intact, although one leg ceased midway between knee
and thigh.
"My word! What place stop 'm that fella leg?" quoth Daughtry, pointing
to the space which the member would have occupied had it not been absent.
"Big fella shark-fish, that fella leg stop 'm along him," the ancient
grinned, exposing a horrible aperture of toothlessness for a mouth.
"Me old fella boy too much," the one-legged Methuselah quavered. "Long
time too much no smoke 'm tobacco. Suppose 'm you big fella white
marster give 'm me one fella stick, close up me washee-washee you that
fella steamer."
"Suppose 'm me no give?" the steward impatiently temporized.
For reply, the old man half-turned, and, on his crutch, swinging his
stump of leg in the air, began sidling hippity-hop into the grass hut.
"All right," Daughtry cried hastily. "Me give 'm you smoke 'm quick
fella."
He dipped into a side coat-pocket for the mintage of the Solomons and
stripped off a stick from the handful of pressed sticks. The old man was
transfigured as he reached avidly for the stick and received it. He
uttered little crooning noises, alternating with sharp cries akin to
pain, half-ecstatic, half-petulant, as he drew a black clay pipe from a
hole in his ear-lobe, and into the bowl of it, with trembling fingers,
untwisted and crumbled the cheap leaf of spoiled Virginia crop.
Pressing down the contents of the full bowl with his thumb, he suddenly
plumped upon the ground, the crutch beside him, the one limb under him so
that he had the seeming of a legless torso. From a small bag of twisted
coconut hanging from his neck upon his withered and sunken chest, he drew
out flint and steel and tinder, and, even while the impatient steward was
proffering him a box of matches, struck a spark, caught it in the tinder,
blew it into strength and quantity, and lighted his pipe from it.
With the first full puff of the smoke he gave over his moans and yelps,
the agitation began to fade out of him, and Daughtry, appreciatively
waiting, saw the trembling go out of his hands, the pendulous
lip-quivering cease, the saliva stop flowing from the corners of his
mouth, and placidity come into the fiery remnants of his eyes.
What the old man visioned in the silence that fell, Daughtry did not try
to guess. He was too occupied with his own vision, and vividly burned
before him the sordid barrenness of a poor-house ward, where an ancient,
very like what he himself would become, maundered and gibbered and
drooled for a crumb of tobacco for his old clay pipe, and where, of all
horrors, no sip of beer ever obtained, much less six quarts of it.
And Michael, by the dim glows of the pipe surveying the scene of the two
old men, one squatted in the dark, the other standing, knew naught of the
tragedy of age, and was only aware, and overwhelmingly aware, of the
immense likableness of this two-legged white god, who, with fingers of
magic, through ear-roots and tail-roots and spinal column, had won to the
heart of him.
The clay pipe smoked utterly out, the old black, by aid of the crutch,
with amazing celerity raised himself upstanding on his one leg and
hobbled, with his hippity-hop, to the beach. Daughtry was compelled to
lend his strength to the hauling down from the sand into the water of the
tiny canoe. It was a dug-out, as ancient and dilapidated as its owner,
and, in order to get into it without capsizing, Daughtry wet one leg to
the ankle and the other leg to the knee. The old man contorted himself
aboard, rolling his body across the gunwale so quickly, that, even while
it started to capsize, his weight was across the danger-point and
counterbalancing the canoe to its proper equilibrium.
Michael remained on the beach, waiting invitation, his mind not quite
made up, but so nearly so that all that was required was that lip-noise.
Dag Daughtry made the lip-noise so low that the old man did not hear, and
Michael, springing clear from sand to canoe, was on board without wetting
his feet. Using Daughtry's shoulder for a stepping-place, he passed over
him and down into the bottom of the canoe. Daughtry kissed with his lips
again, and Michael turned around so as to face him, sat down, and rested
his head on the steward's knees.
"I reckon I can take my affydavy on a stack of Bibles that the dog just
up an' followed me," he grinned in Michael's ear.
"Washee-washee quick fella," he commanded.
The ancient obediently dipped his paddle and started pottering an erratic
course in the general direction of the cluster of lights that marked the
_Makambo_. But he was too feeble, panting and wheezing continually from
the exertion and pausing to rest off strokes between strokes. The
steward impatiently took the paddle away from him and bent to the work.
Half-way to the steamer the ancient ceased wheezing and spoke, nodding
his head at Michael.
"That fella dog he belong big white marster along schooner . . . You give
'm me ten stick tobacco," he added after due pause to let the information
sink in.
"I give 'm you bang alongside head," Daughtry assured him cheerfully.
"White marster along schooner plenty friend along me too much. Just now
he stop 'm along _Makambo_. Me take 'm dog along him along _Makambo_."
There was no further conversation from the ancient, and though he lived
long years after, he never mentioned the midnight passenger in the canoe
who carried Michael away with him. When he saw and heard the confusion
and uproar on the beach later that night when Captain Kellar turned
Tulagi upside-down in his search for Michael, the old one-legged one
remained discreetly silent. Who was he to seek trouble with the strange
ones, the white masters who came and went and roved and ruled?
In this the ancient was in nowise unlike the rest of his dark-skinned
Melanesian race. The whites were possessed of unguessed and unthinkable
ways and purposes. They constituted another world and were as a play of
superior beings on an exalted stage where was no reality such as black
men might know as reality, where, like the phantoms of a dream, the white
men moved and were as shadows cast upon the vast and mysterious curtain
of the Cosmos.
The gang-plank being on the port side, Dag Daughtry paddled around to the
starboard and brought the canoe to a stop under a certain open port.
"Kwaque!" he called softly, once, and twice.
At the second call the light of the port was obscured apparently by a
head that piped down in a thin squeak.
"Me stop 'm, marster."
"One fella dog stop 'm along you," the steward whispered up. "Keep 'm
door shut. You wait along me. Stand by! Now!"
With a quick catch and lift, he passed Michael up and into unseen hands
outstretched from the iron wall of the ship, and paddled ahead to an open
cargo port. Dipping into his tobacco pocket, he thrust a loose handful
of sticks into the ancient's hand and shoved the canoe adrift with no
thought of how its helpless occupant would ever reach shore.
The old man did not touch the paddle, and he was unregardless of the
lofty-sided steamer as the canoe slipped down the length of it into the
darkness astern. He was too occupied in counting the wealth of tobacco
showered upon him. No easy task, his counting. Five was the limit of
his numerals. When he had counted five, he began over again and counted
a second five. Three fives he found in all, and two sticks over; and
thus, at the end of it, he possessed as definite a knowledge of the
number of sticks as would be possessed by the average white man by means
of the single number _seventeen_.
More it was, far more, than his avarice had demanded. Yet he was
unsurprised. Nothing white men did could surprise. Had it been two
sticks instead of seventeen, he would have been equally unsurprised.
Since all acts of white men were surprises, the only surprise of action
they could achieve for a black man would be the doing of an unsurprising
thing.
Paddling, wheezing, resting, oblivious of the shadow-world of the white
men, knowing only the reality of Tulagi Mountain cutting its crest-line
blackly across the dim radiance of the star-sprinkled sky, the reality of
the sea and of the canoe he so feebly urged across it, and the reality of
his fading strength and of the death into which he would surely end, the
ancient black man slowly made his shoreward way.
CHAPTER III
In the meanwhile, Michael. Lifted through the air, exchanged into
invisible hands that drew him through a narrow diameter of brass into a
lighted room, Michael looked about him in expectancy of Jerry. But
Jerry, at that moment, lay cuddled beside Villa Kennan's sleeping-cot on
the slant deck of the _Ariel_, as that trim craft, the Shortlands astern
and New Guinea dead ahead, heeled her scuppers a-whisper and garrulous to
the sea-welter alongside as she logged her eleven knots under the press
of the freshening trades. Instead of Jerry, from whom he had last parted
on board a boat, Michael saw Kwaque.
Kwaque? Well, Kwaque was Kwaque, an individual, more unlike all other
men than most men are unlike one another. No queerer estray ever drifted
along the stream of life. Seventeen years old he was, as men measure
time; but a century was measured in his lean-lined face, his wrinkled
forehead, his hollowed temples, and his deep-sunk eyes. From his thin
legs, fragile-looking as windstraws, the bones of which were sheathed in
withered skin with apparently no muscle padding in between--from such
frail stems sprouted the torso of a fat man. The huge and protuberant
stomach was amply supported by wide and massive hips, and the shoulders
were broad as those of a Hercules. But, beheld sidewise, there was no
depth to those shoulders and the top of the chest. Almost, at that part
of his anatomy, he seemed builded in two dimensions. Thin his arms were
as his legs, and, as Michael first beheld him, he had all the seeming of
a big-bellied black spider.
He proceeded to dress, a matter of moments, slipping into duck trousers
and blouse, dirty and frayed from long usage. Two fingers of his left
hand were doubled into a permanent bend, and, to an expert, would have
advertised that he was a leper. Although he belonged to Dag Daughtry
just as much as if the steward possessed a chattel bill of sale of him,
his owner did not know that his anaesthetic twist of ravaged nerves
tokened the dread disease.
The manner of the ownership was simple. At King William Island, in the
Admiralties, Kwaque had made, in the parlance of the South Pacific, a
pier-head jump. So to speak, leprosy and all, he had jumped into Dag
Daughtry's arms. Strolling along the native runways in the fringe of
jungle just beyond the beach, as was his custom, to see whatever he might
pick up, the steward had picked up Kwaque. And he had picked him up in
extremity.
Pursued by two very active young men armed with fire-hardened spears,
tottering along with incredible swiftness on his two spindle legs, Kwaque
had fallen exhausted at Daughtry's feet and looked up at him with the
beseeching eyes of a deer fleeing from the hounds. Daughtry had inquired
into the matter, and the inquiry was violent; for he had a wholesome fear
of germs and bacilli, and when the two active young men tried to run him
through with their filth-corroded spears, he caught the spear of one
young man under his arm and put the other young man to sleep with a left
hook to the jaw. A moment later the young man whose spear he held had
joined the other in slumber.
The elderly steward was not satisfied with the mere spears. While the
rescued Kwaque continued to moan and slubber thankfulness at his feet, he
proceeded to strip them that were naked. Nothing they wore in the way of
clothing, but from around each of their necks he removed a necklace of
porpoise teeth that was worth a gold sovereign in mere exchange value.
From the kinky locks of one of the naked young men he drew a hand-carved,
fine-toothed comb, the lofty back of which was inlaid with
mother-of-pearl, which he later sold in Sydney to a curio shop for eight
shillings. Nose and ear ornaments of bone and turtle-shell he also
rifled, as well as a chest-crescent of pearl shell, fourteen inches
across, worth fifteen shillings anywhere. The two spears ultimately
fetched him five shillings each from the tourists at Port Moresby. Not
lightly may a ship steward undertake to maintain a six-quart reputation.
When he turned to depart from the active young men, who, back to
consciousness, were observing him with bright, quick, wild-animal eyes,
Kwaque followed so close at his heels as to step upon them and make him
stumble. Whereupon he loaded Kwaque with his trove and put him in front
to lead along the runway to the beach. And for the rest of the way to
the steamer, Dag Daughtry grinned and chuckled at sight of his plunder
and at sight of Kwaque, who fantastically titubated and ambled along,
barrel-like, on his pipe-stems.
On board the steamer, which happened to be the _Cockspur_, Daughtry
persuaded the captain to enter Kwaque on the ship's articles as steward's
helper with a rating of ten shillings a month. Also, he learned Kwaque's
story.
It was all an account of a pig. The two active young men were brothers
who lived in the next village to his, and the pig had been theirs--so
Kwaque narrated in atrocious beche-de-mer English. He, Kwaque, had never
seen the pig. He had never known of its existence until after it was
dead. The two young men had loved the pig. But what of that? It did
not concern Kwaque, who was as unaware of their love for the pig as he
was unaware of the pig itself.
The first he knew, he averred, was the gossip of the village that the pig
was dead, and that somebody would have to die for it. It was all right,
he said, in reply to a query from the steward. It was the custom.
Whenever a loved pig died its owners were in custom bound to go out and
kill somebody, anybody. Of course, it was better if they killed the one
whose magic had made the pig sick. But, failing that one, any one would
do. Hence Kwaque was selected for the blood-atonement.
Dag Daughtry drank a seventh quart as he listened, so carried away was he
by the sombre sense of romance of this dark jungle event wherein men
killed even strangers because a pig was dead.
Scouts out on the runways, Kwaque continued, brought word of the coming
of the two bereaved pig-owners, and the village had fled into the jungle
and climbed trees--all except Kwaque, who was unable to climb trees.
"My word," Kwaque concluded, "me no make 'm that fella pig sick."
"My word," quoth Dag Daughtry, "you devil-devil along that fella pig too
much. You look 'm like hell. You make 'm any fella thing sick look
along you. You make 'm me sick too much."
It became quite a custom for the steward, as he finished his sixth bottle
before turning in, to call upon Kwaque for his story. It carried him
back to his boyhood when he had been excited by tales of wild cannibals
in far lands and dreamed some day to see them for himself. And here he
was, he would chuckle to himself, with a real true cannibal for a slave.
A slave Kwaque was, as much as if Daughtry had bought him on the auction-
block. Whenever the steward transferred from ship to ship of the Burns
Philp fleet, he always stipulated that Kwaque should accompany him and be
duly rated at ten shillings. Kwaque had no say in the matter. Even had
he desired to escape in Australian ports, there was no need for Daughtry
to watch him. Australia, with her "all-white" policy, attended to that.
No dark-skinned human, whether Malay, Japanese, or Polynesian, could land
on her shore without putting into the Government's hand a cash security
of one hundred pounds.
Nor at the other islands visited by the _Makambo_ had Kwaque any desire
to cut and run for it. King William Island, which was the only land he
had ever trod, was his yard-stick by which he measured all other islands.
And since King William Island was cannibalistic, he could only conclude
that the other islands were given to similar dietary practice.
As for King William Island, the _Makambo_, on the former run of the
_Cockspur_, stopped there every ten weeks; but the direst threat Daughtry
ever held over him was the putting ashore of him at the place where the
two active young men still mourned their pig. In fact, it was their
regular programme, each trip, to paddle out and around the _Makambo_ and
make ferocious grimaces up at Kwaque, who grimaced back at them from over
the rail. Daughtry even encouraged this exchange of facial amenities for
the purpose of deterring him from ever hoping to win ashore to the
village of his birth.
For that matter, Kwaque had little desire to leave his master, who, after
all, was kindly and just, and never lifted a hand to him. Having
survived sea-sickness at the first, and never setting foot upon the land
so that he never again knew sea-sickness, Kwaque was certain he lived in
an earthly paradise. He never had to regret his inability to climb
trees, because danger never threatened him. He had food regularly, and
all he wanted, and it was such food! No one in his village could have
dreamed of any delicacy of the many delicacies which he consumed all the
time. Because of these matters he even pulled through a light attack of
home-sickness, and was as contented a human as ever sailed the seas.
And Kwaque it was who pulled Michael through the port-hole into Dag
Daughtry's stateroom and waited for that worthy to arrive by the
roundabout way of the door. After a quick look around the room and a
sniff of the bunk and under the bunk which informed him that Jerry was
not present, Michael turned his attention to Kwaque.
Kwaque tried to be friendly. He uttered a clucking noise in
advertisement of his friendliness, and Michael snarled at this black who
had dared to lay hands upon him--a contamination, according to Michael's
training--and who now dared to address him who associated only with white
gods.
Kwaque passed off the rebuff with a silly gibbering laugh and started to
step nearer the door to be in readiness to open it at his master's
coming. But at first lift of his leg, Michael flew at it. Kwaque
immediately put it down, and Michael subsided, though he kept a watchful
guard. What did he know of this strange black, save that he was a black
and that, in the absence of a white master, all blacks required watching?
Kwaque tried slowly sliding his foot along the floor, but Michael knew
the trick and with bristle and growl put a stop to it.
It was upon this tableau that Daughtry entered, and, while he admired
Michael much under the bright electric light, he realized the situation.
"Kwaque, you make 'm walk about leg belong you," he commanded, in order
to make sure.
Kwaque's glance of apprehension at Michael was convincing enough, but the
steward insisted. Kwaque gingerly obeyed, but scarcely had his foot
moved an inch when Michael's was upon him. The foot and leg petrified,
while Michael stiff-leggedly drew a half-circle of intimidation about
him.
"Got you nailed to the floor, eh?" Daughtry chuckled. "Some
nigger-chaser, my word, any amount."
"Hey, you, Kwaque, go fetch 'm two fella bottle of beer stop 'm along
icey-chestis," he commanded in his most peremptory manner.
Kwaque looked beseechingly, but did not stir. Nor did he stir at a
harsher repetition of the order.
"My word!" the steward bullied. "Suppose 'm you no fetch 'm beer close
up, I knock 'm eight bells 'n 'a dog-watch onta you. Suppose 'm you no
fetch 'm close up, me make 'm you go ashore 'n' walk about along King
William Island."
"No can," Kwaque murmured timidly. "Eye belong dog look along me too
much. Me no like 'm dog kai-kai along me."
"You fright along dog?" his master demanded.
"My word, me fright along dog any amount."
Dag Daughtry was delighted. Also, he was thirsty from his trip ashore
and did not prolong the situation.
"Hey, you, dog," he addressed Michael. "This fella boy he all right.
Savvee? He all right."
Michael bobbed his tail and flattened his ears in token that he was
trying to understand. When the steward patted the black on the shoulder,
Michael advanced and sniffed both the legs he had kept nailed to the
floor.
"Walk about," Daughtry commanded. "Walk about slow fella," he cautioned,
though there was little need.
Michael bristled, but permitted the first timid step. At the second he
glanced up at Daughtry to make certain.
"That's right," he was reassured. "That fella boy belong me. He all
right, you bet."
Michael smiled with his eyes that he understood, and turned casually
aside to investigate an open box on the floor which contained plates of
turtle-shell, hack-saws, and emery paper.
* * * * *
"And now," Dag Daughtry muttered weightily aloud, as, bottle in hand, he
leaned back in his arm-chair while Kwaque knelt at his feet to unlace his
shoes, "now to consider a name for you, Mister Dog, that will be just to
your breeding and fair to my powers of invention."
CHAPTER IV
Irish terriers, when they have gained maturity, are notable, not alone
for their courage, fidelity, and capacity for love, but for their cool-
headedness and power of self-control and restraint. They are less easily
excited off their balance; they can recognize and obey their master's
voice in the scuffle and rage of battle; and they never fly into nervous
hysterics such as are common, say, with fox-terriers.
Michael possessed no trace of hysteria, though he was more
temperamentally excitable and explosive than his blood-brother Jerry,
while his father and mother were a sedate old couple indeed compared with
him. Far more than mature Jerry, was mature Michael playful and
rowdyish. His ebullient spirits were always on tap to spill over on the
slightest provocation, and, as he was afterwards to demonstrate, he could
weary a puppy with play. In short, Michael was a merry soul.
"Soul" is used advisedly. Whatever the human soul may be--informing
spirit, identity, personality, consciousness--that intangible thing
Michael certainly possessed. His soul, differing only in degree, partook
of the same attributes as the human soul. He knew love, sorrow, joy,
wrath, pride, self-consciousness, humour. Three cardinal attributes of
the human soul are memory, will, and understanding; and memory, will, and
understanding were Michael's.
Just like a human, with his five senses he contacted with the world
exterior to him. Just like a human, the results to him of these contacts
were sensations. Just like a human, these sensations on occasion
culminated in emotions. Still further, like a human, he could and did
perceive, and such perceptions did flower in his brain as concepts,
certainly not so wide and deep and recondite as those of humans, but
concepts nevertheless.
Perhaps, to let the human down a trifle from such disgraceful identity of
the highest life-attributes, it would be well to admit that Michael's
sensations were not quite so poignant, say in the matter of a
needle-thrust through his foot as compared with a needle-thrust through
the palm of a hand. Also, it is admitted, when consciousness suffused
his brain with a thought, that the thought was dimmer, vaguer than a
similar thought in a human brain. Furthermore, it is admitted that
never, never, in a million lifetimes, could Michael have demonstrated a
proposition in Euclid or solved a quadratic equation. Yet he was capable
of knowing beyond all peradventure of a doubt that three bones are more
than two bones, and that ten dogs compose a more redoubtable host than do
two dogs.
One admission, however, will not be made, namely, that Michael could not
love as devotedly, as wholeheartedly, unselfishly, madly,
self-sacrificingly as a human. He did so love--not because he was
Michael, but because he was a dog.
Michael had loved Captain Kellar more than he loved his own life. No
more than Jerry for Skipper, would he have hesitated to risk his life for
Captain Kellar. And he was destined, as time went by and the conviction
that Captain Kellar had passed into the inevitable nothingness along with
Meringe and the Solomons, to love just as absolutely this six-quart
steward with the understanding ways and the fascinating lip-caress.
Kwaque, no; for Kwaque was black. Kwaque he merely accepted, as an
appurtenance, as a part of the human landscape, as a chattel of Dag
Daughtry.
But he did not know this new god as Dag Daughtry. Kwaque called him
"marster"; but Michael heard other white men so addressed by the blacks.
Many blacks had he heard call Captain Kellar "marster." It was Captain
Duncan who called the steward "Steward." Michael came to hear him, and
his officers, and all the passengers, so call him; and thus, to Michael,
his god's name was Steward, and for ever after he was to know him and
think of him as Steward.
There was the question of his own name. The next evening after he came
on board, Dag Daughtry talked it over with him. Michael sat on his
haunches, the length of his lower jaw resting on Daughtry's knee, the
while his eyes dilated, contracted and glowed, his ears ever pricking and
repricking to listen, his stump tail thumping ecstatically on the floor.
"It's this way, son," the steward told him. "Your father and mother were
Irish. Now don't be denying it, you rascal--"
This, as Michael, encouraged by the unmistakable geniality and kindness
in the voice, wriggled his whole body and thumped double knocks of
delight with his tail. Not that he understood a word of it, but that he
did understand the something behind the speech that informed the string
of sounds with all the mysterious likeableness that white gods possessed.
"Never be ashamed of your ancestry. An' remember, God loves the
Irish--Kwaque! Go fetch 'm two bottle beer fella stop 'm along
icey-chestis!--Why, the very mug of you, my lad, sticks out Irish all
over it." (Michael's tail beat a tattoo.) "Now don't be blarneyin' me.
'Tis well I'm wise to your insidyous, snugglin', heart-stealin' ways.
I'll have ye know my heart's impervious. 'Tis soaked too long this many
a day in beer. I stole you to sell you, not to be lovin' you. I
could've loved you once; but that was before me and beer was introduced.
I'd sell you for twenty quid right now, coin down, if the chance offered.
An' I ain't goin' to love you, so you can put that in your pipe 'n' smoke
it."
"But as I was about to say when so rudely interrupted by your 'fectionate
ways--"
Here he broke off to tilt to his mouth the opened bottle Kwaque handed
him. He sighed, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, and proceeded.
"'Tis a strange thing, son, this silly matter of beer. Kwaque, the
Methusalem-faced ape grinnin' there, belongs to me. But by my faith do I
belong to beer, bottles 'n' bottles of it 'n' mountains of bottles of it
enough to sink the ship. Dog, truly I envy you, settin' there
comfortable-like inside your body that's untainted of alcohol. I may own
you, and the man that gives me twenty quid will own you, but never will a
mountain of bottles own you. You're a freer man than I am, Mister Dog,
though I don't know your name. Which reminds me--"
He drained the bottle, tossed it to Kwaque, and made signs for him to
open the remaining one.
"The namin' of you, son, is not lightly to be considered. Irish, of
course, but what shall it be? Paddy? Well may you shake your head.
There's no smack of distinction to it. Who'd mistake you for a
hod-carrier? Ballymena might do, but it sounds much like a lady, my boy.
Ay, boy you are. 'Tis an idea. Boy! Let's see. Banshee Boy? Rotten.
Lad of Erin!"
He nodded approbation and reached for the second bottle. He drank and
meditated, and drank again.
"I've got you," he announced solemnly. "Killeny is a lovely name, and
it's Killeny Boy for you. How's that strike your honourableness?--high-
soundin', dignified as a earl or . . . or a retired brewer. Many's the
one of that gentry I've helped to retire in my day."
He finished his bottle, caught Michael suddenly by both jowls, and,
leaning forward, rubbed noses with him. As suddenly released, with
thumping tail and dancing eyes, Michael gazed up into the god's face. A
definite soul, or entity, or spirit-thing glimmered behind his dog's
eyes, already fond with affection for this hair-grizzled god who talked
with him he knew not what, but whose very talking carried delicious and
unguessable messages to his heart.
"Hey! Kwaque, you!"
Kwaque, squatted on the floor, his hams on his heels, paused from the
rough-polishing of a shell comb designed and cut out by his master, and
looked up, eager to receive command and serve.
"Kwaque, you fella this time now savvee name stop along this fella dog.
His name belong 'm him, Killeny Boy. You make 'm name stop 'm inside
head belong you. All the time you speak 'm this fella dog, you speak 'm
Killeny Boy. Savvee? Suppose 'm you no savvee, I knock 'm block off
belong you. Killeny Boy, savvee! Killeny Boy. Killeny Boy."
As Kwaque removed his shoes and helped him undress, Daughtry regarded
Michael with sleepy eyes.
"I've got you, laddy," he announced, as he stood up and swayed toward
bed. "I've got your name, an' here's your number--I got that, too: _high-
strung but reasonable_. It fits you like the paper on the wall.
"High-strung but reasonable, that's what you are, Killeny Boy,
high-strung but reasonable," he continued to mumble as Kwaque helped to
roll him into his bunk.
Kwaque returned to his polishing. His lips stammered and halted in the
making of noiseless whispers, as, with corrugated brows of puzzlement, he
addressed the steward:
"Marster, what name stop 'm along that fella dog?"
"Killeny Boy, you kinky-head man-eater, Killeny Boy, Killeny Boy," Dag
Daughtry murmured drowsily. "Kwaque, you black blood-drinker, run n'
fetch 'm one fella bottle stop 'm along icey-chestis."
"No stop 'm, marster," the black quavered, with eyes alert for something
to be thrown at him. "Six fella bottle he finish altogether."
The steward's sole reply was a snore.
The black, with the twisted hand of leprosy and with a barely perceptible
infiltration of the same disease thickening the skin of the forehead
between the eyes, bent over his polishing, and ever his lips moved,
repeating over and over, "Killeny Boy."
CHAPTER V
For a number of days Michael saw only Steward and Kwaque. This was
because he was confined to the steward's stateroom. Nobody else knew
that he was on board, and Dag Daughtry, thoroughly aware that he had
stolen a white man's dog, hoped to keep his presence secret and smuggle
him ashore when the _Makambo_ docked in Sydney.
Quickly the steward learned Michael's pre-eminent teachableness. In the
course of his careful feeding of him, he gave him an occasional chicken
bone. Two lessons, which would scarcely be called lessons, since both of
them occurred within five minutes and each was not over half a minute in
duration, sufficed to teach Michael that only on the floor of the room in
the corner nearest the door could he chew chicken bones. Thereafter,
without prompting, as a matter of course when handed a bone, he carried
it to the corner.
And why not? He had the wit to grasp what Steward desired of him; he had
the heart that made it a happiness for him to serve. Steward was a god
who was kind, who loved him with voice and lip, who loved him with touch
of hand, rub of nose, or enfolding arm. As all service flourishes in the
soil of love, so with Michael. Had Steward commanded him to forego the
chicken bone after it was in the corner, he would have served him by
foregoing. Which is the way of the dog, the only animal that will
cheerfully and gladly, with leaping body of joy, leave its food uneaten
in order to accompany or to serve its human master.
Practically all his waking time off duty, Dag Daughtry spent with the
imprisoned Michael, who, at command, had quickly learned to refrain from
whining and barking. And during these hours of companionship Michael
learned many things. Daughtry found that he already understood and
obeyed simple things such as "no," "yes," "get up," and "lie down," and
he improved on them, teaching him, "Go into the bunk and lie down," "Go
under the bunk," "Bring one shoe," "Bring two shoes." And almost without
any work at all, he taught him to roll over, to say his prayers, to play
dead, to sit up and smoke a pipe with a hat on his head, and not merely
to stand up on his hind legs but to walk on them.
Then, too, was the trick of "no can and can do." Placing a savoury, nose-
tantalising bit of meat or cheese on the edge of the bunk on a level with
Michael's nose, Daughtry would simply say, "No can." Nor would Michael
touch the food till he received the welcome, "Can do." Daughtry, with
the "no can" still in force, would leave the stateroom, and, though he
remained away half an hour or half a dozen hours, on his return he would
find the food untouched and Michael, perhaps, asleep in the corner at the
head of the bunk which had been allotted him for a bed. Early in this
trick once when the steward had left the room and Michael's eager nose
was within an inch of the prohibited morsel, Kwaque, playfully inclined,
reached for the morsel himself and received a lacerated hand from the
quick flash and clip of Michael's jaws.
None of the tricks that he was ever eager to do for Steward, would
Michael do for Kwaque, despite the fact that Kwaque had no touch of
meanness or viciousness in him. The point was that Michael had been
trained, from his first dawn of consciousness, to differentiate between
black men and white men. Black men were always the servants of white
men--or such had been his experience; and always they were objects of
suspicion, ever bent on wreaking mischief and requiring careful watching.
The cardinal duty of a dog was to serve his white god by keeping a
vigilant eye on all blacks that came about.
Yet Michael permitted Kwaque to serve him in matters of food, water, and
other offices, at first in the absence of Steward attending to his ship
duties, and, later, at any time. For he realized, without thinking about
it at all, that whatever Kwaque did for him, whatever food Kwaque spread
for him, really proceeded, not from Kwaque, but from Kwaque's master who
was also his master. Yet Kwaque bore no grudge against Michael, and was
himself so interested in his lord's welfare and comfort--this lord who
had saved his life that terrible day on King William Island from the two
grief-stricken pig-owners--that he cherished Michael for his lord's sake.
Seeing the dog growing into his master's affection, Kwaque himself
developed a genuine affection for Michael--much in the same way that he
worshipped anything of the steward's, whether the shoes he polished for
him, the clothes he brushed and cleaned for him, or the six bottles of
beer he put into the ice-chest each day for him.
In truth, there was nothing of the master-quality in Kwaque, while
Michael was a natural aristocrat. Michael, out of love, would serve
Steward, but Michael lorded it over the kinky-head. Kwaque possessed
overwhelmingly the slave-nature, while in Michael there was little more
of the slave-nature than was found in the North American Indians when the
vain attempt was made to make them into slaves on the plantations of
Cuba. All of which was no personal vice of Kwaque or virtue of Michael.
Michael's heredity, rigidly selected for ages by man, was chiefly
composed of fierceness and faithfulness. And fierceness and
faithfulness, together, invariably produce pride. And pride cannot exist
without honour, nor can honour without poise.
Michael's crowning achievement, under Daughtry's tutelage, in the first
days in the stateroom, was to learn to count up to five. Many hours of
work were required, however, in spite of his unusual high endowment of
intelligence. For he had to learn, first, the spoken numerals; second,
to see with his eyes and in his brain differentiate between one object,
and all other groups of objects up to and including the group of five;
and, third, in his mind, to relate an object, or any group of objects,
with its numerical name as uttered by Steward.
In the training Dag Daughtry used balls of paper tied about with twine.
He would toss the five balls under the bunk and tell Michael to fetch
three, and neither two, nor four, but three would Michael bring forth and
deliver into his hand. When Daughtry threw three under the bunk and
demanded four, Michael would deliver the three, search about vainly for
the fourth, then dance pleadingly with bobs of tail and half-leaps about
Steward, and finally leap into the bed and secure the fourth from under
the pillow or among the blankets.
It was the same with other known objects. Up to five, whether shoes or
shirts or pillow-slips, Michael would fetch the number requested. And
between the mathematical mind of Michael, who counted to five, and the
mind of the ancient black at Tulagi, who counted sticks of tobacco in
units of five, was a distance shorter than that between Michael and Dag
Daughtry who could do multiplication and long division. In the same
manner, up the same ladder of mathematical ability, a still greater
distance separated Dag Daughtry from Captain Duncan, who by mathematics
navigated the _Makambo_. Greatest mathematical distance of all was that
between Captain Duncan's mind and the mind of an astronomer who charted
the heavens and navigated a thousand million miles away among the stars
and who tossed, a mere morsel of his mathematical knowledge, the few
shreds of information to Captain Duncan that enabled him to know from day
to day the place of the _Makambo_ on the sea.
In one thing only could Kwaque rule Michael. Kwaque possessed a jews'
harp, and, whenever the world of the _Makambo_ and the servitude to the
steward grew wearisome, he could transport himself to King William Island
by thrusting the primitive instrument between his jaws and fanning weird
rhythms from it with his hand, and when he thus crossed space and time,
Michael sang--or howled, rather, though his howl possessed the same soft
mellowness as Jerry's. Michael did not want to howl, but the chemistry
of his being was such that he reacted to music as compulsively as
elements react on one another in the laboratory.
While he lay perdu in Steward's stateroom, his voice was the one thing
that was not to be heard, so Kwaque was forced to seek the solace of his
jews' harp in the sweltering heat of the gratings over the fire-room. But
this did not continue long, for, either according to blind chance, or to
the lines of fate written in the book of life ere ever the foundations of
the world were laid, Michael was scheduled for an adventure that was
profoundly to affect, not alone his own destiny, but the destinies of
Kwaque and Dag Daughtry and determine the very place of their death and
burial.
CHAPTER VI
The adventure that was so to alter the future occurred when Michael, in
no uncertain manner, announced to all and sundry his presence on the
_Makambo_. It was due to Kwaque's carelessness, to commence with, for
Kwaque left the stateroom without tight-closing the door. As the
_Makambo_ rolled on an easy sea the door swung back and forth, remaining
wide open for intervals and banging shut but not banging hard enough to
latch itself.
Michael crossed the high threshold with the innocent intention of
exploring no farther than the immediate vicinity. But scarcely was he
through, when a heavier roll slammed the door and latched it. And
immediately Michael wanted to get back. Obedience was strong in him, for
it was his heart's desire to serve his lord's will, and from the few
days' confinement he sensed, or guessed, or divined, without thinking
about it, that it was Steward's will for him to stay in the stateroom.
For a long time he sat down before the closed door, regarding it
wistfully but being too wise to bark or speak to such inanimate object.
It had been part of his early puppyhood education to learn that only live
things could be moved by plea or threat, and that while things not alive
did move, as the door had moved, they never moved of themselves, and were
deaf to anything life might have to say to them. Occasionally he trotted
down the short cross-hall upon which the stateroom opened, and gazed up
and down the long hall that ran fore and aft.
For the better part of an hour he did this, returning always to the door
that would not open. Then he achieved a definite idea. Since the door
would not open, and since Steward and Kwaque did not return, he would go
in search of them. Once with this concept of action clear in his brain,
without timidities of hesitation and irresolution, he trotted aft down
the long hall. Going around the right angle in which it ended, he
encountered a narrow flight of steps. Among many scents, he recognized
those of Kwaque and Steward and knew they had passed that way.
Up the stairs and on the main deck, he began to meet passengers. Being
white gods, he did not resent their addresses to him, though he did not
linger and went out on the open deck where more of the favoured gods
reclined in steamer-chairs. Still no Kwaque or Steward. Another flight
of narrow, steep stairs invited, and he came out on the boat-deck. Here,
under the wide awnings, were many more of the gods--many times more than
he had that far seen in his life.
The for'ard end of the boat-deck terminated in the bridge, which, instead
of being raised above it, was part of it. Trotting around the
wheel-house to the shady lee-side of it, he came upon his fate; for be it
known that Captain Duncan possessed on board in addition to two
fox-terriers, a big Persian cat, and that cat possessed a litter of
kittens. Her chosen nursery was the wheel-house, and Captain Duncan had
humoured her, giving her a box for her kittens and threatening the
quartermasters with all manner of dire fates did they so much as step on
one of the kittens.
But Michael knew nothing of this. And the big Persian knew of his
existence before he did of hers. In fact, the first he knew was when she
launched herself upon him out of the open wheel-house doorway. Even as
he glimpsed this abrupt danger, and before he could know what it was, he
leaped sideways and saved himself. From his point of view, the assault
was unprovoked. He was staring at her with bristling hair, recognizing
her for what she was, a cat, when she sprang again, her tail the size of
a large man's arm, all claws and spitting fury and vindictiveness.
This was too much for a self-respecting Irish terrier. His wrath was
immediate with her second leap, and he sprang to the side to avoid her
claws, and in from the side to meet her, his jaws clamping together on
her spinal column with a jerk while she was still in mid-air. The next
moment she lay sprawling and struggling on the deck with a broken back.
But for Michael this was only the beginning. A shrill yelling, rather
than yelping, of more enemies made him whirl half about, but not quick
enough. Struck in flank by two full-grown fox-terriers, he was slashed
and rolled on the deck. The two, by the way, had long before made their
first appearance on the _Makambo_ as little puppies in Dag Daughtry's
coat pockets--Daughtry, in his usual fashion, having appropriated them
ashore in Sydney and sold them to Captain Duncan for a guinea apiece.
By this time, scrambling to his feet, Michael was really angry. In
truth, it was raining cats and dogs, such belligerent shower all
unprovoked by him who had picked no quarrels nor even been aware of his
enemies until they assailed him. Brave the fox-terriers were, despite
the hysterical rage they were in, and they were upon him as he got his
legs under him. The fangs of one clashed with his, cutting the lips of
both of them, and the lighter dog recoiled from the impact. The other
succeeded in taking Michael in flank, fetching blood and hurt with his
teeth. With an instant curve, that was almost spasmodic, of his body,
Michael flung his flank clear, leaving the other's mouth full of his
hair, and at the same moment drove his teeth through an ear till they
met. The fox-terrier, with a shrill yelp of pain, sprang back so
impetuously as to ribbon its ear as Michael's teeth combed through it.
The first terrier was back upon him, and he was whirling to meet it, when
a new and equally unprovoked assault was made upon him. This time it was
Captain Duncan, in a rage at sight of his slain cat. The instep of his
foot caught Michael squarely under the chest, half knocking the breath
out of him and wholly lifting him into the air, so that he fell heavily
on his side. The two terriers were upon him, filling their mouths with
his straight, wiry hair as they sank their teeth in. Still on his side,
as he was beginning to struggle to his feet, he clipped his jaws together
on a leg of one, who screamed with pain and retreated on three legs,
holding up the fourth, a fore leg, the bone of which Michael's teeth had
all but crushed.
Twice Michael slashed the other four-footed foe and then pursued him in a
circle with Captain Duncan pursuing him in turn. Shortening the distance
by leaping across a chord of the arc of the other's flight, Michael
closed his jaws on the back and side of the neck. Such abrupt arrest in
mid-flight by the heavier dog brought the fox-terrier down on deck with,
a heavy thump. Simultaneous with this, Captain Duncan's second kick
landed, communicating such propulsion to Michael as to tear his clenched
teeth through the flesh and out of the flesh of the fox-terrier.
And Michael turned on the Captain. What if he were a white god? In his
rage at so many assaults of so many enemies, Michael, who had been
peacefully looking for Kwaque and Steward, did not stop to reckon.
Besides, it was a strange white god upon whom he had never before laid
eyes.
At the beginning he had snarled and growled. But it was a more serious
affair to attack a god, and no sound came from him as he leaped to meet
the leg flying toward him in another kick. As with the cat, he did not
leap straight at it. To the side to avoid, and in with a curve of body
as it passed, was his way. He had learned the trick with many blacks at
Meringe and on board the _Eugenie_, so that as often he succeeded as
failed at it. His teeth came together in the slack of the white duck
trousers. The consequent jerk on Captain Duncan's leg made that
infuriated mariner lose his balance. Almost he fell forward on his face,
part recovered himself with a violent effort, stumbled over Michael who
was in for another bite, tottered wildly around, and sat down on the
deck.
How long he might have sat there to recover his breath is problematical,
for he rose as rapidly as his stoutness would permit, spurred on by
Michael's teeth already sunk into the fleshy part of his shoulder.
Michael missed his calf as he uprose, but tore the other leg of the
trousers to shreds and received a kick that lifted him a yard above the
deck in a half-somersault and landed him on his back on deck.
Up to this time the Captain had been on the ferocious offensive, and he
was in the act of following up the kick when Michael regained his feet
and soared up in the air, not for leg or thigh, but for the throat. Too
high it was for him to reach it, but his teeth closed on the flowing
black scarf and tore it to tatters as his weight drew him back to deck.
It was not this so much that turned Captain Duncan to the pure defensive
and started him retreating backward, as it was the silence of Michael.
Ominous as death it was. There were no snarls nor throat-threats. With
eyes straight-looking and unblinking, he sprang and sprang again. Neither
did he growl when he attacked nor yelp when he was kicked. Fear of the
blow was not in him. As Tom Haggin had so often bragged of Biddy and
Terrence, they bred true in Jerry and Michael in the matter of not
wincing at a blow. Always--they were so made--they sprang to meet the
blow and to encounter the creature who delivered the blow. With a
silence that was invested with the seriousness of death, they were wont
to attack and to continue to attack.
And so Michael. As the Captain retreated kicking, he attacked, leaping
and slashing. What saved Captain Duncan was a sailor with a deck mop on
the end of a stick. Intervening, he managed to thrust it into Michael's
mouth and shove him away. This first time his teeth closed automatically
upon it. But, spitting it out, he declined thereafter to bite it,
knowing it for what it was, an inanimate thing upon which his teeth could
inflict no hurt.
Nor, beyond trying to avoid him, was he interested in the sailor. It was
Captain Duncan, leaning his back against the rail, breathing heavily, and
wiping the streaming sweat from his face, who was Michael's meat. Long
as it has taken to tell the battle, beginning with the slaying of the
Persian cat to the thrusting of the mop into Michael's jaws, so swift had
been the rush of events that the passengers, springing from their deck-
chairs and hurrying to the scene, were just arriving when Michael eluded
the mop of the sailor by a successful dodge and plunged in on Captain
Duncan, this time sinking his teeth so savagely into a rotund calf as to
cause its owner to splutter an incoherent curse and howl of wrathful
surprise.
A fortunate kick hurled Michael away and enabled the sailor to intervene
once again with the mop. And upon the scene came Dag Daughtry, to behold
his captain, frayed and bleeding and breathing apoplectically, Michael
raging in ghastly silence at the end of a mop, and a large Persian mother-
cat writhing with a broken back.
"Killeny Boy!" the steward cried imperatively.
Through no matter what indignation and rage that possessed him, his
lord's voice penetrated his consciousness, so that, cooling almost
instantly, Michael's ears flattened, his bristling hair lay down, and his
lips covered his fangs as he turned his head to look acknowledgment.
"Come here, Killeny!"
Michael obeyed--not crouching cringingly, but trotting eagerly, gladly,
to Steward's feet.
"Lie down, Boy."
He turned half around as he flumped himself down with a sigh of relief,
and, with a red flash of tongue, kissed Steward's foot.
"Your dog, Steward?" Captain Duncan demanded in a smothered voice wherein
struggled anger and shortness of breath.
"Yes, sir. My dog. What's he been up to, sir?"
The totality of what Michael had been up to choked the Captain
completely. He could only gesture around from the dying cat to his torn
clothes and bleeding wounds and the fox-terriers licking their injuries
and whimpering at his feet.
"It's too bad, sir . . . " Daughtry began.
"Too bad, hell!" the captain shut him off. "Bo's'n! Throw that dog
overboard."
"Throw the dog overboard, sir, yes, sir," the boatswain repeated, but
hesitated.
Dag Daughtry's face hardened unconsciously with the stiffening of his
will to dogged opposition, which, in its own slow quiet way, would go to
any length to have its way. But he answered respectfully enough, his
features, by a shrewd effort, relaxing into a seeming of his customary
good-nature.
"He's a good dog, sir, and an unoffending dog. I can't imagine what
could a-made 'm break loose this way. He must a-had cause, sir--"
"He had," one of the passengers, a coconut planter from the Shortlands,
interjected.
The steward threw him a grateful glance and continued.
"He's a good dog, sir, a most obedient dog, sir--look at the way he
minded me right in the thick of the scrap an' come 'n' lay down. He's
smart as chain-lightnin', sir; do anything I tell him. I'll make him
make friends. See. . . "
Stepping over to the two hysterical terriers, Daughtry called Michael to
him.
"He's all right, savvee, Killeny, he all right," he crooned, at the same
time resting one hand on a terrier and the other on Michael.
The terrier whimpered and backed solidly against Captain Duncan's legs,
but Michael, with a slow bob of tail and unbelligerent ears, advanced to
him, looked up to Steward to make sure, then sniffed his late antagonist,
and even ran out his tongue in a caress to the side of the other's ear.
"See, sir, no bad feelings," Daughtry exulted. "He plays the game, sir.
He's a proper dog, he's a man-dog.--Here, Killeny! The other one. He
all right. Kiss and make up. That's the stuff."
The other fox-terrier, the one with the injured foreleg, endured
Michael's sniff with no more than hysterical growls deep in the throat;
but the flipping out of Michael's tongue was too much. The wounded
terrier exploded in a futile snap at Michael's tongue and nose.
"He all right, Killeny, he all right, sure," Steward warned quickly.
With a bob of his tail in token of understanding, without a shade of
resentment, Michael lifted a paw and with a playful casual stroke, dab-
like, brought its weight on the other's neck and rolled him,
head-downward, over on the deck. Though he snarled wrathily, Michael
turned away composedly and looked up into Steward's face for approval.
A roar of laughter from the passengers greeted the capsizing of the fox-
terrier and the good-natured gravity of Michael. But not alone at this
did they laugh, for at the moment of the snap and the turning over,
Captain Duncan's unstrung nerves had exploded, causing him to jump as he
tensed his whole body.
"Why, sir," the steward went on with growing confidence, "I bet I can
make him friends with you, too, by this time to-morrow . . . "
"By this time five minutes he'll be overboard," the captain answered.
"Bo's'n! Over with him!"
The boatswain advanced a tentative step, while murmurs of protest arose
from the passengers.
"Look at my cat, and look at me," Captain Duncan defended his action.
The boatswain made another step, and Dag Daughtry glared a threat at him.
"Go on!" the Captain commanded.
"Hold on!" spoke up the Shortlands planter. "Give the dog a square deal.
I saw the whole thing. He wasn't looking for trouble. First the cat
jumped him. She had to jump twice before he turned loose. She'd have
scratched his eyes out. Then the two dogs jumped him. He hadn't
bothered them. Then you jumped him. He hadn't bothered you. And then
came that sailor with the mop. And now you want the bo's'n to jump him
and throw him overboard. Give him a square deal. He's only been
defending himself. What do you expect any dog that is a dog to do?--lie
down and be walked over by every strange dog and cat that comes along?
Play the game, Skipper. You gave him some mighty hard kicks. He only
defended himself."
"He's some defender," Captain Duncan grinned, with a hint of the return
of his ordinary geniality, at the same time tenderly pressing his
bleeding shoulder and looking woefully down at his tattered duck
trousers. "All right, Steward. If you can make him friends with me in
five minutes, he stays on board. But you'll have to make it up to me
with a new pair of trousers."
"And gladly, sir, thank you, sir," Daughtry cried. "And I'll make it up
with a new cat as well, sir--Come on, Killeny Boy. This big fella
marster he all right, you bet."
And Michael listened. Not with the smouldering, smothering, choking
hysteria that still worked in the fox-terriers did he listen, nor with
quivering of muscles and jumps of over-wrought nerves, but coolly,
composedly, as if no battle royal had just taken place and no rips of
teeth and kicks of feet still burned and ached his body.
He could not help bristling, however, when first he sniffed a trousers'
leg into which his teeth had so recently torn.
"Put your hand down on him, sir," Daughtry begged.
And Captain Duncan, his own good self once more, bent and rested a firm,
unhesitating hand on Michael's head. Nay, more; he even caressed the
ears and rubbed about the roots of them. And Michael the merry-hearted,
who fought like a lion and forgave and forgot like a man, laid his neck
hair smoothly down, wagged his stump tail, smiled with his eyes and ears
and mouth, and kissed with his tongue the hand with which a short time
before he had been at war.
CHAPTER VII
For the rest of the voyage Michael had the run of the ship. Friendly to
all, he reserved his love for Steward alone, though he was not above many
an undignified romp with the fox-terriers.
"The most playful-minded dog, without being silly, I ever saw," was Dag
Daughtry's verdict to the Shortlands planter, to whom he had just sold
one of his turtle-shell combs. "You see, some dogs never get over the
play-idea, an' they're never good for anything else. But not Killeny
Boy. He can come down to seriousness in a second. I'll show you, and
I'll show you he's got a brain that counts to five an' knows wireless
telegraphy. You just watch."
At the moment the steward made his faint lip-noise--so faint that he
could not hear it himself and was almost for wondering whether or not he
had made it; so faint that the Shortlands planter did not dream that he
was making it. At that moment Michael was lying squirming on his back a
dozen feet away, his legs straight up in the air, both fox-terriers
worrying with well-stimulated ferociousness. With a quick out-thrust of
his four legs, he rolled over on his side and with questioning eyes and
pricked ears looked and listened. Again Daughtry made the lip-noise;
again the Shortlands planter did not hear nor guess; and Michael bounded
to his feet and to his lord's side.
"Some dog, eh?" the steward boasted.
"But how did he know you wanted him?" the planter queried. "You never
called him."
"Mental telepathy, the affinity of souls pitched in the same whatever-you-
call-it harmony," the steward mystified. "You see, Killeny an' me are
made of the same kind of stuff, only run into different moulds. He might
a-been my full brother, or me his, only for some mistake in the creation
factory somewhere. Now I'll show you he knows his bit of arithmetic."
And, drawing the paper balls from his pocket, Dag Daughtry demonstrated
to the amazement and satisfaction of the ring of passengers Michael's
ability to count to five.
"Why, sir," Daughtry concluded the performance, "if I was to order four
glasses of beer in a public-house ashore, an' if I was absent-minded an'
didn't notice the waiter 'd only brought three, Killeny Boy there 'd
raise a row instanter."
Kwaque was no longer compelled to enjoy his jews' harp on the gratings
over the fire-room, now that Michael's presence on the _Makambo_ was
known, and, in the stateroom, on stolen occasions, he made experiments of
his own with Michael. Once the jews' harp began emitting its barbaric
rhythms, Michael was helpless. He needs must open his mouth and pour
forth an unwilling, gushing howl. But, as with Jerry, it was not mere
howl. It was more akin to a mellow singing; and it was not long before
Kwaque could lead his voice up and down, in rough time and tune, within a
definite register.
Michael never liked these lessons, for, looking down upon Kwaque, he
hated in any way to be under the black's compulsion. But all this was
changed when Dag Daughtry surprised them at a singing lesson. He
resurrected the harmonica with which it was his wont, ashore in public-
houses, to while away the time between bottles. The quickest way to
start Michael singing, he discovered, was with minors; and, once started,
he would sing on and on for as long as the music played. Also, in the
absence of an instrument, Michael would sing to the prompting and
accompaniment of Steward's voice, who would begin by wailing "kow-kow"
long and sadly, and then branch out on some old song or ballad. Michael
had hated to sing with Kwaque, but he loved to do it with Steward, even
when Steward brought him on deck to perform before the laughter-shrieking
passengers.
Two serious conversations were held by the steward toward the close of
the voyage: one with Captain Duncan and one with Michael.
"It's this way, Killeny," Daughtry began, one evening, Michael's head
resting on his lord's knees as he gazed adoringly up into his lord's
face, understanding no whit of what was spoken but loving the intimacy
the sounds betokened. "I stole you for beer money, an' when I saw you
there on the beach that night I knew you'd bring ten quid anywheres. Ten
quid's a horrible lot of money. Fifty dollars in the way the Yankees
reckon it, an' a hundred Mex in China fashion.
"Now, fifty dollars gold 'd buy beer to beat the band--enough to drown me
if I fell in head first. Yet I want to ask you one question. Can you
see me takin' ten quid for you? . . . Go on. Speak up. Can you?"
And Michael, with thumps of tail to the floor and a high sharp bark,
showed that he was in entire agreement with whatever had been propounded.
"Or say twenty quid, now. That's a fair offer. Would I? Eh! Would I?
Not on your life. What d'ye say to fifty quid? That might begin to
interest me, but a hundred quid would interest me more. Why, a hundred
quid all in beer 'd come pretty close to floatin' this old hooker. But
who in Sam Hill'd offer a hundred quid? I'd like to clap eyes on him
once, that's all, just once. D'ye want to know what for? All right.
I'll whisper it. So as I could tell him to go to hell. Sure, Killeny
Boy, just like that--oh, most polite, of course, just a kindly directin'
of his steps where he'd never suffer from frigid extremities."
Michael's love for Steward was so profound as almost to be a mad but
enduring infatuation. What the steward's regard for Michael was coming
to be was best evidenced by his conversation with Captain Duncan.
"Sure, sir, he must 've followed me on board," Daughtry finished his
unveracious recital. "An' I never knew it. Last I seen of 'm was on the
beach. Next I seen of 'm there, he was fast asleep in my bunk. Now
how'd he get there, sir? How'd he pick out my room? I leave it to you,
sir. I call it marvellous, just plain marvellous."
"With a quartermaster at the head of the gangway!" Captain Duncan
snorted. "As if I didn't know your tricks, Steward. There's nothing
marvellous about it. Just a plain case of steal. Followed you on board?
That dog never came over the side. He came through a port-hole, and he
never came through by himself. That nigger of yours, I'll wager, had a
hand in the helping. But let's have done with beating about the bush.
Give me the dog, and I'll say no more about the cat."
"Seein' you believe what you believe, then you'd be for compoundin' the
felony," Daughtry retorted, the habitual obstinate tightening of his
brows showing which way his will set. "Me, sir, I'm only a ship's
steward, an' it wouldn't mean nothin' at all bein' arrested for
dog-stealin'; but you, sir, a captain of a fine steamer, how'd it sound
for you, sir? No, sir; it'd be much wiser for me to keep the dog that
followed me aboard."
"I'll give ten pounds in the bargain," the captain proffered.
"No, it wouldn't do, it wouldn't do at all, sir, an' you a captain," the
steward continued to reiterate, rolling his head sombrely. "Besides, I
know where's a peach of an Angora in Sydney. The owner is gone to the
country an' has no further use of it, an' it'd be a kindness to the cat,
air to give it a good regular home like the _Makambo_."
CHAPTER VIIII
Another trick Dag Daughtry succeeded in teaching Michael so enhanced him
in Captain Duncan's eyes as to impel him to offer fifty pounds, "and
never mind the cat." At first, Daughtry practised the trick in private
with the chief engineer and the Shortlands planter. Not until thoroughly
satisfied did he make a public performance of it.
"Now just suppose you're policemen, or detectives," Daughtry told the
first and third officers, "an' suppose I'm guilty of some horrible crime.
An' suppose Killeny is the only clue, an' you've got Killeny. When he
recognizes his master--me, of course--you've got your man. You go down
the deck with him, leadin' by the rope. Then you come back this way with
him, makin' believe this is the street, an' when he recognizes me you
arrest me. But if he don't realize me, you can't arrest me. See?"
The two officers led Michael away, and after several minutes returned
along the deck, Michael stretched out ahead on the taut rope seeking
Steward.
"What'll you take for the dog?" Daughtry demanded, as they drew near--this
the cue he had trained Michael to know.
And Michael, straining at the rope, went by, without so much as a wag of
tail to Steward or a glance of eye. The officers stopped before Daughtry
and drew Michael back into the group.
"He's a lost dog," said the first officer.
"We're trying to find his owner," supplemented the third.
"Some dog that--what'll you take for 'm?" Daughtry asked, studying
Michael with critical eyes of interest. "What kind of a temper's he
got?"
"Try him," was the answer.
The steward put out his hand to pat him on the head, but withdrew it
hastily as Michael, with bristle and growl, viciously bared his teeth.
"Go on, go on, he won't hurt you," the delighted passengers urged.
This time the steward's hand was barely missed by a snap, and he leaped
back as Michael ferociously sprang the length of the rope at him.
"Take 'm away!" Dag Daughtry roared angrily. "The treacherous beast! I
wouldn't take 'm for gift!"
And as they obeyed, Michael strained backward in a paroxysm of rage,
making fierce short jumps to the end of the tether as he snarled and
growled with utmost fierceness at the steward.
"Eh? Who'd say he ever seen me in his life?" Daughtry demanded
triumphantly. "It's a trick I never seen played myself, but I've heard
tell about it. The old-time poachers in England used to do it with their
lurcher dogs. If they did get the dog of a strange poacher, no
gamekeeper or constable could identify 'm by the dog--mum was the word."
"Tell you what, he knows things, that Killeny. He knows English. Right
now, in my room, with the door open, an' so as he can find 'm, is shoes,
slippers, cap, towel, hair-brush, an' tobacco pouch. What'll it be? Name
it an' he'll fetch it."
So immediately and variously did the passengers respond that every
article was called for.
"Just one of you choose," the steward advised. "The rest of you pick 'm
out."
"Slipper," said Captain Duncan, selected by acclamation.
"One or both?" Daughtry asked.
"Both."
"Come here, Killeny," Daughtry began, bending toward him but leaping back
from the snap of jaws that clipped together close to his nose.
"My mistake," he apologized. "I ain't told him the other game was over.
Now just listen an, watch. 'n' see if you can catch on to the tip I'm
goin' to give 'm."
No one saw anything, heard anything, yet Michael, with a whine of
eagerness and joy, with laughing mouth and wriggling body, was upon the
steward, licking his hands madly, squirming and twisting in the embrace
of the loved hands he had so recently threatened, making attempts at
short upward leaps as he flashed his tongue upward toward his lord's
face. For hard it was on Michael, a nerve and mental strain of the
severest for him so to control himself as to play-act anger and threat of
hurt to his beloved Steward.
"Takes him a little time to get over a thing like that," Daughtry
explained, as he soothed Michael down.
"Now, Killeny! Go fetch 'm slipper! Wait! Fetch 'm _one_ slipper.
Fetch 'm _two_ slipper."
Michael looked up with pricked ears, and with eyes filled with query as
all his intelligent consciousness suffused them.
"_Two_ slipper! Fetch 'm quick!"
He was off and away in a scurry of speed that seemed to flatten him close
to the deck, and that, as he turned the corner of the deck-house to the
stairs, made his hind feet slip and slide across the smooth planks.
Almost in a trice he was back, both slippers in his mouth, which he
deposited at the steward's feet.
"The more I know dogs the more amazin' marvellous they are to me," Dag
Daughtry, after he had compassed his fourth bottle, confided in monologue
to the Shortlands planter that night just before bedtime. "Take Killeny
Boy. He don't do things for me mechanically, just because he's learned
to do 'm. There's more to it. He does 'm because he likes me. I can't
give you the hang of it, but I feel it, I _know_ it.
"Maybe, this is what I'm drivin' at. Killeny can't talk, as you 'n' me
talk, I mean; so he can't tell me how he loves me, an' he's all love,
every last hair of 'm. An' actions speakin' louder 'n' words, he tells
me how he loves me by doin' these things for me. Tricks? Sure. But
they make human speeches of eloquence cheaper 'n dirt. Sure it's speech.
Dog-talk that's tongue-tied. Don't I know? Sure as I'm a livin' man
born to trouble as the sparks fly upward, just as sure am I that it makes
'm happy to do tricks for me . . . just as it makes a man happy to lend a
hand to a pal in a ticklish place, or a lover happy to put his coat
around the girl he loves to keep her warm. I tell you . . . "
Here, Dag Daughtry broke down from inability to express the concepts
fluttering in his beer-excited, beer-sodden brain, and, with a stutter or
two, made a fresh start.
"You know, it's all in the matter of talkin', an' Killeny can't talk.
He's got thoughts inside that head of his--you can see 'm shinin' in his
lovely brown eyes--but he can't get 'em across to me. Why, I see 'm
tryin' to tell me sometimes so hard that he almost busts. There's a big
hole between him an' me, an' language is about the only bridge, and he
can't get over the hole, though he's got all kinds of ideas an' feelings
just like mine.
"But, say! The time we get closest together is when I play the harmonica
an' he yow-yows. Music comes closest to makin' the bridge. It's a
regular song without words. And . . . I can't explain how . . . but just
the same, when we've finished our song, I know we've passed a lot over to
each other that don't need words for the passin'."
"Why, d'ye know, when I'm playin' an' he's singin', it's a regular duet
of what the sky-pilots 'd call religion an' knowin' God. Sure, when we
sing together I'm absorbin' religion an' gettin' pretty close up to God.
An' it's big, I tell you. Big as the earth an' ocean an' sky an' all the
stars. I just seem to get hold of a sense that we're all the same stuff
after all--you, me, Killeny Boy, mountains, sand, salt water, worms,
mosquitoes, suns, an' shootin' stars an' blazin comets . . . "
Day Daughtry left his flight as beyond his own grasp of speech, and
concluded, his half embarrassment masked by braggadocio over Michael:
"Oh, believe me, they don't make dogs like him every day in the week.
Sure, I stole 'm. He looked good to me. An' if I had it over, knowin'
as I do known 'm now, I'd steal 'm again if I lost a leg doin' it. That's
the kind of a dog _he_ is."
CHAPTER IX
The morning the _Makambo_ entered Sydney harbour, Captain Duncan had
another try for Michael. The port doctor's launch was coming alongside,
when he nodded up to Daughtry, who was passing along the deck:
"Steward, I'll give you twenty pounds."
"No, sir, thank you, sir," was Dag Daughtry's answer. "I couldn't bear
to part with him."
"Twenty-five pounds, then. I can't go beyond that. Besides, there are
plenty more Irish terriers in the world."
"That's what I'm thinkin', sir. An' I'll get one for you. Right here in
Sydney. An' it won't cost you a penny, sir."
"But I want Killeny Boy," the captain persisted.
"An' so do I, which is the worst of it, sir. Besides, I got him first."
"Twenty-five sovereigns is a lot of money . . . for a dog," Captain
Duncan said.
"An' Killeny Boy's a lot of dog . . . for the money," the steward
retorted. "Why, sir, cuttin' out all sentiment, his tricks is worth more
'n that. Him not recognizing me when I don't want 'm to is worth fifty
pounds of itself. An' there's his countin' an' his singin', an' all the
rest of his tricks. Now, no matter how I got him, he didn't have them
tricks. Them tricks are mine. I taught him them. He ain't the dog he
was when he come on board. He's a whole lot of me now, an' sellin' him
would be like sellin' a piece of myself."
"Thirty pounds," said the captain with finality.
"No, sir, thankin' you just the same, sir," was Daughtry's refusal.
And Captain Duncan was forced to turn away in order to greet the port
doctor coming over the side.
Scarcely had the _Makambo_ passed quarantine, and while on her way up
harbour to dock, when a trim man-of-war launch darted in to her side and
a trim lieutenant mounted the _Makambo's_ boarding-ladder. His mission
was quickly explained. The _Albatross_, British cruiser of the second
class, of which he was fourth lieutenant, had called in at Tulagi with
dispatches from the High Commissioner of the English South Seas. A scant
twelve hours having intervened between her arrival and the _Makambo's_
departure, the Commissioner of the Solomons and Captain Kellar had been
of the opinion that the missing dog had been carried away on the steamer.
Knowing that the _Albatross_ would beat her to Sydney, the captain of the
_Albatross_ had undertaken to look up the dog. Was the dog, an Irish
terrier answering to the name of Michael, on board?
Captain Duncan truthfully admitted that it was, though he most
unveraciously shielded Dag Daughtry by repeating his yarn of the dog
coming on board of itself. How to return the dog to Captain Kellar?--was
the next question; for the _Albatross_ was bound on to New Zealand.
Captain Duncan settled the matter.
"The _Makambo_ will be back in Tulagi in eight weeks," he told the
lieutenant, "and I'll undertake personally to deliver the dog to its
owner. In the meantime we'll take good care of it. Our steward has sort
of adopted it, so it will be in good hands."
* * * * *
"Seems we don't either of us get the dog," Daughtry commented resignedly,
when Captain Duncan had explained the situation.
But when Daughtry turned his back and started off along the deck, his
constitutional obstinacy tightened his brows so that the Shortlands
planter, observing it, wondered what the captain had been rowing him
about.
* * * * *
Despite his six quarts a day and all his easy-goingness of disposition,
Dag Daughtry possessed certain integrities. Though he could steal a dog,
or a cat, without a twinge of conscience, he could not but be faithful to
his salt, being so made. He could not draw wages for being a ship
steward without faithfully performing the functions of ship steward.
Though his mind was firmly made up, during the several days of the
_Makambo_ in Sydney, lying alongside the Burns Philp Dock, he saw to
every detail of the cleaning up after the last crowd of outgoing
passengers, and to every detail of preparation for the next crowd of
incoming passengers who had tickets bought for the passage far away to
the coral seas and the cannibal isles.
In the midst of this devotion to his duty, he took a night off and part
of two afternoons. The night off was devoted to the public-houses which
sailors frequent, and where can be learned the latest gossip and news of
ships and of men who sail upon the sea. Such information did he gather,
over many bottles of beer, that the next afternoon, hiring a small launch
at a cost of ten shillings, he journeyed up the harbour to Jackson Bay,
where lay the lofty-poled, sweet-lined, three-topmast American schooner,
the _Mary Turner_.
Once on board, explaining his errand, he was taken below into the main
cabin, where he interviewed, and was interviewed by, a quartette of men
whom Daughtry qualified to himself as "a rum bunch."
It was because he had talked long with the steward who had left the ship,
that Dag Daughtry recognized and identified each of the four men. That,
surely, was the "Ancient Mariner," sitting back and apart with washed
eyes of such palest blue that they seemed a faded white. Long thin wisps
of silvery, unkempt hair framed his face like an aureole. He was slender
to emaciation, cavernously checked, roll after roll of skin, no longer
encasing flesh or muscle, hanging grotesquely down his neck and swathing
the Adam's apple so that only occasionally, with queer swallowing
motions, did it peep out of the mummy-wrappings of skin and sink back
again from view.
A proper ancient mariner, thought Daughtry. Might be seventy-five, might
just as well be a hundred and five, or a hundred and seventy-five.
Beginning at the right temple, a ghastly scar split the cheek-bone, sank
into the depths of the hollow cheek, notched across the lower jaw, and
plunged to disappearance among the prodigious skin-folds of the neck. The
withered lobes of both ears were perforated by tiny gypsy-like circles of
gold. On the skeleton fingers of his right hand were no less than five
rings--not men's rings, nor women's, but foppish rings--"that would fetch
a price," Daughtry adjudged. On the left hand were no rings, for there
were no fingers to wear them. Only was there a thumb; and, for that
matter, most of the hand was missing as well, as if it had been cut off
by the same slicing edge that had cleaved him from temple to jaw and
heaven alone knew how far down that skin-draped neck.
The Ancient Mariner's washed eyes seemed to bore right through Daughtry
(or at least so Daughtry felt), and rendered him so uncomfortable as to
make him casually step to the side for the matter of a yard. This was
possible, because, a servant seeking a servant's billet, he was expected
to stand and face the four seated ones as if they were judges on the
bench and he the felon in the dock. Nevertheless, the gaze of the
ancient one pursued him, until, studying it more closely, he decided that
it did not reach to him at all. He got the impression that those washed
pale eyes were filmed with dreams, and that the intelligence, the
_thing_, that dwelt within the skull, fluttered and beat against the
dream-films and no farther.
"How much would you expect?" the captain was asking,--a most unsealike
captain, in Daughtry's opinion; rather, a spick-and-span, brisk little
business-man or floor-walker just out of a bandbox.
"He shall not share," spoke up another of the four, huge, raw-boned,
middle-aged, whom Daughtry identified by his ham-like hands as the
California wheat-farmer described by the departed steward.
"Plenty for all," the Ancient Mariner startled Daughtry by cackling
shrilly. "Oodles and oodles of it, my gentlemen, in cask and chest, in
cask and chest, a fathom under the sand."
"Share--_what_, sir?" Daughtry queried, though well he knew, the other
steward having cursed to him the day he sailed from San Francisco on a
blind lay instead of straight wages. "Not that it matters, sir," he
hastened to add. "I spent a whalin' voyage once, three years of it, an'
paid off with a dollar. Wages for mine, an' sixty gold a month, seein'
there's only four of you."
"And a mate," the captain added.
"And a mate," Daughtry repeated. "Very good, sir. An' no share."
"But yourself?" spoke up the fourth man, a huge-bulking, colossal-bodied,
greasy-seeming grossness of flesh--the Armenian Jew and San Francisco
pawnbroker the previous steward had warned Daughtry about. "Have you
papers--letters of recommendation, the documents you receive when you are
paid off before the shipping commissioners?"
"I might ask, sir," Dag Daughtry brazened it, "for your own papers. This
ain't no regular cargo-carrier or passenger-carrier, no more than you
gentlemen are a regular company of ship-owners, with regular offices,
doin' business in a regular way. How do I know if you own the ship even,
or that the charter ain't busted long ago, or that you're being libelled
ashore right now, or that you won't dump me on any old beach anywheres
without a soo-markee of what's comin' to me? Howsoever"--he anticipated
by a bluff of his own the show of wrath from the Jew that he knew would
be wind and bluff--"howsoever, here's my papers . . . "
With a swift dip of his hand into his inside coat-pocket he scattered out
in a wealth of profusion on the cabin table all the papers, sealed and
stamped, that he had collected in forty-five years of voyaging, the
latest date of which was five years back.
"I don't ask your papers," he went on. "What I ask is, cash payment in
full the first of each month, sixty dollars a month gold--"
"Oodles and oodles of it, gold and gold and better than gold, in cask and
chest, in cask and chest, a fathom under the sand," the Ancient Mariner
assured him in beneficent cackles. "Kings, principalities and
powers!--all of us, the least of us. And plenty more, my gentlemen,
plenty more. The latitude and longitude are mine, and the bearings from
the oak ribs on the shoal to Lion's Head, and the cross-bearings from the
points unnamable, I only know. I only still live of all that brave, mad,
scallywag ship's company . . . "
"Will you sign the articles to that?" the Jew demanded, cutting in on the
ancient's maunderings.
"What port do you wind up the cruise in?" Daughtry asked.
"San Francisco."
"I'll sign the articles that I'm to sign off in San Francisco then."
The Jew, the captain, and the farmer nodded.
"But there's several other things to be agreed upon," Daughtry continued.
"In the first place, I want my six quarts a day. I'm used to it, and I'm
too old a stager to change my habits."
"Of spirits, I suppose?" the Jew asked sarcastically.
"No; of beer, good English beer. It must be understood beforehand, no
matter what long stretches we may be at sea, that a sufficient supply is
taken along."
"Anything else?" the captain queried.
"Yes, sir," Daughtry answered. "I got a dog that must come along."
"Anything else?--a wife or family maybe?" the farmer asked.
"No wife or family, sir. But I got a nigger, a perfectly good nigger,
that's got to come along. He can sign on for ten dollars a month if he
works for the ship all his time. But if he works for me all the time,
I'll let him sign on for two an' a half a month."
"Eighteen days in the longboat," the Ancient Mariner shrilled, to
Daughtry's startlement. "Eighteen days in the longboat, eighteen days of
scorching hell."
"My word," quoth Daughtry, "the old gentleman'd give one the jumps.
There'll sure have to be plenty of beer."
"Sea stewards put on some style, I must say," commented the wheat-farmer,
oblivious to the Ancient Mariner, who still declaimed of the heat of the
longboat.
"Suppose we don't see our way to signing on a steward who travels in such
style?" the Jew asked, mopping the inside of his collar-band with a
coloured silk handkerchief.
"Then you'll never know what a good steward you've missed, sir," Daughtry
responded airily.
"I guess there's plenty more stewards on Sydney beach," the captain said
briskly. "And I guess I haven't forgotten old days, when I hired them
like so much dirt, yes, by Jinks, so much dirt, there were so many of
them."
"Thank you, Mr. Steward, for looking us up," the Jew took up the idea
with insulting oiliness. "We very much regret our inability to meet your
wishes in the matter--"
"And I saw it go under the sand, a fathom under the sand, on
cross-bearings unnamable, where the mangroves fade away, and the coconuts
grow, and the rise of land lifts from the beach to the Lion's Head."
"Hold your horses," the wheat-farmer said, with a flare of irritation,
directed, not at the Ancient Mariner, but at the captain and the Jew.
"Who's putting up for this expedition? Don't I get no say so? Ain't my
opinion ever to be asked? I like this steward. Strikes me he's the real
goods. I notice he's as polite as all get-out, and I can see he can take
an order without arguing. And he ain't no fool by a long shot."
"That's the very point, Grimshaw," the Jew answered soothingly.
"Considering the unusualness of our . . . of the expedition, we'd be
better served by a steward who is more of a fool. Another point, which
I'd esteem a real favour from you, is not to forget that you haven't put
a red copper more into this trip than I have--"
"And where'd either of you be, if it wasn't for me with my knowledge of
the sea?" the captain demanded aggrievedly. "To say nothing of the
mortgage on my house and on the nicest little best paying flat building
in San Francisco since the earthquake."
"But who's still putting up?--all of you, I ask you." The wheat-farmer
leaned forward, resting the heels of his hands on his knees so that the
fingers hung down his long shins, in Daughtry's appraisal, half-way to
his feet. "You, Captain Doane, can't raise another penny on your
properties. My land still grows the wheat that brings the ready. You,
Simon Nishikanta, won't put up another penny--yet your loan-shark offices
are doing business at the same old stands at God knows what per cent. to
drunken sailors. And you hang the expedition up here in this hole-in-the-
wall waiting for my agent to cable more wheat-money. Well, I guess we'll
just sign on this steward at sixty a month and all he asks, or I'll just
naturally quit you cold on the next fast steamer to San Francisco."
He stood up abruptly, towering to such height that Daughtry looked to see
the crown of his head collide with the deck above.
"I'm sick and tired of you all, yes, I am," he continued. "Get busy!
Well, let's get busy. My money's coming. It'll be here by to-morrow.
Let's be ready to start by hiring a steward that is a steward. I don't
care if he brings two families along."
"I guess you're right, Grimshaw," Simon Nishikanta said appeasingly. "The
trip is beginning to get on all our nerves. Forget it if I fly off the
handle. Of course we'll take this steward if you want him. I thought he
was too stylish for you."
He turned to Daughtry.
"Naturally, the least said ashore about us the better."
"That's all right, sir. I can keep my mouth shut, though I might as well
tell you there's some pretty tales about you drifting around the beach
right now."
"The object of our expedition?" the Jew queried quickly.
Daughtry nodded.
"Is that why you want to come?" was demanded equally quickly.
Daughtry shook his head.
"As long as you give me my beer each day, sir, I ain't goin' to be
interested in your treasure-huntin'. It ain't no new tale to me. The
South Seas is populous with treasure-hunters--" Almost could Daughtry
have sworn that he had seen a flash of anxiety break through the dream-
films that bleared the Ancient Mariner's eyes. "And I must say, sir," he
went on easily, though saying what he would not have said had it not been
for what he was almost certain he sensed of the ancient's anxiousness,
"that the South Seas is just naturally lousy with buried treasure.
There's Keeling-Cocos, millions 'n' millions of it, pounds sterling, I
mean, waiting for the lucky one with the right steer."
This time Daughtry could have sworn to having sensed a change toward
relief in the Ancient Mariner, whose eyes were again filmy with dreams.
"But I ain't interested in treasure, sir," Daughtry concluded. "It's
beer I'm interested in. You can chase your treasure, an' I don't care
how long, just as long as I've got six quarts to open each day. But I
give you fair warning, sir, before I sign on: if the beer dries up, I'm
goin' to get interested in what you're after. Fair play is my motto."
"Do you expect us to pay for your beer in addition?" Simon Nishikanta
demanded.
To Daughtry it was too good to be true. Here, with the Jew healing the
breach with the wheat-farmer whose agents still cabled money, was the
time to take advantage.
"Sure, it's one of our agreements, sir. What time would it suit you,
sir, to-morrow afternoon, for me to sign on at the shipping
commissioner's?"
"Casks and chests of it, casks and chests of it, oodles and oodles, a
fathom under the sand," chattered the Ancient Mariner.
"You're all touched up under the roof," Daughtry grinned. "Which ain't
got nothing to do with me as long as you furnish the beer, pay me due an'
proper what's comin' to me the first of each an' every month, an' pay me
off final in San Francisco. As long as you keep up your end, I'll sail
with you to the Pit 'n' back an' watch you sweatin' the casks 'n' chests
out of the sand. What I want is to sail with you if you want me to sail
with you enough to satisfy me."
Simon Nishikanta glanced about. Grimshaw and Captain Doane nodded.
"At three o'clock to-morrow afternoon, at the shipping commissioner's,"
the Jew agreed. "When will you report for duty?"
"When will you sail, sir?" Daughtry countered.
"Bright and early next morning."
"Then I'll be on board and on duty some time to-morrow night, sir."
And as he went up the cabin companion, he could hear the Ancient Mariner
maundering: "Eighteen days in the longboat, eighteen days of scorching
hell . . . "