CHAPTER IV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER V

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We’ve only to jack her up for a moment,” he had answered.

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

“Somebody run over—can’t get them out,” he said, as they swung on board the wrecking-car and started.

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

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

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

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

“Is the one alive yet?” the shaken policeman asked.

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

He heard himself reply, “I’ll tell you in a minute.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At four the mate took charge of the deck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Gott-fer-dang!  Wind he go!  Rain he no come!”

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

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

“Where’s the rain?” Borckman demanded peevishly.  “Always wind first, the rain follows and kills the wind.  There is no rain.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VI

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

“And kept all the rain in the second half—”

Van Horn broke off with an oath.

“Hey!  What’s the matter along you fella boy?” he shouted to the man at the wheel.

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

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

“The pup’s overboard!” he shouted to Borckman.  “Back your jib to wind’ard!”

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

“Hey!  You fella boat’s crew!  Come in spanker sheet!  Flatten her down good fella!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That proves it.  The rope-yarn’s cut.  The knot’s still in it.  Now what nigger is responsible?”

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

“If only the pup could speak,” he complained.  “He’d tell who it was.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Skipper picked Jerry up and soothed his anger with:

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

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

“What name belong along you fella boy?” he demanded.

“Me fella Lerumie,” came the chirping, quavering answer.

“You come along Pennduffryn?”

“Me come along Meringe.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jerry, who had never had malaria, did not understand.  But in his heart he knew great trouble in that Skipper was in trouble.  Skipper did not recognize him, even when he sprang into the bunk, walked across Skipper’s heaving chest, and licked the acrid sweat of fever from Skipper’s face.  Instead, Skipper’s wildly-thrashing arms brushed him away and flung him violently against the side of the bunk.

This was roughness that was not love-roughness.  Nor was it the roughness of Borckman spurning him away with his foot.  It was part of Skipper’s trouble.  Jerry did not reason this conclusion.  But, and to the point, he acted upon it as if he had reasoned it.  In truth, through inadequacy of one of the most adequate languages in the world, it can only be said that Jerry sensed the new difference of this roughness.

He sat up, just out of range of one restless, beating arm, yearned to come closer and lick again the face of the god who knew him not, and who, he knew, loved him well, and palpitatingly shared and suffered all Skipper’s trouble.

“Eh, Clancey,” Skipper babbled.  “It’s a fine job this day, and no better crew to clean up after the dubs of motormen. . . . Number three jack, Clancey.  Get under the for’ard end.”  And, as the spectres of his nightmare metamorphosed: “Hush, darling, talking to your dad like that, telling him the combing of your sweet and golden hair.  As if I couldn’t, that have combed it these seven years—better than your mother, darling, better than your mother.  I’m the one gold-medal prize-winner in the combing of his lovely daughter’s lovely hair. . . . She’s broken out!  Give her the wheel aft there!  Jib and fore-topsail halyards!  Full and by, there!  A good full! . . . Ah, she takes it like the beauty fairy boat that she is upon the sea. . . I’ll just lift that—sure, the limit.  Blackey, when you pay as much to see my cards as I’m going to pay to see yours, you’re going to see some cards, believe me!”

And so the farrago of unrelated memories continued to rise vocal on Skipper’s lips to the heave of his body and the beat of his arms, while Jerry, crouched against the side of the bunk mourned and mourned his grief and inability to be of help.  All that was occurring was beyond him.  He knew no more of poker hands than did he know of getting ships under way, of clearing up surface car wrecks in New York, or of combing the long yellow hair of a loved daughter in a Harlem flat.

“Both dead,” Skipper said in a change of delirium.  He said it quietly, as if announcing the time of day, then wailed: “But, oh, the bonnie, bonnie braids of all the golden hair of her!”

He lay motionlessly for a space and sobbed out a breaking heart.  This was Jerry’s chance.  He crept inside the arm that tossed, snuggled against Skipper’s side, laid his head on Skipper’s shoulder, his cool nose barely touching Skipper’s cheek, and felt the arm curl about him and press him closer.  The hand bent from the wrist and caressed him protectingly, and the warm contact of his velvet body put a change in Skipper’s sick dreams, for he began to mutter in cold and bitter ominousness: “Any nigger that as much as bats an eye at that puppy. . .”