the village's collected for the chap that gets me and delivers."

"And they ain't--yet," Haggin snorted.
"No fear," was the cheerful retort.

"You talk like Arbuckle used to talk," Haggin censured. "Manny's
the time I've heard him string it off. Poor old Arbuckle. The most

sure and most precautious chap that ever handled niggers. He never
went to sleep without spreadin' a box of tacks on the floor, and

when it wasn't them it was crumpled newspapers. I remember me well,
bein' under the same roof at the time on Florida, when a big tomcat

chased a cockroach into the papers. And it was blim, blam, blim,
six times an' twice over, with his two big horse-pistols, an' the

house perforated like a cullender. Likewise there was a dead tom-
cat. He could shoot in the dark with never an aim, pullin' trigger

with the second finger and pointing with the first finger laid
straight along the barrel.

"No, sir, my laddy buck. He was the bully boy with the glass eye.
The nigger didn't live that'd lift his head. But they got 'm. They

got 'm. He lasted fourteen years, too. It was his cook-boy.
Hatcheted 'm before breakfast. An' it's well I remember our second

trip into the bush after what was left of 'm."
"I saw his head after you'd turned it over to the Commissioner at

Tulagi," Van Horn supplemented.
"An' the peaceful, quiet, everyday face of him on it, with almost

the same old smile I'd seen a thousand times. It dried on 'm that
way over the smokin' fire. But they got 'm, if it did take fourteen

years. There's manny's the head that goes to Malaita, manny's the
time untooken; but, like the old pitcher, it's tooken in the end."

"But I've got their goat," the captain insisted. "When trouble's
hatching, I go straight to them and tell them what. They can't get

the hang of it. Think I've got some powerful devil-devil medicine."
Tom Haggin thrust out his hand in abrupt good-bye, resolutely

keeping his eyes from dropping to Jerry in the other's arms.
"Keep your eye on my return boys," he cautioned, as he went over the

side, "till you land the last mother's son of 'm. They've got no
cause to love Jerry or his breed, an' I'd hate ill to happen 'm at a

nigger's hands. An' in the dark of the night 'tis like as not he
can do a fare-you-well overside. Don't take your eye off 'm till

you're quit of the last of 'm."
At sight of big Mister Haggin deserting him and being pulled away in

the whaleboat, Jerry wriggled and voiced his anxiety in a low,
whimpering whine. Captain Van Horn snuggled him closer in his arm

with a caress of his free hand.
"Don't forget the agreement," Tom Haggin called back across the

widening water. "If aught happens you, Jerry's to come back to me."
"I'll make a paper to that same and put it with the ship's

articles," was Van Horn's reply.
Among the many words possessed by Jerry was his own name; and in the

talk of the two men he had recognised it repeatedly, and he was
aware, vaguely, that the talk was related to the vague and

unguessably terrible thing that was happening to him. He wriggled
more determinedly, and Van Horn set him down on the deck. He sprang

to the rail with more quickness than was to be expected of an
awkward puppy of six months, and not the quick attempt of Van Horn

to cheek him would have succeeded. But Jerry recoiled from the open
water lapping the Arangi's side. The taboo was upon him. It was

the image of the log awash that was not a log but that was alive,
luminous in his brain, that checked him. It was not reason on his

part, but inhibition which had become habit.
He plumped down on his bob tail, lifted golden muzzle skyward, and

emitted a long puppy-wail of dismay and grief.
"It's all right, Jerry, old man, brace up and be a man-dog," Van

Horn soothed him.
But Jerry was not to be reconciled. While this indubitably was a

white-skinned god, it was not his god. Mister Haggin was his god,
and a superior god at that. Even he, without thinking about it at

all, recognized that. His Mister Haggin wore pants and shoes. This
god on the deck beside him was more like a black. Not only did he

not wear pants, and was barefooted and barelegged, but about his
middle, just like any black, he wore a brilliant-coloured loin-

cloth, that, like a kilt, fell nearly to his sunburnt knees.
Captain Van Horn was a handsome man and a striking man, although

Jerry did not know it. If ever a Holland Dutchman stepped out of a
Rembrandt frame, Captain Van Horn was that one, despite the fact

that he was New York born, as had been his knickerbocker ancestors
before him clear back to the time when New York was not New York but

New Amsterdam. To complete his costume, a floppy felt hat,
distinctly Rembrandtish in effect, perched half on his head and

mostly over one ear; a sixpenny, white cotton undershirt covered his
torso; and from a belt about his middle dangled a tobacco pouch, a

sheath-knife, filled clips of cartridges, and a huge automatic
pistol in a leather holster.

On the beach, Biddy, who had hushed her grief, lifted it again when
she heard Jerry's wail. And Jerry, desisting a moment to listen,

heard Michael beside her, barking his challenge, and saw, without
being conscious of it, Michael's withered ear with its persistent

upward cock. Again, while Captain Van Horn and the mate, Borckman,
gave orders, and while the Arangi's mainsail and spanker began to

rise up the masts, Jerry loosed all his heart of woe in what Bob
told Derby on the beach was the "grandest vocal effort" he had ever

heard from any dog, and that, except for being a bit thin, Caruso
didn't have anything on Jerry. But the song was too much for

Haggin, who, as soon as he had landed, whistled Biddy to him and
strode rapidly away from the beach.

At sight of her disappearing, Jerry was guilty of even more Caruso-
like effects, which gave great joy to a Pennduffryn return boy who

stood beside him. He laughed and jeered at Jerry with falsetto
chucklings that were more like the jungle-noises of tree-dwelling

creatures, half-bird and half-man, than of a man, all man, and
therefore a god. This served as an excellent counter-irritant.

Indignation that a mere black should laugh at him mastered Jerry,
and the next moment his puppy teeth, sharp-pointed as needles, had

scored the astonished black's naked calf in long parallel scratches
from each of which leaped the instant blood. The black sprang away

in trepidation, but the blood of Terrence the Magnificent was true
in Jerry, and, like his father before him, he followed up, slashing

the black's other calf into a ruddy pattern.
At this moment, anchor broken out and headsails running up, Captain

Van Horn, whose quick eye had missed no detail of the incident, with
an order to the black helmsman turned to applaud Jerry.

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

The black, in defence, aimed a kick at Jerry, who, leaping in
instead of away--another inheritance from Terrence--avoided the bare

foot and printed a further red series of parallel lines on the dark
leg. This was too much, and the black, afraid more of Van Horn than

of Jerry, turned and fled for'ard, leaping to safety on top of the
eight Lee-Enfield rifles that lay on top of the cabin skylight and

that were guarded by one member of the boat's crew. About the
skylight Jerry stormed, leaping up and falling back, until Captain

Van Horn called him off.
"Some nigger-chaser, that pup, some nigger-chaser!" Van Horn

confided to Borckman, as he bent to pat Jerry and give him due
reward of praise.

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

"He's a lion-dog--more like an Airedale than an Irish terrier," Van