umbs pressed into his neck on either side of the windpipe directly on
the carotid arteries, shutting off the blood to his brain and giving him
most exquisite agony, at the same time rendering him unconscious far more
swiftly than the swiftest anaesthetic. Darkness thrust itself upon him;
and, quivering on the floor, glimmeringly he came back to the light of
the room and to the man who was casually touching a match to a cigarette
and cautiously keeping an observant eye on him.

"Come on," Del Mar challenged. "I know your kind. You can't get my
goat, and maybe I can't get yours entirely, but I can keep you under my
thumb to work for me. Come on, you!"

And Michael came. Being a thoroughbred, despite that he knew he was
beaten by this two-legged thing which was not warm human but was so alien
and hard that he might as well attack the wall of a room with his teeth,
or a tree-trunk, or a cliff of rock, Michael leapt bare-fanged for the
throat. And all that he leapt against was training, formula. The
experience was repeated. His throat was gripped, the thumbs shut off the
blood from his brain, and darkness smote him. Had he been more than a
normal thoroughbred dog, he would have continued to assail his
impregnable enemy until he burst his heart or fell in a fit. But he was
normal. Here was something unassailable, adamantine. As little might he
win victory from it, as from the cement-paved sidewalk of a city. The
thing was a devil, with the hardness and coldness, the wickedness and
wisdom, of a devil. It was as bad as Steward was good. Both were two-
legged. Both were gods. But this one was an evil god.

He did not reason all this, nor any of it. Yet, transmuted into human
terms of thought and understanding, it adequately describes the fulness
of his state of mind toward Del Mar. Had Michael been entangled in a
fight with a warm god, he could have raged and battled blindly,
inflicting and receiving hurt in the chaos of conflict, as such a god,
being warm, would have likewise received and given hurt, being only a
flesh-and-blood, living, breathing entity after all. But this two-legged
god-devil did not rage blindly and was incapable of passional heat. He
was like so much cunning, massive steel machinery, and he did what
Michael could never dream he did--and, for that matter, which few humans
do and which all animal trainers do: _he kept one thought ahead of
Michael's thought all the time_, and therefore, w