lthough in after-years his shoulder was always tender, and, on
occasion, when the weather was damp, he was compelled to ease it with a
slight limp. On the other hand, he was destined to appreciate to a great
price and to become the star performer Harry Del Mar had predicted of
him.

In the meantime he lay for many weary days in the plaster and abstained
from raising a dangerous temperature. The care taken of him was
excellent. But not out of love and affection was it given. It was
merely a part of the system at Cedarwild which made the institution such
a success. When he was taken out of the plaster, he was still denied
that instinctive pleasure which all animals take in licking their wounds,
for shrewdly arranged bandages were wrapped and buckled on him. And when
they were finally removed, there were no wounds to lick; though deep in
the shoulder was a pain that required months in which to die out.

Harris Collins bothered him no more with trying to teach him tricks, and,
one day, loaned him as a filler-in to a man and woman who had lost three
of their dog-troupe by pneumonia.

"If he makes out you can have him for twenty dollars," Collins told the
man, Wilton Davis.

"And if he croaks?" Davis queried.

Collins shrugged his shoulders. "I won't sit up nights worrying about
him. He's unteachable."

And when Michael departed from Cedarwild in a crate on an express wagon,
he might well have never returned, for Wilton Davis was notorious among
trained-animal men for his cruelty to dogs. Some care he might take of a
particular dog with a particularly valuable trick, but mere fillers-in
came too cheaply. They cost from three to five dollars apiece. Worse
than that, so far as he was concerned, Michael had cost nothing. And if
he died it meant nothing to Davis except the trouble of finding another
dog.

The first stage of Michael's new adventure involved no unusual hardship,
despite the fact that he was so cramped in his crate that he could not
stand up and that the jolting and handling of the crate sent countless
twinges of pain shooting through his shoulder. The journey was only to
Brooklyn, where he was duly delivered to a second-rate theatre, Wilton
Davis being so indifferent a second-rate animal man that he could never
succeed in getting time with the big circuits.

The hardship of the cramped crate began after Michael had been carried
into a big room above the stage and deposited with nearly a score