f caught by surprise, fanning the two belligerents with towels.

But the cats themselves were so continually torn and scratched that the
wounds never had a chance to heal and became infected until they were a
mass of sores. On occasion they died, or, when they had become too
abjectly spiritless to attack even a rat, were set to work on the tight-
rope with the doped starved rats that were too near dead to run away from
them. And, as Miss Merle Merryweather said: the bonehead audiences,
tickled to death, applauded Duckworth's Trained Cats and Rats as an
educational act!

A big chimpanzee that covered one of the circuits with Michael had an
antipathy for clothes. Like a horse that fights the putting on of the
bridle, and, after it is on, takes no further notice of it, so the big
chimpanzee fought the putting on the clothes. Once on, it was ready to
go out on the stage and through its turn. But the rub was in putting on
the clothes. It took the owner and two stage-hands, pulling him up to a
ring in the wall and throttling him, to dress him--and this, despite the
fact that the owner had long since knocked out his incisors.

All this cruelty Michael sensed without knowing. And he accepted it as
the way of life, as he accepted the daylight and the dark, the bite of
the frost on bleak and windy station platforms, the mysterious land of
Otherwhere that he knew in dreams and song, the equally mysterious
Nothingness into which had vanished Meringe Plantation and ships and
oceans and men and Steward.

CHAPTER XXXIII

For two years Michael sang his way over the United States, to fame for
himself and to fortune for Jacob Henderson. There was never any time
off. So great was his success, that Henderson refused flattering offers
to cross the Atlantic to show in Europe. But off-time did come to
Michael when Henderson fell ill of typhoid in Chicago.

It was a three-months' vacation for Michael, who, well treated but still
a prisoner, spent it in a caged kennel in Mulcachy's Animal Home.
Mulcachy, one of Harris Collins's brightest graduates, had emulated his
master by setting up in business in Chicago, where he ran everything with
the same rigid cleanliness, sanitation, and scientific cruelty. Michael
received nothing but the excellent food and the cleanliness; but, a
solitary and brooding prisoner in his cage, he could not help but sense
the atmosphere of pain and terror about him of the animals being broken
for