to express it with overtures of wrigglings and
squirmings and whimpering yelpings. Jerry could be depended upon for
that. But he was always seriously glad to be with Villa and Harley and
to receive recognition from them next after Jerry. Some of his deepest
moments of content, before the fireplace, were to sit beside Villa or
Harley and lean his head against a knee and have a hand, on occasion,
drop down on his head or gently twist his crinkled ear.

Jerry was even guilty of playing with children who happened at times to
be under the Kennan aegis. Michael endured children for as long as they
left him alone. If they waxed familiar, he would warn them with a
bristling of his neck-hair and a throaty rumbling and get up and stalk
away.

"I can't understand it," Villa would say. "He was the fullest of play,
and spirits, and all foolishness. He was much sillier and much more
excitable than Jerry and certainly noisier. He must have some terrible
story to tell, if only he could, of all that happened between Tulagi and
the time we found him on the Orpheum stage."

"And that may be the least little hint of it," Harley would reply,
pointing to Michael's shoulder where the leopard had scarred it on the
day Jack, the Airedale, and Sara, the little green monkey, had died.

"He used to bark, I know he used to bark," Villa would continue. "Why
doesn't he bark now?"

And Harley would point to the scarred shoulder and say, "That may account
for it, and most possibly a hundred other things like it of which we
cannot see the marks."

But the time was to come when they were to hear him bark again--not once,
but twice. And both times were to be but an earnest of another and
graver time when, without barking at all, he would express in action the
measure of his love and worship of them who had taken him from the crate
and the footlights and given him the freedom of the Valley of the Moon.

And in the meantime, running endlessly with Jerry over the ranch, he
learned all the ways of it and all the life of it from the chickenyards
and the duck-ponds to the highest pitch of Sonoma Mountain. He learned
where the wild deer, in their season, were to be found; when they raided
the prune-orchard, the vineyards, and the apple-trees; when they sought
the deepest canyons and most secret coverts; and when they stamped out in
open glades and on bare hillsides and crashed and clattered their antlers
together in combat. Under Jerry's leade