e ranch-house, was
an unfailing source of exercise for Jerry's lungs. At such times that
Jerry barked, Michael, with a bored expression, would lie down and wait
until the duet was over. Nor did he bark when he attacked strange dogs
that strayed upon the ranch.

"He fights like a veteran," Harley remarked, after witnessing one such
encounter. "He's cold-blooded. There's no excitement in him."

"He's old before his time," Villa said. "There is no heart of play left
in him, and no desire for speech. Just the same I know he loves me, and
you--"

"Without having to be voluble about it," her husband completed for her.

"You can see it shining in those quiet eyes of his," she supplemented.

"Reminds me of one of the survivors of Lieutenant Greeley's Expedition I
used to know," he agreed. "He was an enlisted soldier and one of the
handful of survivors. He had been through so much that he was just as
subdued as Michael and just as taciturn. He bored most people, who could
not understand him. Of course, the truth was the other way around. They
bored him. They knew so little of life that he knew the last word of.
And one could scarcely get any word out of him. It was not that he had
forgotten how to speak, but that he could not see any reason for speaking
when nobody could understand. He was really crusty from too-bitter wise
experience. But all you had to do was look at him in his tremendous
repose and know that he had been through the thousand hells, including
all the frozen ones. His eyes had the same quietness of Michael's. And
they had the same wisdom. I'd give almost anything to know how he got
his shoulder scarred. It must have been a tiger or a lion."

* * * * *

The man, like the mountain lion whom Michael had encountered up the
mountain, had strayed down from the wilds of Mendocino County, following
the ruggedest mountain stretches, and, at night, crossing the farmed
valley spaces where the presence of man was a danger to him. Like the
mountain lion, the man was an enemy to man, and all men were his enemies,
seeking his life which he had forfeited in ways more terrible than the
lion which had merely killed calves for food.

Like the mountain lion, the man was a killer. But, unlike the lion, his
vague description and the narrative of his deeds was in all the
newspapers, and mankind was a vast deal more interested in him than in
the lion. The lion had slain calves in upland pastures. But the