ed to thrust it into Michael's
mouth and shove him away. This first time his teeth closed automatically
upon it. But, spitting it out, he declined thereafter to bite it,
knowing it for what it was, an inanimate thing upon which his teeth could
inflict no hurt.

Nor, beyond trying to avoid him, was he interested in the sailor. It was
Captain Duncan, leaning his back against the rail, breathing heavily, and
wiping the streaming sweat from his face, who was Michael's meat. Long
as it has taken to tell the battle, beginning with the slaying of the
Persian cat to the thrusting of the mop into Michael's jaws, so swift had
been the rush of events that the passengers, springing from their deck-
chairs and hurrying to the scene, were just arriving when Michael eluded
the mop of the sailor by a successful dodge and plunged in on Captain
Duncan, this time sinking his teeth so savagely into a rotund calf as to
cause its owner to splutter an incoherent curse and howl of wrathful
surprise.

A fortunate kick hurled Michael away and enabled the sailor to intervene
once again with the mop. And upon the scene came Dag Daughtry, to behold
his captain, frayed and bleeding and breathing apoplectically, Michael
raging in ghastly silence at the end of a mop, and a large Persian mother-
cat writhing with a broken back.

"Killeny Boy!" the steward cried imperatively.

Through no matter what indignation and rage that possessed him, his
lord's voice penetrated his consciousness, so that, cooling almost
instantly, Michael's ears flattened, his bristling hair lay down, and his
lips covered his fangs as he turned his head to look acknowledgment.

"Come here, Killeny!"

Michael obeyed--not crouching cringingly, but trotting eagerly, gladly,
to Steward's feet.

"Lie down, Boy."

He turned half around as he flumped himself down with a sigh of relief,
and, with a red flash of tongue, kissed Steward's foot.

"Your dog, Steward?" Captain Duncan demanded in a smothered voice wherein
struggled anger and shortness of breath.

"Yes, sir. My dog. What's he been up to, sir?"

The totality of what Michael had been up to choked the Captain
completely. He could only gesture around from the dying cat to his torn
clothes and bleeding wounds and the fox-terriers licking their injuries
and whimpering at his feet.

"It's too bad, sir . . . " Daughtry began.

"Too bad, hell!" the captain shut him off. "Bo's'n! Throw that dog
overboard."

"Th