heless was articulate, from
wagging tail and wriggling sides to flat-laid ears and eyes that almost
spoke, to any human sensitive of understanding.

But Borckman saw in his way only a four-legged creature of the brute
world, which, in his arrogant brutalness he esteemed more brute than
himself. All the pretty picture of the soft puppy, instinct with
communicativeness, bursting with tenderness of petition, was veiled to
his vision. What he saw was merely a four-legged animal to be thrust
aside while he continued his lordly two-legged progress toward the bottle
that could set maggots crawling in his brain and make him dream dreams
that he was prince, not peasant, that he was a master of matter rather
than a slave of matter.

And thrust aside Jerry was, by a rough and naked foot, as harsh and
unfeeling in its impact as an inanimate breaking sea on a beach-jut of
insensate rock. He half-sprawled on the slippery deck, regained his
balance, and stood still and looked at the white-god who had treated him
so cavalierly. The meanness and unfairness had brought from Jerry no
snarling threat of retaliation, such as he would have offered Lerumie or
any other black. Nor in his brain was any thought of retaliation. This
was no Lerumie. This was a superior god, two-legged, white-skinned, like
Skipper, like Mister Haggin and the couple of other superior gods he had
known. Only did he know hurt, such as any child knows under the blow of
a thoughtless or unloving mother.

In the hurt was mingled a resentment. He was keenly aware that there
were two sorts of roughness. There was the kindly roughness of love,
such as when Skipper gripped him by the jowl, shook him till his teeth
rattled, and thrust him away with an unmistakable invitation to come back
and be so shaken again. Such roughness, to Jerry, was heaven. In it was
the intimacy of contact with a beloved god who in such manner elected to
express a reciprocal love.

But this roughness of Borckman was different. It was the other kind of
roughness in which resided no warm affection, no heart-touch of love.
Jerry did not quite understand, but he sensed the difference and
resented, without expressing in action, the wrongness and unfairness of
it. So he stood, after regaining balance, and soberly regarded, in a
vain effort to understand, the mate with a bottle-bottom inverted
skyward, the mouth to his lips, the while his throat made gulping
contractions and noises. And s