painful
clutch on his flank and groin that made him cry out in pain and whirl
around. Next, as the mate had seen Skipper do in play, Jerry had his
jowls seized in a tooth-clattering shake that was absolutely different
from the Skipper's rough love-shake. His head and body were shaken, his
teeth clattered painfully, and with the roughest of roughness he was
flung part way down the slippery slope of deck.

Now Jerry was a gentleman. All the soul of courtesy was in him, for
equals and superiors. After all, even in an inferior like the wild-dog,
he did not consciously press an advantage very far--never extremely far.
In his stalking and rushing of the wild-dog, he had been more sound and
fury than an overbearing bully. But with a superior, with a two-legged
white-god like Borckman, there was more a demand upon his control,
restraint, and inhibition of primitive promptings. He did not want to
play with the mate a game that he ecstatically played with Skipper,
because he had experienced no similar liking for the mate, two-legged
white-god that he was.

And still Jerry was all gentleness. He came back in a feeble imitation
rush of the whole-hearted rush that he had learned to make on Skipper. He
was, in truth, acting, play-acting, attempting to do what he had no heart-
prompting to do. He made believe to play, and uttered simulated growls
that failed of the verity of simulation.

He bobbed his tail good-naturedly and friendly, and growled ferociously
and friendly; but the keenness of the drunkenness of the mate discerned
the difference and aroused in him, vaguely, the intuition of difference,
of play-acting, of cheating. Jerry was cheating--out of his heart of
consideration. Borckman drunkenly recognized the cheating without
crediting the heart of good behind it. On the instant he was
antagonistic. Forgetting that he was only a brute, he posited that this
was no more than a brute with which he strove to play in the genial
comradely way that the Skipper played.

Red war was inevitable--not first on Jerry's part, but on Borckman's
part. Borckman felt the abysmal urgings of the beast, as a beast, to
prove himself master of this four-legged beast. Jerry felt his jowl and
jaw clutched still more harshly and hardly, and, with increase of
harshness and hardness, he was flung farther down the deck, which, on
account of its growing slant due to heavier gusts of wind, had become a
steep and slippery hill.

He came