ion, and direction would flow back into the
wilted little carcass. But where, in the meanwhile, at the impact of the
stick, had gone all the consciousness, and sensitiveness, and will?

Bashti sighed wearily, and wearily wrapped the heads in their grass-mat
coverings--all but Van Horn's; and hoisted them up in the air to hang
from the roof-beams--to hang as he debated, long after he was dead and
out if it, even as some of them had so hung from long before his father's
and his grandfather's time. The head of Van Horn he left lying on the
floor, while he stole out himself to peer in through a crack and see what
next the puppy might do.

Jerry quivered at first, and in the matter of a minute struggled feebly
to his feet where he stood swaying and dizzy; and thus Bashti, his eye to
the crack, saw the miracle of life flow back through the channels of the
inert body and stiffen the legs to upstanding, and saw consciousness, the
mystery of mysteries, flood back inside the head of bone that was covered
with hair, smoulder and glow in the opening eyes, and direct the lips to
writhe away from the teeth and the throat to vibrate to the snarl that
had been interrupted when the stick smashed him down into darkness.

And more Bashti saw. At first, Jerry looked about for his enemy,
growling and bristling his neck hair. Next, in lieu of his enemy, he saw
Skipper's head, and crept to it and loved it, kissing with his tongue the
hard cheeks, the closed lids of the eyes that his love could not open,
the immobile lips that would not utter one of the love-words they had
been used to utter to the little dog.

Next, in profound desolation, Jerry set down before Skipper's head,
pointed his nose toward the lofty ridge-pole, and howled mournfully and
long. Finally, sick and subdued, he crept out of the house and away to
the house of his devil devil master, where, for the round of twenty-four
hours, he waked and slept and dreamed centuries of nightmares.

For ever after in Somo, Jerry feared that grass house of Bashti. He was
not in fear of Bashti. His fear was indescribable and unthinkable. In
that house was the nothingness of what once was Skipper. It was the
token of the ultimate catastrophe to life that was wrapped and twisted
into every fibre of his heredity. One step advanced beyond this, Jerry's
uttermost, the folk of Somo, from the contemplation of death, had
achieved concepts of the spirits of the dead still living in immate