n in the end."
"But I've got their goat," the captain insisted. "When trouble's
hatching, I go straight to them and tell them what. They can't get the
hang of it. Think I've got some powerful devil-devil medicine."
Tom Haggin thrust out his hand in abrupt good-bye, resolutely keeping his
eyes from dropping to Jerry in the other's arms.
"Keep your eye on my return boys," he cautioned, as he went over the
side, "till you land the last mother's son of 'm. They've got no cause
to love Jerry or his breed, an' I'd hate ill to happen 'm at a nigger's
hands. An' in the dark of the night 'tis like as not he can do a fare-
you-well overside. Don't take your eye off 'm till you're quit of the
last of 'm."
At sight of big _Mister_ Haggin deserting him and being pulled away in
the whaleboat, Jerry wriggled and voiced his anxiety in a low, whimpering
whine. Captain Van Horn snuggled him closer in his arm with a caress of
his free hand.
"Don't forget the agreement," Tom Haggin called back across the widening
water. "If aught happens you, Jerry's to come back to me."
"I'll make a paper to that same and put it with the ship's articles," was
Van Horn's reply.
Among the many words possessed by Jerry was his own name; and in the talk
of the two men he had recognised it repeatedly, and he was aware,
vaguely, that the talk was related to the vague and unguessably terrible
thing that was happening to him. He wriggled more determinedly, and Van
Horn set him down on the deck. He sprang to the rail with more quickness
than was to be expected of an awkward puppy of six months, and not the
quick attempt of Van Horn to cheek him would have succeeded. But Jerry
recoiled from the open water lapping the _Arangi's_ side. The taboo was
upon him. It was the image of the log awash that was not a log but that
was alive, luminous in his brain, that checked him. It was not reason on
his part, but inhibition which had become habit.
He plumped down on his bob tail, lifted golden muzzle skyward, and
emitted a long puppy-wail of dismay and grief.
"It's all right, Jerry, old man, brace up and be a man-dog," Van Horn
soothed him.
But Jerry was not to be reconciled. While this indubitably was a white-
skinned god, it was not his god. _Mister_ Haggin was his god, and a
superior god at that. Even he, without thinking about it at all,
recognized that. His _Mister_ Haggin wore pants and shoes. This god on
the deck beside him was
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