Jerry of the Islands | Page 9

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 more like a black. Not only did he not wear
pants, and was barefooted and barelegged, but about his middle, just
like any black, he wore a brilliant-coloured loin- cloth, that, like a kilt,
fell nearly to his sunburnt knees.
Captain Van Horn was a handsome man and a striking man, although
Jerry did not know it. If ever a Holland Dutchman stepped out of a

Rembrandt frame, Captain Van Horn was that one, despite the fact that
he was New York born, as had been his knickerbocker ancestors before
him clear back to the time when New York was not New York but New
Amsterdam. To complete his costume, a floppy felt hat, distinctly
Rembrandtish in effect, perched half on his head and mostly over one
ear; a sixpenny, white cotton undershirt covered his torso; and from a
belt about his middle dangled a tobacco pouch, a sheath-knife, filled
clips of cartridges, and a huge automatic pistol in a leather holster.
On the beach, Biddy, who had hushed her grief, lifted it again when she
heard Jerry's wail. And Jerry, desisting a moment to listen, heard
Michael beside her, barking his challenge, and saw, without being
conscious of it, Michael's withered ear with its persistent upward cock.
Again, while Captain Van Horn and the mate, Borckman, gave orders,
and while the Arangi's mainsail and spanker began to rise up the masts,
Jerry loosed all his heart of woe in what Bob told Derby on the beach
was the "grandest vocal effort" he had ever heard from any dog, and
that, except for being a bit thin, Caruso didn't have anything on Jerry.
But the song was too much for Haggin, who, as soon as he had landed,
whistled Biddy to him and strode rapidly away from the beach.
At sight of her disappearing, Jerry was guilty of even more Caruso- like
effects, which gave great joy to a Pennduffryn return boy who stood
beside him. He laughed and jeered at Jerry with falsetto chucklings that
were more like the jungle-noises of tree-dwelling creatures, half-bird
and half-man, than of a man, all man, and therefore a god. This served
as an excellent counter-irritant. Indignation that a mere black should
laugh at him mastered Jerry, and the next moment his puppy teeth,
sharp-pointed as needles, had scored the astonished black's naked calf
in long parallel scratches from each of which leaped the instant blood.
The black sprang away in trepidation, but the blood of Terrence the
Magnificent was true in Jerry, and,