The dog, like the horse, abases1 the base. Being base, Waiter Merritt Emory was abased2 by his desire for the possession of Michael. Had there been no Michael, his conduct would have been quite different. He would have dealt with Daughtry as Daughtry had described, as between white men. He would have warned Daughtry of his disease and enabled him to take ship to the South Seas or to Japan, or to other countries where lepers are not segregated3. This would have worked no hardship on those countries, since such was their law and procedure, while it would have enabled Daughtry and Kwaque to escape the hell of the San Francisco pest-house, to which, because of his baseness, he condemned4 them for the rest of their lives.
Furthermore, when the expense of the maintenance of armed guards over the pest-house, day and night, throughout the years, is considered, Walter Merritt Emory could have saved many thousands of dollars to the tax-payers of the city and county of San Francisco, which thousands of dollars, had they been spent otherwise, could have been diverted to the reduction of the notorious crowding in school-rooms, to purer milk for the babies of the poor, or to an increase of breathing-space in the park system for the people of the stifling5 ghetto6. But had Walter Merritt Emory been thus considerate, not only would Daughtry and Kwaque have sailed out and away over the sea, but with them would have sailed Michael.
Never was a reception-roomful of patients rushed through more expeditiously7 than was Doctor Emory’s the moment the door had closed upon the two policemen who brought up Daughtry’s rear. And before he went to his late lunch, Doctor Emory was away in his machine and down into the Barbary Coast to the door of the Bowhead Lodging8 House. On the way, by virtue9 of his political affiliations10, he had been able to pick up a captain of detectives. The addition of the captain proved necessary, for the landlady11 put up a stout12 argument against the taking of the dog of her lodger13. But Milliken, captain of detectives, was too well known to her, and she yielded to the law of which he was the symbol and of which she was credulously14 ignorant.
As Michael started out of the room on the end of a rope, a plaintive15 call of reminder16 came from the window-sill, where perched a tiny, snow-white cockatoo.
“Cocky,” he called. “Cocky.”
Walter Merritt Emory glanced back and for no more than a moment hesitated. “We’ll send for the bird later,” he told the landlady, who, still mildly expostulating as she followed them downstairs, failed to notice that the captain of the detectives had carelessly left the door to Daughtry’s rooms ajar.
* * * * *
But Walter Merritt Emory was not the only base one abased by desire of possession of Michael. In a deep leather chair, his feet resting in another deep leather chair, at the Indoor Yacht Club, Harry17 Del Mar18 yielded to the somniferous digestion19 of lunch, which was for him breakfast as well, and glanced through the first of the early editions of the afternoon papers. His eyes lighted on a big headline, with a brief five lines under it. His feet were instantly drawn20 down off the chair and under him as he stood up erect21 upon them. On swift second thought, he sat down again, pressed the electric button, and, while waiting for the club steward22, reread the headline and the brief five lines.
In a taxi, and away, heading for the Barbary Coast, Harry Del Mar saw visions that were golden. They took on the semblance23 of yellow, twenty-dollar gold pieces, of yellow-backed paper bills of the government stamping of the United States, of bank books, and of rich coupons24 ripe for the clipping—and all shot through the flashings of the form of a rough-coated Irish terrier, on a galaxy26 of brilliantly-lighted stages, mouth open, nose upward to the drops, singing, ever singing, as no dog had ever been known to sing in the world before.
Cocky himself was the first to discover that the door was ajar, and was looking at it with speculation27 (if by “speculation” may be described the mental processes of a bird, in some mysterious way absorbing into its consciousness a fresh impression of its environment and preparing to act, or not act, according to which way the fresh impression modifies its conduct). Humans do this very thing, and some of them call it “free will.” Cocky, staring at the open door, was in just the stage of determining whether or not he should more closely inspect that crack of exit to the wider world, which inspection28, in turn, would determine whether or not he should venture out through the crack, when his eyes beheld29 the eyes of the second discoverer staring in.
The eyes were bestial30, yellow-green, the pupils dilating31 and narrowing with sharp swiftness as they sought about among the lights and glooms of the room. Cocky knew danger at the first glimpse—danger to the uttermost of violent death. Yet Cocky did nothing. No panic stirred his heart. Motionless, one eye only turned upon the crack, he focused that one eye upon the head and eyes of the gaunt gutter-cat whose head had erupted into the crack like an apparition32.
Alert, dilating and contracting, as swift as cautious, and infinitely33 apprehensive34, the pupils vertically36 slitted in jet into the midmost of amazing opals of greenish yellow, the eyes roved the room. They alighted on Cocky. Instantly the head portrayed37 that the cat had stiffened38, crouched39, and frozen. Almost imperceptibly the eyes settled into a watching that was like to the stony41 stare of a sphinx across aching and eternal desert sands. The eyes were as if they had so stared for centuries and millenniums.
No less frozen was Cocky. He drew no film across his one eye that showed his head cocked sideways, nor did the passion of apprehension42 that whelmed him manifest itself in the quiver of a single feather. Both creatures were pe............