But Jerry had been love-selected and courage-selected. His ancestors had
been deliberately and consciously chosen by men, who, somewhere in the
forgotten past, had taken the wild-dog and made it into the thing they
visioned and admired and desired it to be. It must never fight like a
rat in a corner, because it must never be rat-like and slink into a
corner. Retreat must be unthinkable. The dogs in the past who retreated
had been rejected by men. They had not become Jerry's ancestors. The
dogs selected for Jerry's ancestors had been the brave ones, the
up-standing and out-dashing ones, who flew into the face of danger and
battled and died, but who never gave ground. And, since it is the way of
kind to beget kind, Jerry was what Terrence was before him, and what
Terrence's forefathers had been for a long way back.

So it was that Jerry, when he chanced upon the wild-dog stowed shrewdly
away from the wind in the lee-corner made by the mainmast and the cabin
skylight, did not stop to consider whether the creature was bigger or
fiercer than he. All he knew was that it was the ancient enemy--the wild-
dog that had not come in to the fires of man. With a wild paean of joy
that attracted Captain Van Horn's all-hearing ears and all-seeing eyes,
Jerry sprang to the attack. The wild puppy gained his feet in full
retreat with incredible swiftness, but was caught by the rush of Jerry's
body and rolled over and over on the sloping deck. And as he rolled, and
felt sharp teeth pricking him, he snapped and snarled, alternating snarls
with whimperings and squallings of terror, pain, and abject humility.

And Jerry was a gentleman, which is to say he was a gentle dog. He had
been so selected. Because the thing did not fight back, because it was
abject and whining, because it was helpless under him, he abandoned the
attack, disengaging himself from the top of the tangle into which he had
slid in the lee scuppers. He did not think about it. He did it because