CHAPTER VII


At seven in the morning, when Skipper rolled him out of the blanket and
got up, Jerry celebrated the new day by chasing the wild-dog back into
his hole and by drawing a snicker from the blacks on deck, when, with a
growl and a flash of teeth, he made Lerumie side-step half a dozen feet
and yield the deck to him.

He shared breakfast with Skipper, who, instead of eating, washed down
with a cup of coffee fifty grains of quinine wrapped in a cigarette
paper, and who complained to the mate that he would have to get under the
blankets and sweat out the fever that was attacking him. Despite his
chill, and despite his teeth that were already beginning to chatter while
the burning sun extracted the moisture in curling mist-wreaths from the
deck planking, Van Horn cuddled Jerry in his arms and called him
princeling, and prince, and a king, and a son of kings.

For Van Horn had often listened to the recitals of Jerry's pedigree by
Tom Haggin, over Scotch-and-sodas, when it was too pestilentially hot to
go to bed. And the pedigree was as royal-blooded as was possible for an
Irish terrier to possess, whose breed, beginning with the ancient Irish
wolf-hound, had been moulded and established by man in less than two
generations of men.

There was Terrence the Magnificent--descended, as Van Horn remembered,
from the American-bred Milton Droleen, out of the Queen of County Antrim,
Breda Muddler, which royal bitch, as every one who is familiar with the
stud book knows, goes back as far as the almost mythical Spuds, with