ts the interest on a capital value of one hundred an' twenty
thousand-dollars. Then we'll suppose expenses and salary for me is
twenty thousand. That leaves the dog worth a hundred thousand. Just to
be fair, cut it in half--a fifty-thousand dog. And you're offerin' a
thousand for him."

"I suppose you think he'll last for ever, like so much land'," Del Mar
smiled quietly.

Daughtry saw the point instantly.

"Give 'm five years of work--that's thirty thousand. Give 'm one year of
work--it's six thousand. An' you're offerin' me one thousand for six
thousand. That ain't no kind of business--for me . . . an' him. Besides,
when he can't work any more, an' ain't worth a cent, he'll be worth just
a plumb million to me, an' if anybody offered it, I'd raise the price."

CHAPTER XIX

"I'll see you again," Harry Del Mar told Daughtry, at the end of his
fourth conversation on the matter of Michael's sale.

Wherein Harry Del Mar was mistaken. He never saw Daughtry again, because
Daughtry saw Doctor Emory first.

Kwaque's increasing restlessness at night, due to the swelling under his
right arm-pit, had began to wake Daughtry up. After several such
experiences, he had investigated and decided that Kwaque was sufficiently
sick to require a doctor. For which reason, one morning at eleven,
taking Kwaque along, he called at Walter Merritt Emory's office and
waited his turn in the crowded reception-room.

"I think he's got cancer, Doc.," Daughtry said, while Kwaque was pulling
off his shirt and undershirt. "He never squealed, you know, never
peeped. That's the way of niggers. I didn't find our till he got to
wakin' me up nights with his tossin' about an' groanin' in his
sleep.--There! What'd you call it? Cancer or tumour--no two ways about
it, eh?"

But the quick eye of Walter Merritt Emory had not missed, in passing, the
twisted fingers of Kwaque's left hand. Not only was his eye quick, but
it was a "leper eye." A volunteer surgeon in the first days out in the
Philippines, he had made a particular study of leprosy, and had observed
so many lepers that infallibly, except in the incipient beginnings of the
disease, he could pick out a leper at a glance. From the twisted
fingers, which was the anaesthetic form, produced by
nerve-disintegration, to the corrugated lion forehead (again anaesthetic),
his eyes flashed to the swelling under the right arm-pit and his brain
diagnosed it as the tubercular form.