ed.

Again Michael obeyed, although all that was Michael was in protest. He
quivered as the shrill-sweet strains from the silver reeds ran through
him. All his throat and chest was in the impulse to sing; but he
mastered it, for he did not care to sing for this man. All he wanted of
him was Steward.

"Oh, you're stubborn, eh?" Del Mar sneered at him. "The matter with you
is you're thoroughbred. Well, my boy, it just happens I know your kind
and I reckon I can make you get busy and work for me just as much as you
did for that other guy. Now get busy."

He shifted the tune on into "Georgia Camp Meeting." But Michael was
obdurate. Not until the melting strains of "Old Kentucky Home" poured
through him did he lose his self-control and lift his mellow-throated
howl that was the call for the lost pack of the ancient millenniums.
Under the prodding hypnosis of this music he could not but yearn and burn
for the vague, forgotten life of the pack when the world was young and
the pack was the pack ere it was lost for ever through the endless
centuries of domestication.

"Ah, ha," Del Mar chuckled coldly, unaware of the profound history and
vast past he evoked by his silver reeds.

A loud knock on the partition wall warned him that some sleepy passenger
was objecting.

"That will do!" he said sharply, taking the harmonica from his lips. And
Michael ceased, and hated him. "I guess I've got your number all right.
And you needn't think you're going to sleep here scratching fleas and
disturbing my sleep."

He pressed the call-button, and, when his room-steward answered, turned
Michael over to him to be taken down below and tied up in the crowded
cubby-hole.

* * * * *

During the several days and nights on the _Umatilla_, Michael learned
much of what manner of man Harry Del Mar was. Almost, might it be said,
he learned Del Mar's pedigree without knowing anything of his history.
For instance he did not know that Del Mar's real name was Percival
Grunsky, and that at grammar school he had been called "Brownie" by the
girls and "Blackie" by the boys. No more did he know that he had gone
from half-way-through grammar school directly into the industrial reform
school; nor that, after serving two years, he had been paroled out by
Harris Collins, who made a living, and an excellent one, by training
animals for the stage. Much less could he know the training that for six
years Del Mar, as assistant, had been taught to g