om a business
standpoint, good care did not pay. Since mongrel dogs were cheap, it was
cheaper to replace them when they died than so to care for them as to
keep them from dying.

What the baggageman did not know, and what Peterson did know, was that of
these thirty-five dogs not one was a surviving original of the troupe
when it first started out four years before. Nor had there been any
originals discarded. The only way they left the troupe and its cages was
by dying. Nor did Michael know even as little as the baggageman knew. He
knew nothing save that here reigned pain and woe and that it seemed he
was destined to share the same fate.

Into the midst of them, when with more howlings and yelpings they were
loaded into the baggage car, was Michael's cage piled. And for a day and
a part of two nights, travelling eastward, he remained in the dog
inferno. Then they were loaded off in some large city, and Michael
continued on in greater quietness and comfort, although his injured foot
still hurt and was bruised afresh whenever his crate was moved about in
the car.

What it was all about--why he was kept in his cramped prison in the
cramped car--he did not ask himself. He accepted it as unhappiness and
misery, and had no more explanation for it than for the crushing of the
paw. Such things happened. It was life, and life had many evils. The
_why_ of things never entered his head. He knew _things_ and some small
bit of the _how_ of things. What was, _was_. Water was wet, fire hot,
iron hard, meat good. He accepted such things as he accepted the
everlasting miracles of the light and of the dark, which were no miracles
to him any more than was his wire coat a miracle, or his beating heart,
or his thinking brain.

In Chicago, he was loaded upon a track, carted through the roaring
streets of the vast city, and put into another baggage-car which was
quickly in motion in continuation of the eastward journey. It meant more
strange men who handled baggage, as it meant in New York, where, from
railroad baggage-room to express wagon he was exchanged, for ever a
crated prisoner and dispatched to one, Harris Collins, on Long Island.

First of all came Harris Collins and the animal hell over which he ruled.
But the second event must be stated first. Michael never saw Harry Del
Mar again. As the other men he had known had stepped out of life, which
was a way they had, so Harry Del Mar stepped out of Michael's purvie