nbending of Agno, thus
to lead him, was a surprise and a delight to Jerry, who, without
reasoning about it, in a vague way felt the preliminary sensations that
possibly Agno, in a small way, might prove the master which his dog's
soul continually sought.

Emerging from the swamp of mangroves, abruptly they came upon a patch of
sand, still so salt and inhospitable from the sea's deposit that no great
trees rooted and interposed their branches between it and the sun's heat.
A primitive gate gave entrance, but Agno did not take Jerry through it.
Instead, with weird little chirrupings of encouragement and excitation,
he persuaded Jerry to dig a tunnel beneath the rude palisade of fence. He
helped with his own hands, dragging out the sand in quantities, but
imposing on Jerry the leaving of the indubitable marks of a dog's paws
and claws.

And, when Jerry was inside, Agno, passing through the gate, enticed and
seduced him into digging out the eggs. But Jerry had no taste of the
eggs. Eight of them Agno sucked raw, and two of them he tucked whole
into his arm-pits to take back to his house of the devil devils. The
shells of the eight he sucked he broke to fragments as a dog might break
them, and, to build the picture he had long visioned, of the eighth egg
he reserved a tiny portion which he spread, not on Jerry's jowls where
his tongue could have erased it, but high up about his eyes and above
them, where it would remain and stand witness against him according to
the plot he had planned.

Even worse, in high priestly sacrilege, he encouraged Jerry to attack a
megapode hen in the act of laying. And, while Jerry slew it, knowing
that the lust of killing, once started, would lead him to continue
killing the silly birds, Agno left the laying-yard to hot-foot it through
the mangrove swamp and present to Bashti an ecclesiastical quandary. The
taboo of the dog, as he expounded it, had prevented him from interfering
with the taboo dog when it ate the taboo egg-layers. Which taboo might
be the greater was beyond him. And Bashti, who had not tasted a megapode
egg in half a year, and who was keen for the one recrudescent thrill of
remote youth still left to him, led the way back across the mangrove
swamp at so prodigious a pace as quite to wind his high priest who was
many years younger than he.

And he arrived at the laying-yard and caught Jerry, red-pawed and red-
mouthed, in the midst of his fourth kill of an egg-layer, t