m beyond compare. She
was not small like the _Arangi_, nor was she cluttered fore and aft, on
deck and below, with a spawn of niggers. The only black Jerry found on
her was Johnny; while her spaciousness was filled principally with two-
legged white-gods.

He met them everywhere, at the wheel, on lookout, washing decks,
polishing brass-work, running aloft, or tailing on to sheets and tackles
half a dozen at a time. But there was a difference. There were gods and
gods, and Jerry was not long in learning that in the hierarchy of the
heaven of these white-gods on the _Ariel_, the sailorizing, ship-working
ones were far beneath the captain and his two white-and-gold-clad
officers. These, in turn, were less than Harley Kennan and Villa Kennan;
for them, it came quickly to him, Harley Kennan commanded. Nevertheless,
there was one thing he did not learn and was destined never to learn,
namely, the supreme god over all on the _Ariel_. Although he never tried
to know, being unable to think to such a distance, he never came to know
whether it was Harley Kennan who commanded Villa, or Villa Kennan who
commanded Harley. In a way, without vexing himself with the problem, he
accepted their over-lordship of the world as dual. Neither out-ranked
the other. They seemed to rule co-equal, while all others bowed before
them.

It is not true that to feed a dog is to win a dog's heart. Never did
Harley or Villa feed Jerry; yet it was to them he elected to belong, them
he elected to love and serve rather than to the Japanese steward who
regularly fed him. For that matter, Jerry, like any dog, was able to
differentiate between the mere direct food-giver and the food source.
That is, subconsciously, he was aware that not alone his own food, but
the food of all on board found its source in the man and woman. They it
was who fed all and ruled all. Captain Winters might give orders to the
sailors, but Captain Winters took orders from Harley Kennan. Jerry knew
this as indubitably as he acted upon it, although all the while it never
entered his head as an item of conscious knowledge.

And, as he had been accustomed, all his life, as with Mister Haggin,
Skipper, and even with Bashti and the chief devil devil doctor of Somo,
he attached himself to the high gods themselves, and from the gods under
them received deference accordingly. As Skipper, on the _Arangi_, and
Bashti in Somo, had promulgated taboos, so the man and the woman on t