Then, too, there was usually at least one bush-dog on the _Arangi_ at
which Jerry and Michael, from the beach, could bark their heads off.
Once, Terrence, who was nearly as large as an Airedale and fully as lion-
hearted--Terrence the Magnificent, as Tom Haggin called him--had caught
such a bush-dog trespassing on the beach and given him a delightful
thrashing, in which Jerry and Michael, and Patsy and Kathleen, who were
at the time alive, had joined with many shrill yelps and sharp nips.
Jerry had never forgotten the ecstasy of the hair, unmistakably doggy in
scent, which had filled his mouth at his one successful nip. Bush-dogs
were dogs--he recognized them as his kind; but they were somehow
different from his own lordly breed, different and lesser, just as the
blacks were compared with _Mister_ Haggin, Derby, and Bob.
But Jerry did not continue to gaze at the nearing _Arangi_. Biddy, wise
with previous bitter bereavements, had sat down on the edge of the sand,
her fore-feet in the water, and was mouthing her woe. That this
concerned him, Jerry knew, for her grief tore sharply, albeit vaguely, at
his sensitive, passionate heart. What it presaged he knew not, save that
it was disaster and catastrophe connected with him. As he looked back at
her, rough-coated and grief-stricken, he could see Terrence hovering
solicitously near her. He, too, was rough-coated, as was Michael, and as
Patsy and Kathleen had been, Jerry being the one smooth-coated member of
the family.
Further, although Jerry did not know it and Tom Haggin did, Terrence was
a royal lover and a devoted spouse. Jerry, from his earliest
impressions, could remember the way Terrence had of running with Biddy,
miles and miles along the beaches or through the avenues of cocoanuts,
side by side with her, both with laughing mouths of sheer delight. As
these were the only dogs, besides his brothers and sisters and the
several eruptions of strange bush-dogs that Jerry knew, it did not enter
his head otherwise than that this was the way of dogs, male and female,
wedded and faithful. But Tom Haggin knew its unusualness. "Proper
affinities," he declared, and repeatedly declared, with warm voice and
moist eyes of appreciation. "A gentleman, that Terrence, and a
four-legged proper man. A man-dog, if there ever was one, four-square as
the legs on the four corners of him. And prepotent! My word! His
blood'd breed true for a thousand generations, and the cool head and the
kindly brave heart of him."
Terrence did not voice his sorrow, if sorrow he had; but his hovering
about Biddy tokened his anxiety for her. Michael, however, yielding to
the contagion, sat beside his mother and barked angrily out across the
increasing stretch of water as he would have barked at any danger that
crept and rustled in the jungle. This, too, sank to Jerry's heart,
adding weight to his sure intuition that dire fate, he knew not what, was
upon him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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