"Go on!" the Captain commanded. "Hold on!" spoke up the Shortlands planter. "Give the dog a square deal. I saw the whole thing. He wasn't looking for trouble. First the cat jumped him. She had to jump twice before he turned loose. She'd have scratched his eyes out. Then the two dogs jumped him. He hadn't bothered them. Then you jumped him. He hadn't bothered you. And then came that sailor with the mop. And now you want the bo's'n to jump him and throw him overboard. Give him a square deal. He's only been defending himself. What do you expect any dog that is a dog to do?--lie down and be walked over by every strange dog and cat that comes along? Play the game, Skipper. You gave him some mighty hard kicks. He only defended himself." "He's some defender," Captain Duncan grinned, with a hint of the return of his ordinary geniality, at the same time tenderly pressing his bleeding shoulder and looking woefully down at his tattered duck trousers. "All right, Steward. If you can make him friends with me in five minutes, he stays on board. But you'll have to make it up to me with a new pair of trousers." "And gladly, sir, thank you, sir," Daughtry cried. "And I'll make it up with a new cat as well, sir--Come on, Killeny Boy. This big fella marster he all right, you bet." And Michael listened. Not with the smouldering, smothering, choking hysteria that still worked in the fox-terriers did he listen, nor with quivering of muscles and jumps of over-wrought nerves, but coolly, composedly, as if no battle royal had just taken place and no rips of teeth and kicks of feet still burned and ached his body. He could not help bristling, however, when first he sniffed a trousers' leg into which his teeth had so recently torn. "Put your hand down on him, sir," Daughtry begged. And Captain Duncan, his own good self once more, bent and rested a firm, unhesitating hand on Michael's head. Nay, more; he even caressed the ears and rubbed about the roots of them. And Michael the merry-hearted, who fought like a lion and forgave and forgot like a man, laid his neck hair smoothly down, wagged his stump tail, smiled with his eyes and ears and mouth, and kissed with his tongue the hand with which a short time before he had been at war. CHAPTER VII For the rest of the voyage Michael had the run of the ship. Friendly to all, he reserved his love for Steward alone, though he was not above many an undignified romp with the fox-terriers. "The most playful-minded dog, without being silly, I ever saw," was Dag Daughtry's verdict to the Shortlands planter, to whom he had just sold one of his turtle-shell combs. "You see, some dogs never get over the play-idea, an' they're never good for anything else. But not Killeny Boy. He can come down to seriousness in a second. I'll show you, and I'll show you he's got a brain that counts to five an' knows wireless telegraphy. You just watch."