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He saw again Captain Kellar, of the Eugenie, who had last called him it, and Mister Haggin, and Derby, and Bob of Meringe Plantation, and Biddy and Terrence, and, not least among these shades of the vanished past, his brother Jerry. But was it the vanished past? The name which had ceased for years, had come back. It had entered the room along with this man and woman.
But the song was too much for Haggin, who, as soon as he had landed, whistled Biddy to him and strode rapidly away from the beach. At sight of her disappearing, Jerry was guilty of even more Caruso-like effects, which gave great joy to a Pennduffryn return boy who stood beside him.
Jerry did not know Mister Haggin as "master," for "master" had no place in Jerry's vocabulary, Jerry being a smooth-coated, golden-sorrel Irish terrier. But in Jerry's vocabulary, "Mister Haggin" possessed all the definiteness of sound and meaning that the word "master" possesses in the vocabularies of humans in relation to their dogs.
"When trouble's hatching, I go straight to them and tell them what. They can't get the hang of it. Think I've got some powerful devil-devil medicine." Tom Haggin thrust out his hand in abrupt good-bye, resolutely keeping his eyes from dropping to Jerry in the other's arms. "Keep your eye on my return boys," he cautioned, as he went over the side, "till you land the last mother's son of 'm.
After another prolonged scrutiny, Kennan shook his head. "Blamed if I can see anything so indisputable as to leave conjecture out." "The tail," his wife gurgled. "Surely the natives do not bob the tails of their dogs. Do they, Johnny? Do black man stop along Malaita chop 'm off tail along dog." "No chop 'm off," Johnny agreed. "Mister Haggin along Meringe he chop 'm off.
Usually, unaccompanied by visions, he knew no more than vaguenesses of sensations, sadly sweet, ghosts of memories that they were. At other times, incited by such sadness, images of Skipper and Mister Haggin would throng his mind; images, too, of Terrence, and Biddy, and Michael, and the rest of the long-vanished life at Meringe Plantation.
Then if you were rich, you bought a horse or a mule and rode for the rest of your journey. If you were poor, or thrifty perhaps, you walked, or tried to get a ride on one of the ox-freight teams which plied their way across Haggin Grant to Auburn and Dutch Flat, or to Folsom and Coloma.
Being so trained, he walked on his four legs superior to them, two-legged though they were; for he had moved and lived always under the aegis of the great two-legged and be-trousered god, Mister Haggin. Then there were the strange return boys, from Pennduffryn and the Bay of a Thousand Ships. He insisted on knowing them all. He might need to know them in some future time. He did not think this.
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.
Captain Van Horn snuggled him closer in his arm with a caress of his free hand. "Don't forget the agreement," Tom Haggin called back across the widening water. "If aught happens you, Jerry's to come back to me." "I'll make a paper to that same and put it with the ship's articles," was Van Horn's reply.
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