Next, something brushed past him, and he encountered it with a snarl and a splashing of his forepaws.  He was half-whirled about in the vortex of the thing’s passage caused by the alarmed flirt of its tail.  Shark it was, and not crocodile, and not so timidly would it have sheered clear but for the fact that it was fairly full with a recent feed of a huge sea turtle too feeble with age to escape.

Although he could not see it, Jerry sensed that the thing, the instrument of nothingness, lurked about him.  Nor did he see the dorsal fin break surface and approach him from the rear.  From the yacht he heard rifle-shots in quick succession.  From the rear a panic splash came to his ears.  That was all.  The peril passed and was forgotten.  Nor did he connect the rifle-shots with the passing of the peril.  He did not know, and he was never to know, that one, known to men as Harley Kennan, but known as “Husband-Man” by the woman he called “Wife-Woman,” who owned the three-topmast schooner yacht Ariel, had saved his life by sending a thirty-thirty Marlin bullet through the base of a shark’s fin.

But Jerry was to know Harley Kennan, and quickly, for it was Harley Kennan, a bowline around his body under his arm-pits, lowered by a couple of seamen down the generous freeboard of the Ariel, who gathered in by the nape of the neck the smooth-coated Irish terrier that, treading water perpendicularly, had no eyes for him so eagerly did he gaze at the line of faces along the rail in quest of the one face.

No pause for thanks did he make when he was dropped down upon the deck.  Instead, shaking himself instinctively as he ran, he scurried along the deck for Skipper.  The man and his wife laughed at the spectacle.

“He acts as if he were demented with delight at being rescued,” Mrs. Kennan observed.

And Mr. Kennan:  “It’s not that.  He must have a screw loose somewhere.  Perhaps he’s one of those creatures who’ve slipped the ratchet off the motion cog.  Maybe he can’t stop running till he runs down.”

In the meantime Jerry continued to run, up port side and down starboard side, from stern to bow and back again, wagging his stump tail and laughing friendliness to the many two-legged gods he encountered.  Had he been able to think to such abstraction he would have been astounded at the number of white-gods.  Thirty there were at least of them, not counting other gods that were neither black nor white, but that still, two-legged, upright and garmented, were beyond all peradventure gods.  Likewise, had he been capable of such generalization, he would have decided that the white-gods had not yet all of them passed into the nothingness.  As it was, he realized all this without being aware that he realized it.

But there was no Skipper.  He sniffed down the forecastle hatch, sniffed into the galley where two Chinese cooks jabbered unintelligibly to him, sniffed down the cabin companionway, sniffed down the engine-room skylight and for the first time knew gasoline and engine oil; but sniff as he would, wherever he ran, no scent did he catch of Skipper.