“I salute you, Mrs. S. Holmes,” her husband acknowledged gallantly.  “And all that remains is for you to lead me directly to the head of La Perouse himself.  The sailing directions record that he left it somewhere in these islands.”

Little did they guess that Jerry had lived on intimate terms with one Bashti, not many miles away along the shore, who, in Somo, at that very moment, sat in his grass house pondering over a head on his withered knees that had once been the head of the great navigator, the history of which had been forgotten by the sons of the chief who had taken it.

CHAPTER XXI

The fine, three-topmast schooner Ariel, on a cruise around the world, had already been out a year from San Francisco when Jerry boarded her.  As a world, and as a white-god world, she was to him 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.