“He broke my pipe,” answered McTeague.

It was this that had roused him.  The thrown knife, the attempt on his life, was beyond his solution; but the breaking of his pipe he understood clearly enough.

“I’ll show him,” he exclaimed.

As though they had been little children, McTeague set Frenna and the harness-maker aside, and strode out at the door like a raging elephant.  Heise stood rubbing his shoulder.

“Might as well try to stop a locomotive,” he muttered.  “The man’s made of iron.”

Meanwhile, McTeague went storming up the street toward the flat, wagging his head and grumbling to himself.  Ah, Marcus would break his pipe, would he?  Ah, he was a zinc-plugger, was he?  He’d show Marcus Schouler.  No one should make small of him.  He tramped up the stairs to Marcus’s room.  The door was locked.  The dentist put one enormous hand on the knob and pushed the door in, snapping the wood-work, tearing off the lock.  Nobody—­the room was dark and empty.  Never mind, Marcus would have to come home some time that night.  McTeague would go down and wait for him in his “Parlors.”  He was bound to hear him as he came up the stairs.

As McTeague reached his room he stumbled over, in the darkness, a big packing-box that stood in the hallway just outside his door.  Puzzled, he stepped over it, and lighting the gas in his room, dragged it inside and examined it.

It was addressed to him.  What could it mean?  He was expecting nothing.  Never since he had first furnished his room had packing-cases been left for him in this fashion.  No mistake was possible.  There were his name and address unmistakably.  “Dr. McTeague, dentist—­Polk Street, San Francisco, Cal.,” and the red Wells Fargo tag.

Seized with the joyful curiosity of an overgrown boy, he pried off the boards with the corner of his fireshovel.  The case was stuffed full of excelsior.  On the top lay an envelope addressed to him in Trina’s handwriting.  He opened it and read, “For my dear Mac’s birthday, from Trina;” and below, in a kind of post-script, “The man will be round to-morrow to put it in place.”  McTeague tore away the excelsior.  Suddenly he uttered an exclamation.

It was the Tooth—­the famous golden molar with its huge prongs—­his sign, his ambition, the one unrealized dream of his life; and it was French gilt, too, not the cheap German gilt that was no good.  Ah, what a dear little woman was this Trina, to keep so quiet, to remember his birthday!

“Ain’t she—­ain’t she just a—­just a Jewel,” exclaimed McTeague under his breath, “a Jewel—­yes, just a Jewel; that’s the word.”

Very carefully he removed the rest of the excelsior, and lifting the ponderous Tooth from its box, set it upon the marble-top centre table.  How immense it looked in that little room!  The thing was tremendous, overpowering—­the tooth of a gigantic fossil, golden and dazzling.  Beside it everything seemed dwarfed.  Even McTeague himself, big boned and enormous as he was, shrank and dwindled in the presence of the monster.  As for an instant he bore it in his hands, it was like a puny Gulliver struggling with the molar of some vast Brobdingnag.