“Now, my boy, times have changed,” Del Mar addressed him in cold, brittle tones.  “I’m going to make an actor out of you, and teach you what’s what.  First of all, come here . . .  COME HERE!”

Michael obeyed, without haste, without lagging, and patently without eagerness.

“You’ll get over that, my lad, and put pep into your motions when I talk to you,” Del Mar assured him; and the very manner of his utterance was a threat that Michael could not fail to recognise.  “Now we’ll just see if I can pull off the trick.  You listen to me, and sing like you did for that leper guy.”

Drawing a harmonica from his vest pocket, he put it to his lips and began to play “Marching through Georgia.”

“Sit down!” he commanded.

Again Michael obeyed, although all that was Michael was in protest.  He quivered as the shrill-sweet strains from the silver reeds ran through him.  All his throat and chest was in the impulse to sing; but he mastered it, for he did not care to sing for this man.  All he wanted of him was Steward.

“Oh, you’re stubborn, eh?” Del Mar sneered at him.  “The matter with you is you’re thoroughbred.  Well, my boy, it just happens I know your kind and I reckon I can make you get busy and work for me just as much as you did for that other guy.  Now get busy.”

He shifted the tune on into “Georgia Camp Meeting.”  But Michael was obdurate.  Not until the melting strains of “Old Kentucky Home” poured through him did he lose his self-control and lift his mellow-throated howl that was the call for the lost pack of the ancient millenniums.  Under the prodding hypnosis of this music he could not but yearn and burn for the vague, forgotten life of the pack when the world was young and the pack was the pack ere it was lost for ever through the endless centuries of domestication.

“Ah, ha,” Del Mar chuckled coldly, unaware of the profound history and vast past he evoked by his silver reeds.

A loud knock on the partition wall warned him that some sleepy passenger was objecting.

“That will do!” he said sharply, taking the harmonica from his lips.  And Michael ceased, and hated him.  “I guess I’ve got your number all right.  And you needn’t think you’re going to sleep here scratching fleas and disturbing my sleep.”

He pressed the call-button, and, when his room-steward answered, turned Michael over to him to be taken down below and tied up in the crowded cubby-hole.

* * * * *

During the several days and nights on the Umatilla, Michael learned much of what manner of man Harry Del Mar was.  Almost, might it be said, he learned Del Mar’s pedigree without knowing anything of his history.  For instance he did not know that Del Mar’s real name was Percival Grunsky, and that at grammar school he had been called “Brownie” by the girls and “Blackie” by the boys.  No more did he know that he had gone from half-way-through grammar school directly into the industrial reform school; nor that, after serving two years, he had been paroled out by Harris Collins, who made a living, and an excellent one, by training animals for the stage.  Much less could he know the training that for six years Del Mar, as assistant, had been taught to give the animals, and, thereby, had received for himself.