What it was all about—­why he was kept in his cramped prison in the cramped car—­he did not ask himself.  He accepted it as unhappiness and misery, and had no more explanation for it than for the crushing of the paw.  Such things happened.  It was life, and life had many evils.  The why of things never entered his head.  He knew things and some small bit of the how of things.  What was, was.  Water was wet, fire hot, iron hard, meat good.  He accepted such things as he accepted the everlasting miracles of the light and of the dark, which were no miracles to him any more than was his wire coat a miracle, or his beating heart, or his thinking brain.

In Chicago, he was loaded upon a track, carted through the roaring streets of the vast city, and put into another baggage-car which was quickly in motion in continuation of the eastward journey.  It meant more strange men who handled baggage, as it meant in New York, where, from railroad baggage-room to express wagon he was exchanged, for ever a crated prisoner and dispatched to one, Harris Collins, on Long Island.

First of all came Harris Collins and the animal hell over which he ruled.  But the second event must be stated first.  Michael never saw Harry Del Mar again.  As the other men he had known had stepped out of life, which was a way they had, so Harry Del Mar stepped out of Michael’s purview of life as well as out of life itself.  And his stepping out was literal.  A collision on the elevated, a panic scramble of the uninjured out upon the trestle over the street, a step on the third rail, and Harry Del Mar was engulfed in the Nothingness which men know as death and which is nothingness in so far as such engulfed ones never reappear nor walk the ways of life again.

CHAPTER XXIV

Harris Collins was fifty-two years of age.  He was slender and dapper, and in appearance and comportment was so sweet- and gentle-spirited that the impression he radiated was almost of sissyness.  He might have taught a Sunday-school, presided over a girls’ seminary, or been a president of a humane society.

His complexion was pink and white, his hands were as soft as the hands of his daughters, and he weighed a hundred and twelve pounds.  Moreover, he was afraid of his wife, afraid of a policeman, afraid of physical violence, and lived in constant dread of burglars.  But the one thing he was not afraid of was wild animals of the most ferocious sorts, such as lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars.  He knew the game, and could conquer the most refractory lion with a broom-handle—­not outside the cage, but inside and locked in.