After that he resisted no more, and was washed out and scrubbed out and cleansed out with the hose, a big bristly brush, and much carbolic soap, the lather of which got into and stung his eyes and nose, causing him to weep copiously and sneeze violently.  Apprehensive of what might at any moment happen to him, but by this time aware that the youth was neither positive nor negative for kindness or harm, Michael continued to endure without further battling, until, clean and comfortable, he was put away into a pen, sweet and wholesome, where he slept and for the time being forgot.  The place was the hospital, or segregation ward, and a week of imprisonment was spent therein, in which nothing happened in the way of development of germ diseases, and nothing happened to him except regular good food, pure drinking-water, and absolute isolation from contact with all life save the youth-god who, like an automaton, attended on him.

Michael had yet to meet Harris Collins, although, from a distance, often he heard his voice, not loud, but very imperative.  That the owner of this voice was a high god, Michael knew from the first sound of it.  Only a high god, a master over ordinary gods, could be so imperative.  Will was in that voice, and accustomedness to command.  Any dog would have so decided as quickly as Michael did.  And any dog would have decided that there was no love nor lovableness in the god behind the voice, nothing to warm one’s heart nor to adore.

CHAPTER XXV

It was at eleven in the morning that the pale youth-god put collar and chain on Michael, led him out of the segregation ward, and turned him over to a dark youth-god who wasted no time of greeting on him and manifested no friendliness.  A captive at the end of a chain, on the way Michael quickly encountered other captives going in his direction.  There were three of them, and never had he seen the like.  Three slouching, ambling monsters of bears they were, and at sight of them Michael bristled and uttered the lowest of growls; for he knew them, out of his heredity (as a domestic cow knows her first wolf), as immemorial enemies from the wild.  But he had travelled too far, seen too much, and was altogether too sensible, to attack them.  Instead, walking stiff-legged and circumspectly, but smelling with all his nose the strange scent of the creatures, he followed at the end of his chain his own captor god.

Continually a multitude of strange scents invaded his nostrils.  Although he could not see through walls, he got the smells he was later to identify of lions, leopards, monkeys, baboons, and seals and sea-lions.  All of which might have stunned an ordinary dog; but the effect on him was to make him very alert and at the same time very subdued.  It was as if he walked in a new and monstrously populous jungle and was unacquainted with its ways and denizens.