Up to this time the Captain had been on the ferocious offensive, and he was in the act of following up the kick when Michael regained his feet and soared up in the air, not for leg or thigh, but for the throat.  Too high it was for him to reach it, but his teeth closed on the flowing black scarf and tore it to tatters as his weight drew him back to deck.

It was not this so much that turned Captain Duncan to the pure defensive and started him retreating backward, as it was the silence of Michael.  Ominous as death it was.  There were no snarls nor throat-threats.  With eyes straight-looking and unblinking, he sprang and sprang again.  Neither did he growl when he attacked nor yelp when he was kicked.  Fear of the blow was not in him.  As Tom Haggin had so often bragged of Biddy and Terrence, they bred true in Jerry and Michael in the matter of not wincing at a blow.  Always—­they were so made—­they sprang to meet the blow and to encounter the creature who delivered the blow.  With a silence that was invested with the seriousness of death, they were wont to attack and to continue to attack.

And so Michael.  As the Captain retreated kicking, he attacked, leaping and slashing.  What saved Captain Duncan was a sailor with a deck mop on the end of a stick.  Intervening, he managed to thrust it into Michael’s mouth and shove him away.  This first time his teeth closed automatically upon it.  But, spitting it out, he declined thereafter to bite it, knowing it for what it was, an inanimate thing upon which his teeth could inflict no hurt.

Nor, beyond trying to avoid him, was he interested in the sailor.  It was Captain Duncan, leaning his back against the rail, breathing heavily, and wiping the streaming sweat from his face, who was Michael’s meat.  Long as it has taken to tell the battle, beginning with the slaying of the Persian cat to the thrusting of the mop into Michael’s jaws, so swift had been the rush of events that the passengers, springing from their deck-chairs and hurrying to the scene, were just arriving when Michael eluded the mop of the sailor by a successful dodge and plunged in on Captain Duncan, this time sinking his teeth so savagely into a rotund calf as to cause its owner to splutter an incoherent curse and howl of wrathful surprise.

A fortunate kick hurled Michael away and enabled the sailor to intervene once again with the mop.  And upon the scene came Dag Daughtry, to behold his captain, frayed and bleeding and breathing apoplectically, Michael raging in ghastly silence at the end of a mop, and a large Persian mother-cat writhing with a broken back.

“Killeny Boy!” the steward cried imperatively.

Through no matter what indignation and rage that possessed him, his lord’s voice penetrated his consciousness, so that, cooling almost instantly, Michael’s ears flattened, his bristling hair lay down, and his lips covered his fangs as he turned his head to look acknowledgment.