“There’s an all-night bank,” the other went on.  “We can stroll over, I’ll cash a cheque, and in half an hour the cash will be in your hand.”

Daughtry shook his head.

“Even as a business proposition, nothing doing,” he said.  “Look you.  Here’s the dog earnin’ twenty dollars a night.  Say he works twenty-five days in the month.  That’s five hundred a month, or six thousand a year.  Now say that’s five per cent., because it’s easier to count, it represents the interest on a capital value of one hundred an’ twenty thousand-dollars.  Then we’ll suppose expenses and salary for me is twenty thousand.  That leaves the dog worth a hundred thousand.  Just to be fair, cut it in half—­a fifty-thousand dog.  And you’re offerin’ a thousand for him.”

“I suppose you think he’ll last for ever, like so much land’,” Del Mar smiled quietly.

Daughtry saw the point instantly.

“Give ’m five years of work—­that’s thirty thousand.  Give ’m one year of work—­it’s six thousand.  An’ you’re offerin’ me one thousand for six thousand.  That ain’t no kind of business—­for me . . . an’ him.  Besides, when he can’t work any more, an’ ain’t worth a cent, he’ll be worth just a plumb million to me, an’ if anybody offered it, I’d raise the price.”

CHAPTER XIX

“I’ll see you again,” Harry Del Mar told Daughtry, at the end of his fourth conversation on the matter of Michael’s sale.

Wherein Harry Del Mar was mistaken.  He never saw Daughtry again, because Daughtry saw Doctor Emory first.

Kwaque’s increasing restlessness at night, due to the swelling under his right arm-pit, had began to wake Daughtry up.  After several such experiences, he had investigated and decided that Kwaque was sufficiently sick to require a doctor.  For which reason, one morning at eleven, taking Kwaque along, he called at Walter Merritt Emory’s office and waited his turn in the crowded reception-room.

“I think he’s got cancer, Doc.,” Daughtry said, while Kwaque was pulling off his shirt and undershirt.  “He never squealed, you know, never peeped.  That’s the way of niggers.  I didn’t find our till he got to wakin’ me up nights with his tossin’ about an’ groanin’ in his sleep.—­There!  What’d you call it?  Cancer or tumour—­no two ways about it, eh?”

But the quick eye of Walter Merritt Emory had not missed, in passing, the twisted fingers of Kwaque’s left hand.  Not only was his eye quick, but it was a “leper eye.”  A volunteer surgeon in the first days out in the Philippines, he had made a particular study of leprosy, and had observed so many lepers that infallibly, except in the incipient beginnings of the disease, he could pick out a leper at a glance.  From the twisted fingers, which was the anaesthetic form, produced by nerve-disintegration, to the corrugated lion forehead (again anaesthetic), his eyes flashed to the swelling under the right arm-pit and his brain diagnosed it as the tubercular form.