The outlook from the windows was not inspiriting.  A quarter of a mile in either direction, looking out along the shallow canyon of the sand-hills, Dag Daughtry could see the sentry-boxes of the guards, themselves armed and more prone to kill than to lay hands on any escaping pest-man, much less persuavively discuss with him the advisability of his return to the prison house.

On the opposing sides of the prospect from the windows of the four walls of the pest-house were trees.  Eucalyptus they were, but not the royal monarchs that their brothers are in native habitats.  Poorly planted, by politics, illy attended, by politics, decimated and many times repeatedly decimated by the hostile forces of their environment, a straggling corporal’s guard of survivors, they thrust their branches, twisted and distorted, as if writhing in agony, into the air.  Scrub of growth they were, expending the major portion of their meagre nourishment in their roots that crawled seaward through the insufficient sand for anchorage against the prevailing gales.

Not even so far as the sentry-boxes were Daughtry and Kwaque permitted to stroll.  A hundred yards inside was the dead-line.  Here, the guards came hastily to deposit food-supplies, medicines, and written doctors’ instructions, retreating as hastily as they came.  Here, also, was a blackboard upon which Daughtry was instructed to chalk up his needs and requests in letters of such size that they could be read from a distance.  And on this board, for many days, he wrote, not demands for beer, although the six-quart daily custom had been broken sharply off, but demands like: 

   WHERE IS MY DOG?

   HE IS AN IRISH TERRIER.

   HE IS ROUGH-COATED.

   HIS NAME IS KILLENY BOY.

   I WANT MY DOG.

   I WANT TO TALK TO DOC.  EMORY.

   TELL DOC.  EMORY TO WRITE TO ME ABOUT MY DOG.

One day, Dag Daughtry wrote: 

   IF I DON’T GET MY DOG I WILL KILL DOC.  EMORY.

Whereupon the newspapers informed the public that the sad case of the two lepers at the pest-house had become tragic, because the white one had gone insane.  Public-spirited citizens wrote to the papers, declaiming against the maintenance of such a danger to the community, and demanding that the United States government build a national leprosarium on some remote island or isolated mountain peak.  But this tiny ripple of interest faded out in seventy-two hours, and the reporter-cubs proceeded variously to interest the public in the Alaskan husky dog that was half a bear, in the question whether or not Crispi Angelotti was guilty of having cut the carcass of Giuseppe Bartholdi into small portions and thrown it into the bay in a grain-sack off Fisherman’s Wharf, and in the overt designs of Japan upon Hawaii, the Philippines, and the Pacific Coast of North America.