first head-on glance.  He trotted to the edge of the cage and thrust his nose between the bars, and a taunting laugh rose out of Grouse Piet’s throat.  Then he began making a circle of the cage, his sharp eyes on the silent ring of faces.  Taao stood in the centre of the cage, and not once did his reddish eyes leave Miki.  What was outside of the cage held small interest for him.  He understood his business, and murder was bred in his heart.  For a space during which Durant’s heart beat like a hammer Taao turned, as if on a pivot, following Miki’s movement, and the crest on his spine stood up like bristles.

Then Miki stopped, and in that moment Durant saw the end of all his hopes.  Without a sound the wolf-dog was at his opponent.  A bellow rose from Grouse Piet’s lips.  A deep breath passed through the circle of spectators, and Durant felt a cold chill run up his back to the roots of his hair.  What happened in the next instant made men’s hearts stand still.  In that first rush Miki should have died.  Grouse Piet expected him to die, and Durant expected him to die.  But in the last fractional bit of the second in which the wolf-dog’s jaws closed, Miki was transformed into a thing of living lightning.  No man had ever seen a movement swifter than that with which he turned on Taao.  Their jaws clashed.  There was a sickening grinding of bone, and in another moment they were rolling and twisting together on the earth floor.  Neither Grouse Piet nor Durant could see what was happening.  They forgot even their own bets in the horror of that fight.  Never had there been such a fight at Fort O’ God.

The sound of it reached to the Company’s store.  In the door, looking toward the big cage, stood the young white man.  He heard the snarling, the clashing of teeth, and his jaws set heavily and a dull flame burned in his eyes.  His breath came in a sudden gasp.

“Damn!” he cried, softly.

His hands clenched, and he stepped slowly down from the door and went toward the cage.  It was over when he made his way through the ring of spectators.  The fight had ended as suddenly as it had begun, and Grouse Piet’s wolf-dog lay in the centre of the cage with a severed jugular.  Miki looked as though he might be dying.  Durant had opened the door and had slipped a rope over his head, and outside the cage Miki stood swaying on his feet, red with blood, and half blind.  His flesh was red and bleeding in a dozen places, and a stream of blood trickled from his mouth.  A cry of horror rose to the young white man’s lips as he looked down at him.

And then, almost in the same breath, there came a still stranger cry.

“Good God!  Miki—­Miki—­Miki—­”

Beating upon his brain as if from a vast distance, coming to him through the blindness of his wounds, Miki heard that voice.

The voice!  The voice that had lived with him in all his dreams, the voice he had waited for, and searched for, and knew that some day he would find.  The voice of Challoner, his master!