Harry1 Del Mar2 found only a few white feathers on the floor of Dag Daughtry’s room in the Bowhead Lodging3 House, and from the landlady4 learned what had happened to Michael. The first thing Harry Del Mar did, still retaining his taxi, was to locate the residence of Doctor Emory and make sure that Michael was confined in an outhouse in the back yard. Next he engaged passage on the steamship5 Umatilla, sailing for Seattle and Puget Sound ports at daylight. And next he packed his luggage and paid his bills.
In the meantime, a wordy war was occurring in Walter Merritt Emory’s office.
“The man’s yelling his head off,” Doctor Masters was contending. “The police had to rap him with their clubs in the ambulance. He was violent. He wanted his dog. It can’t be done. It’s too raw. You can’t steal his dog this way. He’ll make a howl in the papers.”
“Huh!” quoth Walter Merritt Emory. “I’d like to see a reporter with backbone6 enough to go within talking distance of a leper in the pest-house. And I’d like to see the editor who wouldn’t send a pest-house letter (granting it’d been smuggled7 past the guards) out to be burned the very second he became aware of its source. Don’t you worry, Doc. There won’t be any noise in the papers.”
“But leprosy! Public health! The dog has been exposed to his master. The dog itself is a peripatetic8 source of infection.”
“Contagion is the better and more technical word, Doc.,” Walter Merritt Emory soothed9 with the sting of superior knowledge.
“Contagion, then,” Doctor Masters took him up. “The public must be considered. It must not run the risk of being infected—”
“Of contracting the contagion,” the other corrected smoothly10.
“Call it what you will. The public—”
“Poppycock,” said Walter Merritt Emory. “What you don’t know about leprosy, and what the rest of the board of health doesn’t know about leprosy, would fill more books than have been compiled by the men who have expertly studied the disease. The one thing they have eternally tried, and are eternally trying, is to inoculate11 one animal outside man with the leprosy that is peculiar12 to man. Horses, rabbits, rats, donkeys, monkeys, mice, and dogs—heavens, they have tried it on them all, tens of thousands of times and a hundred thousand times ten thousand times, and never a successful inoculation13! They have never succeeded in inoculating14 it on one man from another. Here—let me show you.”
And from his shelves Waiter Merritt Emory began pulling down his authorities.
“Amazing . . . most interesting . . . ” Doctor Masters continued to emit from time to time as he followed the expert guidance of the other through the books. “I never dreamed . . . the amount of work they have done is astounding15 . . . ”
“But,” he said in conclusion, “there is no convincing a layman16 of the matter contained on your shelves. Nor can I so convince my public. Nor will I try to. Besides, the man is consigned17 to the living death of life-long imprisonment18 in the pest-house. You know the beastly hole it is. He loves the dog. He’s mad over it. Let him have it. I tell you it’s rotten unfair and cruel, and I won’t stand for it.”
“Yes, you will,” Walter Merritt Emory assured him coolly. “And I’ll tell you why.”
He told him. He said things that no doctor should say to another, but which a politician may well say, and has often said, to another politician—things which cannot bear repeating, if, for no other reason, because they are too humiliating and too little conducive19 to pride for the average American citizen to know; things of the inside, secret governments of imperial municipalities which the average American citizen, voting free as a king at the polls, fondly thinks he manages; things which are, on rare occasion, partly unburied and promptly20 reburied in the tomes of reports of Lexow Committees and Federal Commissions.
And Walter Merritt Emory won his desire of Michael against Doctor Masters; had his wife dine with him at Jules’ that evening and took her to see Margaret Anglin in celebration of the victory; returned home at one in the morning, in his pyjamas21 went out to take a last look at Michael, and found no Michael.
The pest-house of San Francisco, as is naturally the case with pest-houses in all American cities, was situated22 on the bleakest23, remotest, forlornest, cheapest space of land owned by the city. Poorly protected from the Pacific Ocean, chill winds and dense24 fog-banks whistled and swirled25 sadly across the sand-dunes. Picnicking parties never came there, nor did small boys hunting birds’ nests or playing at being wild Indians. The only class of frequenters was the suicides, who, sad of life, sought the saddest landscape as a fitting scene in which to end. And, because they so ended, they never repeated their visits.
The outlook from the windows was not inspiriting. A quarter of a mile in either direction, looking out along the shallow canyon26 of the sand-hills, Dag Daughtry could see the sentry-boxes of the guards, themselves armed and more prone27 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 prospect28 from the windows of the four walls of the pest-house were trees. Eucalyptus29 they were, but not the royal monarchs30 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 survivors31, they thrust their branches, twisted and distorted, as if writhing32 in agony, into the air. Scrub of growth they were, expending33 the major portion of their meagre nourishment34 in their roots that crawled seaward through the insufficient35 sand for anchorage against the prevailing36 gales37.
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 tragic39, 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 isolated40 mountain peak. But this tiny ripple41 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 Wharf42, and in the overt43 designs of Japan upon Hawaii, the Philippines, and the Pacific Coast of North America.
And, outside of imprisonment, nothing happened of interest to Dag Daughtry and Kwaque at the pest-house until one night in the late fall. A gale38 was not merely brewing44. It was coming on to blow. Because, in a basket of fruit, stated to have been sent by the young ladies of Miss Foote’s Seminary, Dau............