The owner of the ranch was neither mild, refined, nor patient.  Jack, good-natured as he was, partly grasped these facts as he found himself taken from the pannier, but when it came to getting cranky little Jill out of the basket and into a collar, there ensued a scene so unpleasant that no collar was needed.  The ranchman wore his hand in a sling for two weeks, and Jacky at his chain’s end paced the ranch-yard alone.

V. THE RIVER HELD IN THE FOOTHILLS

There was little of pleasant interest in the next eighteen months of Jack’s career.  His share of the globe was a twenty-foot circle around a pole in the yard.  The blue hills of the offing, the nearer pine grove, and even the ranch-house itself were fixed stars, far away and sending merely faint suggestions of their splendors to his not very bright eyes.  Even the horses and men were outside his little sphere and related to him about as much as comets are to the earth.  The very tricks that had made him valued were being forgotten as Jack grew up in chains.

At first a butter-firkin had made him an ample den, but he rapidly passed through the various stages—­butter-firkin, nail-keg, flour-barrel, oil-barrel—­and had now to be graded as a good average hogshead Bear, though he was far from filling that big round wooden cavern that formed his latest den.

The ranch hotel lay just where the foothills of the Sierras with their groves of live oaks were sloping into the golden plains of the Sacramento.  Nature had showered on it every wonderful gift in her lap.  A foreground rich with flowers, luxuriant in fruit, shade and sun, dry pastures, rushing rivers, and murmuring rills, were here.  Great trees were variants of the view, and the high Sierras to the east overtopped the wondrous plumy forests of their pines with blocks of sculptured blue.  Back of the house was a noble river of water from the hills, fouled and chained by sluice and dam, but still a noble stream whose earliest parent rill had gushed from grim old Tallac’s slope.

Things of beauty, life, and color were on every side, and yet most sordid of the human race were the folk about the ranch hotel.  To see them in this setting might well raise doubt that any “rise from Nature up to Nature’s God.”  No city slum has ever shown a more ignoble crew, and Jack, if his mind were capable of such things, must have graded the two-legged ones lower in proportion as he knew them better.

Cruelty was his lot, and hate was his response.  Almost the only amusing trick he now did was helping himself to a drink of beer.  He was very fond of beer, and the loafers about the tavern often gave him a bottle to see how dexterously he would twist off the wire and work out the cork.  As soon as it popped, he would turn it up between his paws and drink to the last drop.