A big chimpanzee that covered one of the circuits with Michael had an antipathy for clothes.  Like a horse that fights the putting on of the bridle, and, after it is on, takes no further notice of it, so the big chimpanzee fought the putting on the clothes.  Once on, it was ready to go out on the stage and through its turn.  But the rub was in putting on the clothes.  It took the owner and two stage-hands, pulling him up to a ring in the wall and throttling him, to dress him—­and this, despite the fact that the owner had long since knocked out his incisors.

All this cruelty Michael sensed without knowing.  And he accepted it as the way of life, as he accepted the daylight and the dark, the bite of the frost on bleak and windy station platforms, the mysterious land of Otherwhere that he knew in dreams and song, the equally mysterious Nothingness into which had vanished Meringe Plantation and ships and oceans and men and Steward.

CHAPTER XXXIII

For two years Michael sang his way over the United States, to fame for himself and to fortune for Jacob Henderson.  There was never any time off.  So great was his success, that Henderson refused flattering offers to cross the Atlantic to show in Europe.  But off-time did come to Michael when Henderson fell ill of typhoid in Chicago.

It was a three-months’ vacation for Michael, who, well treated but still a prisoner, spent it in a caged kennel in Mulcachy’s Animal Home.  Mulcachy, one of Harris Collins’s brightest graduates, had emulated his master by setting up in business in Chicago, where he ran everything with the same rigid cleanliness, sanitation, and scientific cruelty.  Michael received nothing but the excellent food and the cleanliness; but, a solitary and brooding prisoner in his cage, he could not help but sense the atmosphere of pain and terror about him of the animals being broken for the delight of men.

Mulcachy had originated aphorisms of his own which he continually enunciated, among which were: 

“Take it from me, when an animal won’t give way to pain, it can’t be broke.  Pain is the only school-teacher.”

“Just as you got to take the buck out of a broncho, you’ve got to take the bite out of a lion.”

“You can’t break animals with a feather duster.  The thicker the skull the thicker the crowbar.”

“They’ll always beat you in argument.  First thing is to club the argument out of them.”

“Heart-bonds between trainers and animals!  Son, that’s dope for the newspaper interviewer.  The only heart-bond I know is a stout stick with some iron on the end of it.”

“Sure you can make ’m eat outa your hand.  But the thing to watch out for is that they don’t eat your hand.  A blank cartridge in the nose just about that time is the best preventive I know.”