He tried lying down, confined as the space was, and made out better, although his lips were cut and bleeding by having been forced so sharply against his teeth.  But the worst was to come.  One of his forepaws slipped out through the slats or bars and rested on the bottom of the wagon where the trunks were squeaking, screeching, and jigging.  A rut in the roadway made the nearest trunk tilt one edge in the air and shift position, so that when it tilted back again it rested on Michael’s paw.  The unexpectedness of the crushing hurt of it caused him to yelp and at the same time instinctively and spasmodically to pull back with all his strength.  This wrenched his shoulder and added to the agony of the imprisoned foot.

And blind fear descended upon Michael, the fear that is implanted in all animals and in man himself—­the fear of the trap.  Utterly beside himself, though he no longer yelped, he flung himself madly about, straining the tendons and muscles of his shoulder and leg and further and severely injuring the crushed foot.  He even attacked the bars with his teeth in his agony to get at the monster thing outside that had laid hold of him and would not let him go.  Another rut saved him, however, tilting the trunk just sufficiently to enable his violent struggling to drag the foot clear.

At the railroad station, the crate was handled, not with deliberate roughness, but with such carelessness that it half-slipped out of a baggageman’s hands, capsized sidewise, and was caught when it was past the man’s knees but before it struck the cement floor.  But, Michael, sliding helplessly down the perpendicular bottom of the crate, fetched up with his full weight on the injured paw.

“Huh!” said Del Mar a little later to Michael, having strolled down the platform to where the crate was piled on a truck with other baggage destined for the train.  “Got your foot smashed.  Well, it’ll teach you a lesson to keep your feet inside.”

“That claw is a goner,” one of the station baggage-men said, straightening up from an examination of Michael through the bars.

Del Mar bent to a closer scrutiny.

“So’s the whole toe,” he said, drawing his pocket-knife and opening a blade.  “I’ll fix it in half a jiffy if you’ll lend a hand.”

He unlocked the box and dipped Michael out with the customary strangle-hold on the neck.  He squirmed and struggled, dabbing at the air with the injured as well as the uninjured forepaw and increasing his pain.

“You hold the leg,” Del Mar commanded.  “He’s safe with that grip.  It won’t take a second.”

Nor did it take longer.  And Michael, back in the box and raging, was one toe short of the number which he had brought into the world.  The blood ran freely from the crude but effective surgery, and he lay and licked the wound and was depressed with apprehension of he knew not what terrible fate awaited him and was close at hand.  Never, in his experience of men, had he been so treated, while the confinement of the box was maddening with its suggestion of the trap.  Trapped he was, and helpless, and the ultimate evil of life had happened to Steward, who had evidently been swallowed up by the Nothingness which had swallowed up Meringe, the Eugenie, the Solomon Islands, the Makambo, Australia, and the Mary Turner.