It was the token of the ultimate catastrophe to life that was wrapped and twisted into every fibre of his heredity.

In that house was the nothingness of what once was Skipper. His fear was indescribable and unthinkable. Finally, sick and subdued, he crept out of the house and away to the house of his devil devil master, where, for the round of twenty-four hours, he waked and slept and dreamed centuries of nightmares.įor ever after in Somo, Jerry feared that grass house of Bashti. Next, in profound desolation, Jerry set down before Skipper’s head, pointed his nose toward the lofty ridge-pole, and howled mournfully and long. Next, in lieu of his enemy, he saw Skipper’s head, and crept to it and loved it, kissing with his tongue the hard cheeks, the closed lids of the eyes that his love could not open, the immobile lips that would not utter one of the love-words they had been used to utter to the little dog. At first, Jerry looked about for his enemy, growling and bristling his neck hair. Jerry quivered at first, and in the matter of a minute struggled feebly to his feet where he stood swaying and dizzy and thus Bashti, his eye to the crack, saw the miracle of life flow back through the channels of the inert body and stiffen the legs to upstanding, and saw consciousness, the mystery of mysteries, flood back inside the head of bone that was covered with hair, smoulder and glow in the opening eyes, and direct the lips to writhe away from the teeth and the throat to vibrate to the snarl that had been interrupted when the stick smashed him down into darkness.Īnd more Bashti saw. The head of Van Horn he left lying on the floor, while he stole out himself to peer in through a crack and see what next the puppy might do.

Bashti sighed wearily, and wearily wrapped the heads in their grass-mat coverings-all but Van Horn’s and hoisted them up in the air to hang from the roof-beams-to hang as he debated, long after he was dead and out if it, even as some of them had so hung from long before his father’s and his grandfather’s time.

Just crack an egg southwest