Trooper Tales — page 142: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

130 Shadow and the Cherub. All these words we heard. Then Cherub dashed up the | companionway, his chains dragging behind. His fangs were horrible to see. A sailor in his way was thrown over, and to-day there ‘is an ugly scar on his throat. Others were bitten. Shadow was speaking in a low voice we could not understand. The bloodhound and the boy were close together. We, ~who were watching, shuddered. Slowly, cautiously, a dark hand moved out and grasped the chain. The red, flashing orbs of the brute lowered from Shadow’s gaze. We hoped no more when the bloodhound growled. Without haste, seemingly, the dark hand holding the chain moved toward the halyards. The fingers worked swiftly for a moment, but how long it seemed to us! Then like a flash Shadow was beyond the length of the chain, and laughing like one whose nerve is gone. Cherub beat his body upon the deck and upon the halyards. We were in the tropics where there is no cure for canine madness; Cherub did not roar or suffer long, and for him Shadow, who loved all things small and great, wept long. But out of that grief there came to the heart of the little dusky boy a joy sweet and lasting, for somehow the men from the South who stood upon the hurricane deck that day forgot pride and prejudice. And now the troop is scouring the mist-hung hills of Porto Rico—peering into caves, and searching lonely highland shacks—for Spaniards who were once soldiers and now guerrillas. CONNIE NOOKS5(EC)