A hundred yards away he sat down in the sand and waited.
"Worth twenty pounds if a penny," he muttered to himself.

"If I couldn't get ten pounds for him, just like that, with a thank-you-ma'am, I'm a sucker that don't know a terrier from a greyhound .-- Sure, ten pounds, in any pub on Sydney beach." And ten pounds, metamorphosed into quart bottles of beer, reared an immense and radiant vision, very like a brewery, inside his head.
A scurry of feet in the sand, and low sniffings, stiffened him to alertness.

It was as he had hoped.

The dog had liked him from the start, and had followed him.
For Dag Daughtry had a way with him, as Michael was quickly to learn, when the man's hand reached out and clutched him, half by the jowl, half by the slack of the neck under the ear.

There was no threat in that reach, nothing tentative nor timorous.