This first time his teeth closed automatically upon it.

But, spitting it out, he declined thereafter to bite it, knowing it for what it was, an inanimate thing upon which his teeth could inflict no hurt.
Nor, beyond trying to avoid him, was he interested in the sailor.

It was Captain Duncan, leaning his back against the rail, breathing heavily, and wiping the streaming sweat from his face, who was Michael's meat.

Long as it has taken to tell the battle, beginning with the slaying of the Persian cat to the thrusting of the mop into Michael's jaws, so swift had been the rush of events that the passengers, springing from their deck- chairs and hurrying to the scene, were just arriving when Michael eluded the mop of the sailor by a successful dodge and plunged in on Captain Duncan, this time sinking his teeth so savagely into a rotund calf as to cause its owner to splutter an incoherent curse and howl of wrathful surprise.
A fortunate kick hurled Michael away and enabled the sailor to intervene once again with the mop.

And upon the scene came Dag Daughtry, to behold his captain, frayed and bleeding and breathing apoplectically, Michael raging in ghastly silence at the end of a mop, and a large Persian mother- cat writhing with a broken back.
"Killeny Boy!" the steward cried imperatively.
Through no matter what indignation and rage that possessed him, his lord's voice penetrated his consciousness, so that, cooling almost instantly, Michael's ears flattened, his bristling hair lay down, and his lips covered his fangs as he turned his head to look acknowledgment.
"Come here, Killeny!" Michael obeyed--not crouching cringingly, but trotting eagerly, gladly, to Steward's feet.
"Lie down, Boy." He turned half around as he flumped himself down with a sigh of relief, and, with a red flash of tongue, kissed Steward's foot.
"Your dog, Steward ?" Captain Duncan demanded in a smothered voice wherein struggled anger and shortness of breath.
"Yes, sir.