nger. The next moment, reaching over the fence, he brought down the
trunk on Last Bull's hump with such a terrible flail-like blow that the
great buffalo stumbled forward upon his knees.

He was up again in an instant and hurling himself madly against the
inexorable steel which separated him from his foe. Bong hesitated for a
second, then, reaching over the fence once more, clutched Last Bull
maliciously around the base of his horns and tried to twist his neck.
This enterprise, however, was too much even for the elephant's titanic
powers, for Last Bull's greatest strength lay in the muscles of his
ponderous and corded neck. Raving and bellowing, he plunged this way and
that, striving in vain to wrench himself free from that
incomprehensible, snake-like thing which had fastened upon him. Bong,
trumpeting savagely, braced himself with widespread pillars of legs, and
between them it seemed that the steel fence must go down under such
cataclysmic shocks as it was suffering. But the noisy violence of the
battle presently brought its own ending. An amused but angry squad of
attendants came up and stopped it, and Bong, who seemed plainly the
aggressor, was hustled off to his stall in deep disgrace.

Last Bull was humiliated. In this encounter things had happened which
he could in no way comprehend; and though, beyond an aching in neck and
shoulders, he felt none the worse physically, he had nevertheless a
sense of having been worsted, of having been treated with ignominy, in
spite of the fact that it was his foe, and not he, who had retired from
the field. For several days he wore a subdued air and kept about meekly
with his docile cows. Then his old, bitter moodiness reasserted itself,
and he resumed his solitary broodings on the crest of the knoll.

When the winter storms came on, it had been Last Bull's custom to let
himself be housed luxuriously at nightfall, with the rest of the herd,
in the warm and ample buffalo-shed. But this winter he made such
difficulty about going in that at last Payne decreed that he should have
his own way and stay out. "It will do him no harm, and may cool his
peppery blood some!" had been the keeper's decision. So the door was
left open, and Last Bull entered or refrained, according to his whim. It
was noticed, however,--and this struck a chord of answering sympathy in
the plainsman's imaginative temperament,--that, though on ordinary
nights he might come in and stay with the herd under shelte