incts affected Finn's very shape,
giving to his massive depth of chest a suggestion of the hyaena,
to his head a marked suggestion of the wolf, and to his drooping
hind-quarters more than a hint of the lion. The facts that the hair
along his spine stood erect like wire, and that his exposed fangs
and updrawn lips changed his whole facial aspect, had a good deal
to do with the alterations wrought in his shape by the curious
position in which he found himself this night. A wiser man than Sam
would have refrained from putting Finn in this predicament, and
that more especially while he was still a stranger to the great
hound. But Sam had been invited to join a party of his companions
who were supplied with euchre cards and a bottle of whisky, and, as
he told himself, he "couldn't be bothered with the bloomin' dawg!"

Sam rather regretted his carelessness when he came to release Finn
next morning. Since the small hours, the part of the train in which
Sam had travelled had been lying in a siding, close to a little
mountain station. And now the different wagons, including that
containing Finn and the tiger and the bears, with a lot of
paraphernalia, were being swung out upon the ground, preparatory to
being drawn by road to the neighbouring town. At this stage Sam had
intended to take Finn out to be inspected by his employer, and, if
fortune willed it, sold to that gentleman for what Sam considered a
handsome figure, say, fifteen or twenty pounds.

Sam was one of the underlings employed by Rutherford's famous
Southern Cross travelling circus; and his idea was that Finn would
be found a suitable and welcome addition to the menagerie of
performing animals attached to that popular institution. But when
Sam came to look at Finn by daylight, and to note the extreme
fierceness of the Wolfhound's mien--brought about entirely by his
own stupidity in locking the hound up beside a tiger and two
bears--his heart failed him in the matter of releasing his prize,
and he decided to wait until the camp had been formed, and things
had settled down a little. That cowardly decision of Sam's affected
the whole of Finn's future life.

The process of transferring his cage to the road, and travelling
along that road, which was in reality no better than a very rough
mountain track and exceedingly bumpy, worked old Killer, as the
tiger was ominously called, into a frenzy of wrath, the which was
by no means softened by the removal of the outer side