ness, or some
other cause, did lead him to make one other attempt, on a hot
afternoon, just before the hour of tea and of dressing for the
evening show. Finn's fighting blood, inherited through long
centuries of unsmirched descent, made him put his best foot
foremost, and meet the Professor with a mien of most formidable
ferocity as soon as the red iron appeared. The Professor did not
know how near to breaking-point Finn's despair had reached. There
was little sign of it in the roaring fierceness with which he faced
the iron and whip. A wolf in such a case, with the cunning of the
wild, and without the life's experience of humans which made the
Professor's part so incredibly base, so gratuitously cruel and
treacherous to Finn, would have given in long before. Finn fought
with the courage of a brave man who has reached the last ditch, and
with the ferocity that came to him out of the ancient days in which
his warrior ancestors were never known either to give or to receive
quarter.

The Professor felt that this was a last attempt, and he did not
greatly care whether the great hound lived or died. The Giant Wolf
had defeated him as a trainer; but the Giant Wolf should never
forget the price paid for the defeat. It was a cruel onslaught. The
iron bit deep, and--it had been better for the Professor's
character development, better for his record as man, if he had left
Finn alone when he decided to make no further attempt at taming.
But men, too, have fierce, brutal passions, with less than the
simplicity of brutes, and more, far more, of the knowledge which
makes cruelty leave a permanent stain upon them. The Professor
himself was aching and sore when he flung passionately out from
Finn's cage and slammed the iron gate to; and as for Finn, I have
no words in which to explain how his poor body ached and was sore.
If the iron had been stone cold, Finn would still have been a
terribly badly beaten hound, when he staggered to his corner, after
this last visit from the mad beast-man in the leathern coat--so he
thought of the Professor, in that tumult of sinking flames which we
may call his mind. He lay in his corner, quivering and shuddering,
and did not even find the heart to lick his wounds till long hours
afterwards, when silence ruled in the field where the circus was
encamped that night.

This field was on the outskirts of a considerable township; the
twenty-second that Finn had visited with the Southern Cross Circus.
Th