it, and dodged again. A half-dozen times this was
repeated, the candle still flaring. It could not last long. The bear was
enraged. Its movements became swifter, its vicious teeth and lips were
covered with froth, which dripped to the floor, and sometimes spattered
Ferrol's clothes as he ran past. No matador ever played with the horns
of a mad bull as Ferrol played his deadly game with Michael, the dancing
bear. His breath was becoming shorter and shorter; he had a stifling
sensation, a terrible tightness across his chest. He did not cough,
however, but once or twice he tasted warm drops of his heart's blood
in his mouth. Once he drew the back of his hand across his lips
mechanically, and a red stain showed upon it.

In his boyhood and early manhood he had been a good sportsman; had been
quick of eye, swift of foot, and fearless. But what could fearlessness
avail him in this strait? With the best of rifles he would have felt
himself at a disadvantage. He was certain his time had come; and with
that conviction upon him, the terror of the thing and the horrible
physical shrinking almost passed away from him. The disease, eating
away his life, had diminished that revolt against death which is in
the healthy flesh of every man. He was levying upon the vital forces
remaining in him, which, distributed naturally, might cover a year or
so, to give him here and now a few moments of unnatural strength for the
completion of a hopeless struggle.

It was also as if two brains in him were working: one busy with all the
chances and details of his wild contest, the other with the events of
his life.

Pictures flashed before him. Some having to do with the earliest days
of his childhood; some with fighting on the Danube, before he left the
army, impoverished and ashamed; some with idle hours in the North Tower
in Stavely Castle; and one with the day he and his sister left the
old castle, never to return, and looked back upon it from the top of
Farcalladen Moor, waving a "God bless you" to it. The thought of his
sister filled him with a desire, a pitiful desire to live.

Just then another picture flashed before his eyes. It was he himself,
riding the mad stallion, Bolingbroke, the first year he followed the
hounds: how the brute tried to smash his leg against a stone wall; how
it reared until it almost toppled over and backwards; how it jibbed at
a gate, and nearly dashed its own brains out against a tree; and how,
after an hour's h