Thus, a mongrel semblance to a cooker
spaniel of a dog was tried out for several days as a pony-rider who would
leap through paper hoops from the pony's back, and return upon the back
again. After several falls and painful injuries, it was rejected for the
feat and tried out as a plate-balancer. Failing in this, it was made
into a see-saw dog who, for the rest of the turn, filled into the
background of a troupe of twenty dogs.

Number Nineteen was a place of perpetual quarrelling and pain. Dogs,
hurt in the training, licked their wounds, and moaned, or howled, or were
irritable to excess on the slightest provocation. Always, when a new dog
entered--and this was a regular happening, for others were continually
being taken away to hit the road--the cage was vexed with quarrels and
battles, until the new dog, by fighting or by non resistance, had
commanded or been taught its proper place.

Michael ignored the denizens of Number Nineteen. They could sniff and
snarl belligerently across at him, but he took no notice, reserving his
companionship for the play-acted and perennial quarrel with Pedro. Also,
Michael was out in the arena more often and far longer hours than any of
them.

"Trust Harry not to make a mistake on a dog," was Collins's judgment; and
constantly he strove to find in Michael what had made Del Mar declare him
a ten strike and the limit.

Every indignity, in the attempt to find out, was wreaked upon Michael.
They tried him at hurdle-jumping, at walking on forelegs, at pony-riding,
at forward flips, and at clowning with other dogs. They tried him at
waltzing, all his legs cord-fastened and dragged and jerked and slacked
under him. They spiked his collar in some of the attempted tricks to
keep him from lurching from side to side or from falling forward or
backward. They used the whip and the rattan stick; and twisted his nose.
They attempted to make a goal-keeper of him in a football game between
two teams of pain-driven and pain-bitten mongrels. And they dragged him
up ladders to make him dive into a tank of water.

Even they essayed to make him "loop the loop"--rushing him down an
inclined trough at so high speed of his legs, accelerated by the slash of
whips on his hindquarters, that, with such initial momentum, had he put
his heart and will into it, he could have successfully run up the inside
of the loop, and across the inside of the top of it, back-downward, like
a fly on the ceiling, and