brother Jerry, began to grow saturnine, and peevish, and
ill-tempered. He no longer experienced impulses to play, to romp around,
to run about. His body became as quiet and controlled as his brain.
Human convicts, in prisons, attain this quietude. He could stand by the
hour, to heel to Collins, uninterested, infinitely bored, while Collins
tortured some mongrel creature into the performance of a trick.

And much of this torturing Michael witnessed. There were the greyhounds,
the high-jumpers and wide-leapers. They were willing to do their best,
but Collins and his assistants achieved the miracle, if miracle it may be
called, of making them do better than their best. Their best was
natural. Their better than best was unnatural, and it killed some and
shortened the lives of all. Rushed to the springboard and the leap,
always, after the take-off, in mid-air, they had to encounter an
assistant who stood underneath, an extraordinarily long buggy-whip in
hand, and lashed them vigorously. This made them leap from the
springboard beyond their normal powers, hurting and straining and
injuring them in their desperate attempt to escape the whip-lash, to beat
the whip-lash in the air and be past ere it could catch their flying
flanks and sting them like a scorpion.

"Never will a jumping dog jump his hardest," Collins told his assistants,
"unless he's made to. That's your job. That's the difference between
the jumpers I turn out and some of these dub amateur-jumping outfits that
fail to make good even on the bush circuits."

Collins continually taught. A graduate from his school, an assistant who
received from him a letter of recommendation, carried a high credential
of a sheepskin into the trained-animal world.

"No dog walks naturally on its hind legs, much less on its forelegs,"
Collins would say. "Dogs ain't built that way. _They have to be made
to_, that's all. That's the secret of all animal training. They have
to. You've got to make them. That's your job. Make them. Anybody who
can't, can't make good in this factory. Put that in your pipe and smoke
it, and get busy."

Michael saw, without fully appreciating, the use of the spiked saddle on
the bucking mule. The mule was fat and good-natured the first day of its
appearance in the arena. It had been a pet mule in a family of children
until Collins's keen eyes rested on it; and it had known only love and
kindness and much laughter for its foolish muli