obstacle that confronted his way.
But Collins, knowing ahead of the lion what the lion was going to do,
struck first, with the broom-handle rapping the beast on its tender nose.
Hannibal recoiled with a flash of snarl and flashed back a second
sweeping stroke of his mighty paw. Again he was anticipated, and the rap
on his nose sent him into recoil.

"Got to keep his head down--that way lies safety," the master-trainer
muttered in a low, tense voice.

"Ah, would you? Take it, then."

Hannibal, in wrath, crouching for a spring, had lifted his head. The
consequent blow on his nose forced his head down to the floor, and the
king of beasts, nose still to floor, backed away with mouth-snarls and
throat-and-chest noises.

"Follow up," Collins enunciated, himself following, rapping the nose
again sharply and accelerating the lion's backward retreat.

"Man is the boss because he's got the head that thinks," Collins preached
the lesson; "and he's just got to make his head boss his body, that's
all, so that he can think one thought ahead of the animal, and act one
act ahead. Watch me get his goat. He ain't the hard case he's trying to
make himself believe he is. And that idea, which he's just starting, has
got to be taken out of him. The broomstick will do it. Watch."

He backed the animal down the length of the cage, continually rapping at
the nose and keeping it down to the floor.

"Now I'm going to pile him into the corner."

And Hannibal, snarling, growling, and spitting, ducking his head and with
short paw-strokes trying to ward off the insistent broomstick, backed
obediently into the corner, crumpled up his hind-parts, and tried to
withdraw his corporeal body within itself in a pain-urged effort to make
it smaller. And always he kept his nose down and himself harmless for a
spring. In the thick of it he slowly raised his nose and yawned. Nor,
because it came up slowly, and because Collins had anticipated the yawn
by being one thought ahead of Hannibal in Hannibal's own brain, was the
nose rapped.

"That's the goat," Collins announced, for the first time speaking in a
hearty voice in which was no vibration of strain. "When a lion yawns in
the thick of a fight, you know he ain't crazy. He's sensible. He's got
to be sensible, or he'd be springing or lashing out instead of yawning.
He knows he's licked, and that yawn of his merely says: 'I quit. For the
I love of Mike leave me alone. My nose is awful so