ted
and driven home.

Stepping to a near safe distance, he lashed Ben Bolt on the nose. He
repeated it. He did it a score of times, and scores of times. Turn his
head as he would, ever Ben Bolt received the bite of the whip on his
fearfully bruised nose; for Mulcachy was as expert as a stage-driver in
his manipulation of the whip, and unerringly the lash snapped and cracked
and stung Ben Bolt's nose wherever Ben Bolt at the moment might have it.

When it became maddeningly unendurable, he sprang, only to be jerked back
by the ten strong men who held the rope to his neck. And wrath, and
ferocity, and intent to destroy, passed out utterly from the tiger's
inflamed brain, until he knew fear, again and again, always fear and only
fear, utter and abject fear, of this human mite who searched him with
such pain.

Then the lesson of the first trick was taken up. Mulcachy tapped the
chair sharply with the butt of the whip to draw the animal's attention to
it, then flicked the whip-lash sharply on his nose. At the same moment,
an attendant, through the bars behind, drove an iron fork into his ribs
to force him away from the bars and toward the chair. He crouched
forward, then shrank back against the side-bars. Again the chair was
rapped, his nose was lashed, his ribs were jabbed, and he was forced by
pain toward the chair. This went on interminably--for a quarter of an
hour, for half an hour, for an hour; for the men-animals had the patience
of gods while he was only a jungle-brute. Thus tigers are broken. And
the verb means just what it means. A performing animal is _broken_.
Something _breaks_ in an animal of the wild ere such an animal submits to
do tricks before pay-audiences.

Mulcachy ordered an assistant to enter the arena with him. Since he
could not compel the tiger directly to sit in the chair, he must employ
other means. The rope about Ben Bolt's neck was passed up through the
bars and rove through the block-and-tackle. At signal from Mulcachy, the
ten men hauled away. Snarling, struggling, choking, in a fresh madness
of terror at this new outrage, Ben Bolt was slowly hoisted by his neck up
from the floor, until, quite clear of it, whirling, squirming, battling,
suspended by his neck like a man being hanged, his wind was shut off and
he began to suffocate. He coiled and twisted, the splendid muscles of
his body enabling him almost to tie knots in it.

The block-and-tackle, running like a trolley o