lair among reeds or tall grass
or bushes, catching him by the mane or the scruff of his neck, leading him
to his cage and caging him, was extremely, even unbelievably exhausting.

Whenever any of our searchers located a beast in hiding the teamsters
drove their wagons with his cage as near as might be; in no case did I
lead a cowed captive half a mile; seldom two furlongs. But I walked a
great distance in the course of each of these days, rode many miles in the
course of all the riding I did between recaptures, and was never calmed
between my recurrent periods of tense excitement. I felt limp.

My condition was not improved by the occurrence and recurrence of
perturbing excitement from a more disquieting cause. Early on my third day
of animal-catching, just as I stepped back from bolting the door of a cage
on a lion, I felt rather than saw out of the tail of my eye someone rush
towards me from behind, trip when a few yards from me and fall flat. I
whirled to look and beheld a mere lad, one of my fellow-slaves at the
villa, a stable cleaner, scrambling to his feet. When he was half up the
man nearest him, another of my fellow-slaves, an assistant colt-wrangler,
apparently the man who had tripped him, dealt him a smashing blow on the
ear with his clenched fist and felled him again. As he went down I saw
that he had a long-bladed, keen-edged, gleaming dagger in his right hand.
It flew from his grasp as he plowed up the ground with his face. The colt-
wrangler picked it up.

We were on a crossroad, some distance from the highway, in the woods. The
wagon and cage were surrounded by almost a score of the slaves of the
estate, with nearly as many more helpers; farm-slaves, farmers, teamsters,
beast-warders, yokels and stragglers; the _Villicus_ was near.

"Napsus," he said to the colt-wrangler, "kill him with his own dagger!"

Instantly Napsus stabbed the fallen lad between the shoulders. The thrust
went home neatly, under the left shoulder-blade, deep and inclined a
little upward. It must have reached his heart, for he died after one
violent convulsion which threw him into the air, and turned him completely
over, his corpse slapping the ground like a flopping fish on a stream-
bank.

"Hand me that rope!" the _Villicus_ ordered a teamster.

He knotted a hangman's noose at one end of the rope, tried it to make sure
it worked properly and ordered the estate slaves to hang the body to a
convenient limb of a near by tree. Th