ee, Bill proceeded coldly with his task of "crowding" Jan out and
away from the safety of that place and into the wilderness. In a few
minutes he ventured to hasten matters by actually nipping one of Jan's
hind legs with his teeth. But with what precise delicacy! It had been
sweet to drive the fangs home and feel the bone and sinew crack. But
that would not mean death and might bring rescue. So Bill's jaws pressed
no more hardly than those of a nursing-mother of his kind what time she
draws a too venturesome pup into the shelter of her warm dugs.

It was beautifully done; a triumph of self-mastery and an exquisitely
gauged piece of tactics. It brought Jan quickly lumbering to his feet,
snarling savagely but not very loudly. It sent him sullenly some twenty,
thirty paces nearer to his doom and farther from the camp. A dozen paces
Bill followed him, crowding threateningly to enforce the right
direction. And then Bill halted, not wishing to risk causing Jan to
dodge and double backward toward the camp. And because his persecutor
stopped when he did, Jan followed the line of least resistance,
lumbering on down the slope into the deep wood for twenty paces more
before lowering himself again with a grunt for the repose which, to his
glutted sloth, seemed more desirable now than all the meat in the world,
aye, and of more pressing import than all his dignity, than all his new
pride in working efficiency in his leadership.

With a patience no red Indian could have excelled, Bill repeated these
tactics twenty or thirty times; but always with the same nicely balanced
accuracy; with ample pauses between each fresh beginning; with
mathematically accurate gauging of the precise provocation needed to
shift Jan farther and farther into the wilderness without seriously and
dangerously arousing his somnolent faculties.

But though he himself did not know it, and Bill could not possibly
suspect it, it yet was a fact that something of wakefulness remained and
grew through the intervals between Jan's forced marches. It seemed that
though he did most unwillingly move on and on at Bill's cunningly given
behests, Jan barely was roused from his heavy sleep into which he
plunged fathoms deep every time he resumed the recumbent position. So it
seemed. Thus Bill saw the outworking of his devilishly ingenious
tactics. And could Jan have understood any challenge on the subject, he
would have admitted that this was the way it worked.

And now, to