nts, he--charged.

The ratel moved to meet him--to meet him--and at a cool jog-trot!

What happened then was hard to follow. It looked as if the worn fangs of
the lion failed to make his hold on the wonderful, leathern, loose armor
of the little honey-badger, and that he bungled the stroke of his
terrible paw. Be that as it may, the honey-badger certainly went
straight in, right under the lion's guard, right under the lion, and
rearing, he bit home, and hung like a living spanner.

And here, perhaps, it is best to draw a curtain. For one reason, I
cannot describe it, and frankly confess the fact. For several other
reasons, it is best not to try. The ratel died in about ten minutes,
crushed, battered, smashed to death; but the chaos lasted longer than
that, because, even after death, he was not done with--the passing of
life had locked his amazing jaws shut forever, and _they were shut on the
lion_.

The end found the little ratel lying crumpled up and crimson on the
trampled grass, and the lion running about like some great injured dog,
squatting down every few seconds to lick furiously at his wound. Fear
was in the eyes of the king of beasts, for the first, probably, and
certainly for the last, time in his life, and his blood reddened the
grass wherever he made his way; but the internal hemorrhage was the worst.

Then the vultures came, and that, my friends, is a signal for us humans
to go. The vultures get the last word always, even in a story, and the
name of that word is--FINIS.

XVIII

THE DAY

Now, if you wore a helmet and neck armor of purple, green, and blue in
metallic reflections, with scarlet cheek and eye pieces, if your
uniform were of purple, brown, yellow, orange-red, green, and black,
"either positive or reflected," with a long, rakish, dashing
rapier-scabbard cocked jauntily out behind, wouldn't _you_ feel proud?
So did he; pride and the "grand air" were written all over him. True,
though, the rapier-scabbard was not a rapier-scabbard exactly--only a
tail; but it looked like one, in a way. His full title was _Phasianus
colchicus_, but ordinary people called him just plain pheasant for
short.

You would have thought, after all this, that even in the first pale
light of a cold dawn he would have been easy to see. As a matter of
fact, Gaiters, the head gamekeeper, one of his underlings, three dogs,
and a gun passed right under his bed without seeing him. Rather, they
may have u