itself again and appropriated another bundle of the now
precious hay, the outraged owner bestirred himself. With a curt roar,
that was more of a cough or a grunt than a bellow, he lunged forward
and strove to pin the intruding trunk to the ground.

With startled alacrity Bong withdrew his trunk, but just in time to
save it from being mangled. For an instant he stood with the member
held high in air, bewildered by what seemed to him such a gratuitous
attack. Then his twinkling little eyes began to blaze, and he
trumpeted shrilly with anger. The next moment, reaching over the
fence, he brought down the trunk on Last Bull's hump with such a
terrible flail-like blow that the great buffalo stumbled forward upon
his knees.

He was up again in an instant and hurling himself madly against the
inexorable steel which separated him from his foe. Bong hesitated for
a second, then, reaching over the fence once more, clutched Last Bull
maliciously around the base of his horns and tried to twist his neck.
This enterprise, however, was too much even for the elephant's titanic
powers, for Last Bull's greatest strength lay in the muscles of his
ponderous and corded neck. Raving and bellowing, he plunged this way
and that, striving in vain to wrench himself free from that
incomprehensible, snake-like thing which had fastened upon him. Bong,
trumpeting savagely, braced himself with widespread pillars of legs,
and between them it seemed that the steel fence must go down under
such cataclysmic shocks as it was suffering. But the noisy violence of
the battle presently brought its own ending. An amused but angry squad
of attendants came up and stopped it, and Bong, who seemed plainly the
aggressor, was hustled off to his stall in deep disgrace.

Last Bull was humiliated. In this encounter things had happened which
he could in no way comprehend; and though, beyond an aching in neck
and shoulders, he felt none the worse physically, he had nevertheless
a sense of having been worsted, of having been treated with ignominy,
in spite of the fact that it was his foe, and not he, who had retired
from the field. For several days he wore a subdued air and kept about
meekly with his docile cows. Then his old, bitter moodiness reasserted
itself, and he resumed his solitary broodings on the crest of the
knoll.

When the winter storms came on, it had been Last Bull's custom to let
himself be housed luxuriously at nightfall, with the rest of the herd,
i