sleep he badly needed. While he slept the burns on his muzzle and
ear were healing, the searing heat of his grief was subsiding, and
his body and nervous system were adapting themselves to his
situation, and recharging themselves after the great drain which
had been made upon them during the past couple of days.

When Killer's long, snarling yawn woke Finn in the morning he did
not fling himself against the partition which hid the tiger from
him. He did not even bark or snarl a defiant reply. He only bared
his white fangs in silence, and breathed somewhat harshly through
his nostrils, while the hair over his shoulders rose a little in
token of instinctive resentment. This comparatively mild
demonstration cost Finn a great deal less in the way of expenditure
of vitality than his previous day's reception of the tiger's
snarls; and left him by just so much the better fitted to cope with
other ordeals that lay before him.

If Finn had been a wild beast, his experience in the Southern Cross
Circus would have been a far less trying one for him than it was.
He would have learned early that the Professor was a practically
all-powerful tyrant, who had to be obeyed because he had the power
and the will to inflict great suffering upon those of the wild
kindred who refused him obedience. That he was a tyrant and an
enemy the wild creature would have accepted from the outset, as a
natural and an inevitable fact. In Finn's case the matter was far
otherwise. His instinct and inclination bade him regard a man as a
probable friend. Naturally, if the Professor had been aware of
this, he would never have approached Finn with a hot iron, and
their relations would have been quite different from the beginning.
As it was, or as Finn saw it, anyhow, the Professor had proved
himself a creature absolutely beyond the pale; a mad wild beast,
disguised as a man; a devil who met friendly advances with repeated
blows of a magic weapon, a stick made of fire, against which no
living thing might stand. Matey had seemed to Finn a mad man, and
one to be avoided. But Matey had not been a wild beast as well,
neither had he carried fire in his hand. The Professor was a far
more formidable and deadly creature. However he might disguise his
intentions, his purpose clearly was Finn's destruction. That was
how Finn saw it, and he acted accordingly; consistently, and not
from malice, but upon the dictates of common sense and
self-preservation, as he understoo