For his part, Jan had lost blood and realized that he was attacked in fierce earnest.  As for Grip, he had tasted blood, and found it as balm to his aching ribs.  This big blundering black-and-gray thing was no sheep, at all events.  Then let it keep away from him, or take the consequences.  Life was no game for Grip; but rather a serious routine of work, of fighting to kill, of getting food, of resting when he might, and of avoiding his master’s ashen staff.  Nothing could be more different from Jan’s gaily irresponsible and joyously immature conception of life.

However, Jan was in earnest now; more so than he had ever been since, more than five months earlier, he had flung his gristly bulk upon the vixen fox who slew his sister in the cave.  Some breath he wasted in a second cry—­all challenge and fury, and no questioning wonder this time—­and then, like a Clydesdale colt attacking a leopard, he flung himself upon the sheep-dog, roaring and grappling for a hold.  It seemed that Grip was made of steel springs and india-rubber.  The shock of Jan’s assault was doubtless something of a blow; for Jan weighed more than the sheep-dog; but he tossed it from him with a twist of his densely clad shoulders, and again as the youngster blundered past him he took toll (this time of the loose skin on the right side of the hound’s neck) in his precisely worked jaws.

All unlearned though he was in these wolf-like (or any other) fighting tactics, Jan presented an imposing picture of rampant fury as he wheeled again to face his calmly resourceful enemy.  David Crumplin had now recognized the young hound as an animal of value and consequence in the world, and in all sincerity was doing his best to separate the pair.  But the fight had gone too far now for verbal remonstrances to have any effect, even with disciplined Grip; and as for Jan, he was merely unconscious, alike in the matter of David’s adjurations and the thrusts and thwacks of his stave.

In the pages of a correctly conceived romance, one man (providing, of course, that he is a hero) is always able without much difficulty to separate two fighting dogs, even though he be innocent of doggy lore and attired blamelessly, as judged by the illustrator’s standards for walking out with the heroine.  But in real life the thing is somehow different.  Not only are two pairs of strong hands needed, but it is necessary that the possessors of those hands should approach the fray from opposite sides, and be nimble and strong enough to get clear away, one from the other, when each pair has grabbed its dog.  No single pair of hands can manage it in the case of big dogs, and a man’s feet are not far enough removed from his hands to make them an adequate substitute for a second pair of hands.