David Crumplin, having speedily given up persuasion, yelled for help, and cursed and swore vehemently at the dogs, banging and thrusting at each in turn, without prejudice and without effect.  Much they cared for his curses, or his ashen staff.  Jan was bleeding now from half a dozen gaping wounds; and Grip, the famous killer, was in an icy fury of wrath, for the reason that this blundering young elephant of a puppy was actually pressing and hurting him—­the best feared dog in that countryside.  For, be it said, Jan learned with surprising quickness.  He could not acquire in a minute or in a month the sort of fighting craft that made Grip terrible; but he did learn in one minute that he could not afford to repeat the blundering rushes which had lost him his first blood.

At first he strove hard to bowl the sheep-dog over by sheer weight and strength.  Then he struggled bravely to get his teeth through Grip’s coat of mail at the neck.  And if all the time he was getting punishment, he also was getting learning; as was proved by the fact that immediately after his own third wound he tore one of Grip’s ears in sunder, and, a minute later, got home on the sheep-dog’s right fore leg (where the coat of mail was thin) with a bite which would surely mean a week of limping for Grip.  It was this last thrust that placed Grip definitely outside his master’s reach, by fanning into white flame the smoldering fire of his nature.  Indeed, for a minute or two it even made the sheep-dog forgetful of his cunning, so angry was he; with the result that he lost a section from his sound ear and came near to being overturned by the impetuosity of Jan’s onslaught.

And then suddenly the sheep-dog completely changed, as though by magic.  His flame died down to still, white fire; his jaws ceased to clash; his ferocious snarl died away into deadly silence; he crouched like a lynx at bay.  At that moment Jan’s number was very nearly up, for Grip had coldly determined to kill.  He had practically ceased fighting.  He was merely sparring defensively now, with bloody murder in his blue eyes, watching grimly for his opening—­the opening through which he was wont to end his serious fights, the opening which would yield him the death-hold.

Jan, who knew naught of death-holds, and was at this moment blind to every consideration in life save that of combat, would assuredly yield the fatal opening within a very few seconds; and that being so, it was a small matter to Grip that in the mean time the youngster should rob him of a little fur and blood and skin.  No orders, no suasion, could touch Grip now; neither could any form of attack move his anger.  He was about to kill; and, for him, that fact filled the universe.

At last the moment arrived.  When the breath was out of Jan’s body after a missed rush, he stumbled badly in wheeling, and almost choked as the spume of blood and froth and fur flew from his aching jaws.  At that psychological moment Grip, balanced to the perfection of a hair-spring, and calmly calculating, leaped upon him from the side, and brought the youngster’s four feet into the air at one time.  That was the opening, and, in the same second, Grip’s jaws sprang apart to profit by it and to inclose Jan’s throat in a final and sufficing hold.