And much of this torturing Michael witnessed.  There were the greyhounds, the high-jumpers and wide-leapers.  They were willing to do their best, but Collins and his assistants achieved the miracle, if miracle it may be called, of making them do better than their best.  Their best was natural.  Their better than best was unnatural, and it killed some and shortened the lives of all.  Rushed to the springboard and the leap, always, after the take-off, in mid-air, they had to encounter an assistant who stood underneath, an extraordinarily long buggy-whip in hand, and lashed them vigorously.  This made them leap from the springboard beyond their normal powers, hurting and straining and injuring them in their desperate attempt to escape the whip-lash, to beat the whip-lash in the air and be past ere it could catch their flying flanks and sting them like a scorpion.

“Never will a jumping dog jump his hardest,” Collins told his assistants, “unless he’s made to.  That’s your job.  That’s the difference between the jumpers I turn out and some of these dub amateur-jumping outfits that fail to make good even on the bush circuits.”

Collins continually taught.  A graduate from his school, an assistant who received from him a letter of recommendation, carried a high credential of a sheepskin into the trained-animal world.

“No dog walks naturally on its hind legs, much less on its forelegs,” Collins would say.  “Dogs ain’t built that way. They have to be made to, that’s all.  That’s the secret of all animal training.  They have to.  You’ve got to make them.  That’s your job.  Make them.  Anybody who can’t, can’t make good in this factory.  Put that in your pipe and smoke it, and get busy.”

Michael saw, without fully appreciating, the use of the spiked saddle on the bucking mule.  The mule was fat and good-natured the first day of its appearance in the arena.  It had been a pet mule in a family of children until Collins’s keen eyes rested on it; and it had known only love and kindness and much laughter for its foolish mulishness.  But Collins’s eyes had read health, vigour, and long life, as well as laughableness of appearance and action in the long-eared hybrid.

Barney Barnato he was renamed that first day in the arena, when, also, he received the surprise of his life.  He did not dream of the spike in the saddle, nor, while the saddle was empty, did it press against him.  But the moment Samuel Bacon, a negro tumbler, got into the saddle, the spike sank home.  He knew about it and was prepared.  But Barney, taken by surprise, arched his back in the first buck he had ever made.  It was so prodigious a buck that Collins eyes snapped with satisfaction, while Sam landed a dozen feet away in the sawdust.

“Make good like that,” Collins approved, “and when I sell the mule you’ll go along as part of the turn, or I miss my guess.  And it will be some turn.  There’ll be at least two more like you, who’ll have to be nervy and know how to fall.  Get busy.  Try him again.”