And Michael might well have been tried out on Hannibal and have lost his head inside that animal’s huge mouth, had not the good fortune of apropos-ness intervened.  For, the next moment, Collins was listening to the hasty report of his lion-and-tiger keeper.  The man who reported was possibly forty years of age, although he looked half as old again.  He was a withered-faced man, whose face-lines, deep and vertical, looked as if they had been clawed there by some beast other than himself.

“Old Hannibal is going crazy,” was the burden of his report.

“Nonsense,” said Harris Collins.  “It’s you that’s getting old.  He’s got your goat, that’s all.  I’ll show it to you.—­Come on along, all of you.  We’ll take fifteen minutes off of the work, and I’ll show you a show never seen in the show-ring.  It’d be worth ten thousand a week anywhere . . . only it wouldn’t last.  Old Hannibal would turn up his toes out of sheer hurt feelings.—­Come on everybody!  All hands!  Fifteen minutes recess!”

And Michael followed at the heels of his latest and most terrible master, the twain leading the procession of employees and visiting professional animal men who trooped along behind.  As was well known, when Harris Collins performed he performed only for the elite, for the hoi-polloi of the trained-animal world.

The lion-and-tiger man, who had clawed his own face with the beast-claws of his nature, whimpered protest when he saw his employer’s preparation to enter Hannibal’s cage; for the preparation consisted merely in equipping himself with a broom-handle.

Hannibal was old, but he was reputed the largest lion in captivity, and he had not lost his teeth.  He was pacing up and down the length of his cage, heavily and swaying, after the manner of captive animals, when the unexpected audience erupted into the space before his cage.  Yet he took no notice whatever, merely continuing his pacing, swinging his head from side to side, turning lithely at each end of his cage, with all the air of being bent on some determined purpose.

“That’s the way he’s been goin’ on for two days,” whimpered his keeper.  “An’ when you go near ’m, he just reaches for you.  Look what he done to me.”  The man held up his right arm, the shirt and undershirt ripped to shreds, and red parallel grooves, slightly clotted with blood, showing where the claws had broken the skin.  “An’ I wasn’t inside.  He did it through the bars, with one swipe, when I was startin’ to clean his cage.  Now if he’d only roar, or something.  But he never makes a sound, just keeps on goin’ up an’ down.”

“Where’s the key?” Collins demanded.  “Good.  Now let me in.  And lock it afterward and take the key out.  Lose it, forget it, throw it away.  I’ll have all the time in the world to wait for you to find it to let me out.”

And Harris Collins, a sliver of a less than a light-weight man, who lived in mortal fear that at table the mother of his children would crown him with a plate of hot soup, went into the cage, before the critical audience of his employees and professional visitors, armed only with a broom-handle.  Further, the door was locked behind him, and, the moment he was in, keeping a casual but alert eye on the pacing Hannibal, he reiterated his order to lock the door and remove the key.