Half a dozen times the lion paced up and down, declining to take any notice of the intruder.  And then, when his back was turned as he went down the cage, Collins stepped directly in the way of his return path and stood still.  Coming back and finding his way blocked, Hannibal did not roar.  His muscular movements sliding each into the next like so much silk of tawny hide, he struck at the obstacle that confronted his way.  But Collins, knowing ahead of the lion what the lion was going to do, struck first, with the broom-handle rapping the beast on its tender nose.  Hannibal recoiled with a flash of snarl and flashed back a second sweeping stroke of his mighty paw.  Again he was anticipated, and the rap on his nose sent him into recoil.

“Got to keep his head down—­that way lies safety,” the master-trainer muttered in a low, tense voice.

“Ah, would you?  Take it, then.”

Hannibal, in wrath, crouching for a spring, had lifted his head.  The consequent blow on his nose forced his head down to the floor, and the king of beasts, nose still to floor, backed away with mouth-snarls and throat-and-chest noises.

“Follow up,” Collins enunciated, himself following, rapping the nose again sharply and accelerating the lion’s backward retreat.

“Man is the boss because he’s got the head that thinks,” Collins preached the lesson; “and he’s just got to make his head boss his body, that’s all, so that he can think one thought ahead of the animal, and act one act ahead.  Watch me get his goat.  He ain’t the hard case he’s trying to make himself believe he is.  And that idea, which he’s just starting, has got to be taken out of him.  The broomstick will do it.  Watch.”

He backed the animal down the length of the cage, continually rapping at the nose and keeping it down to the floor.

“Now I’m going to pile him into the corner.”

And Hannibal, snarling, growling, and spitting, ducking his head and with short paw-strokes trying to ward off the insistent broomstick, backed obediently into the corner, crumpled up his hind-parts, and tried to withdraw his corporeal body within itself in a pain-urged effort to make it smaller.  And always he kept his nose down and himself harmless for a spring.  In the thick of it he slowly raised his nose and yawned.  Nor, because it came up slowly, and because Collins had anticipated the yawn by being one thought ahead of Hannibal in Hannibal’s own brain, was the nose rapped.

“That’s the goat,” Collins announced, for the first time speaking in a hearty voice in which was no vibration of strain.  “When a lion yawns in the thick of a fight, you know he ain’t crazy.  He’s sensible.  He’s got to be sensible, or he’d be springing or lashing out instead of yawning.  He knows he’s licked, and that yawn of his merely says:  ’I quit.  For the I love of Mike leave me alone.  My nose is awful sore.  I’d like to get you, but I can’t.  I’ll do anything you want, and I’ll be dreadful good, but don’t hit my poor sore nose.’