dope for hydrophobia.  And he always will limp with his right leg from what the dogs did to him.  I tell you, they were the limit.  And yet, every time the curtain went up, Captain Roberts brought the house down with the first stunt.  Those dogs just flocked all over him, loving him to death, from the looks of it.  And were they loving him?  They hated him.  I’ve seen him, right here in the cage at Cedarwild, wade into them with a club and whale the stuffing impartially out of all of them.  Sure, they loved him not.  Just a bit of the same old aniseed was what he used.  He’d soak small pieces of meat in aniseed oil and stick them in his pockets.  But that stunt would only work with a bunch of giant dogs like his.  It was their size that got it across.  Had they been a lot of ordinary dogs it would have looked silly.  And, besides, they didn’t do their regular tricks for aniseed.  They did it for Captain Roberts’s club.  He was a tough bird himself.”

“He used to say that the art of training animals was the art of inspiring them with fear.  One of his assistants told me a nasty one about him afterwards.  They had an off month in Los Angeles, and Captain Roberts got it into his head he was going to make a dog balance a silver dollar on the neck of a champagne bottle.  Now just think that over and try to see yourself loving a dog into doing it.  The assistant said he wore out about as many sticks as dogs, and that he wore out half a dozen dogs.  He used to get them from the public pound at two and a half apiece, and every time one died he had another ready and waiting.  And he succeeded with the seventh dog.  I’m telling you, it learned to balance a dollar on the neck of a bottle.  And it died from the effects of the learning within a week after he put it on the stage.  Abscesses in the lungs, from the stick.”

“There was an Englishman came over when I was a youngster.  He had ponies, monkeys, and dogs.  He bit the monkey’s ears, so that, on the stage, all he had to do was to make a move as if he was going to bite and they’d quit their fooling and be good.  He had a big chimpanzee that was a winner.  It could turn four somersaults as fast as you could count on the back of a galloping pony, and he used to have to give it a real licking about twice a week.  And sometimes the lickings were too stiff, and the monkey’d get sick and have to lay off.  But the owner solved the problem.  He got to giving him a little licking, a mere taste of the stick, regular, just before the turn came on.  And that did it in his case, though with some other case the monkey most likely would have got sullen and not acted at all.”

It was on that day that Harris Collins sold a valuable bit of information to a lion man who needed it.  It was off time for him, and his three lions were boarding at Cedarwild.  Their turn was an exciting and even terrifying one, when viewed from the audience; for, jumping about and roaring, they were made to appear as if about to destroy the slender little lady who performed with them and seemed to hold them in subjection only by her indomitable courage and a small riding-switch in her hand.