“Well, shoot it along,” the lion man surrendered.

“Wire the cage,” said Collins.

At first the man could not comprehend; then the light began to break on him.

“You mean . . . ?”

“Just that,” Collins nodded.  “And nobody need be the wiser.  Dry batteries will do it beautifully.  You can install them nicely under the cage floor.  All Isadora has to do when she’s ready is to step on the button; and when the electricity shoots through their feet, if they don’t go up in the air and rampage and roar around to beat the band, not only can you keep the three hundred, but I’ll give you three hundred more.  I know.  I’ve seen it done, and it never misses fire.  It’s just as though they were dancing on a red-hot stove.  Up they go, and every time they come down they burn their feet again.

“But you’ll have to put the juice into them slowly,” Collins warned.  “I’ll show you how to do the wiring.  Just a weak battery first, so as they can work up to it, and then stronger and stronger to the curtain.  And they never get used to it.  As long as they live they’ll dance just as lively as the first time.  What do you think of it?”

“It’s worth three hundred all right,” the man admitted.  “I wish I could make my money that easy.”

CHAPTER XXIX

“Guess I’ll have to wash my hands of him,” Collins told Johnny.  “I know Del Mar must have been right when he said he was the limit, but I can’t get a clue to it.”

This followed upon a fight between Michael and Collins.  Michael, more morose than ever, had become even crusty-tempered, and, scarcely with provocation at all, had attacked the man he hated, failing, as ever, to put his teeth into him, and receiving, in turn, a couple of smashing kicks under his jaw.

“He’s like a gold-mine all right all right,” Collins meditated, “but I’m hanged if I can crack it, and he’s getting grouchier every day.  Look at him.  What’d he want to jump me for?  I wasn’t rough with him.  He’s piling up a sour-ball that’ll make him fight a policeman some day.”

A few minutes later, one of his patrons, a tow-headed young man who was boarding and rehearsing three performing leopards at Cedarwild, was asking Collins for the loan of an Airedale.

“I’ve only got one left now,” he explained, “and I ain’t safe without two.”

“What’s happened to the other one?” the master-trainer queried.

“Alphonso—­that’s the big buck leopard—­got nasty this morning and settled his hash.  I had to put him out of his misery.  He was gutted like a horse in the bull-ring.  But he saved me all right.  If it hadn’t been for him I’d have got a mauling.  Alphonso gets these bad streaks just about every so often.  That’s the second dog he’s killed for me.”

Collins shook his head.

“Haven’t got an Airedale,” he said, and just then his eyes chanced to fall on Michael.  “Try out the Irish terrier,” he suggested.  “They’re like the Airedale in disposition.  Pretty close cousins, at any rate.”