Jimmy’s back and tries to break it, and old Jimmy Jocks snaps his gums and claws the grass, panting and groaning awful.  But he can’t do nothing, and the grizzly bear just rolls him under him, biting and tearing cruel.  The odds was all that Woodstock Wizard III. was going to be killed.  I had fought enough to see that, but not knowing the rules of the game among champions, I didn’t like to interfere between two gentlemen who might be settling a private affair, and, as it were, take it as presuming of me.  So I stood by, though I was shaking terrible, and holding myself in like I was on a leash.  But at that Woodstock Wizard III., who was underneath, sees me through the dust, and calls very faint, “Help, you!” he says.  “Take him in the hind-leg,” he says.  “He’s murdering me,” he says.  And then the little Miss Dorothy, who was crying, and calling to the kennel-men, catches at the Red Elfberg’s hind-legs to pull him off, and the brute, keeping his front pats well in Jimmy’s stomach, turns his big head and snaps at her.  So that was all I asked for, thank you.  I went up under him.  It was really nothing.  He stood so high that I had only to take off about three feet from him and come in from the side, and my long, “punishing jaw” as mother was always talking about, locked on his woolly throat, and my back teeth met.  I couldn’t shake him, but I shook myself, and every time I shook myself there was thirty pounds of weight tore at his windpipes.  I couldn’t see nothing for his long hair, but I heard Jimmy Jocks puffing and blowing on one side, and munching the brute’s leg with his old gums.  Jimmy was an old sport that day, was Jimmy, or, Woodstock Wizard III., as I should say.  When the Red Elfberg was out and down I had to run, or those kennel-men would have had my life.  They chased me right into the stables; and from under the hay I watched the head-groom take down a carriage-whip and order them to the right about.  Luckily Master and the young grooms were out, or that day there’d have been fighting for everybody.

Well, it nearly did for me and the Master.  “Mr. Wyndham, sir,” comes raging to the stables and said I’d half-killed his best prize-winner, and had oughter be shot, and he gives the Master his notice.  But Miss Dorothy she follows him, and says it was his Red Elfberg what began the fight, and that I’d saved Jimmy’s life, and that old Jimmy Jocks was worth more to her than all the St. Bernards in the Swiss mountains—­where-ever they be.  And that I was her champion, anyway.  Then she cried over me most beautiful, and over Jimmy Jocks, too, who was that tied up in bandages he couldn’t even waddle.  So when he heard that side of it, “Mr. Wyndham, sir,” told us that if Nolan put me on a chain, we could stay.  So it came out all right for everybody but me.  I was glad the Master kept his place, but I’d never worn a chain before, and it disheartened me—­but that was the least of it.  For the quality-dogs couldn’t forgive my whipping their champion,