gently borne. For an hour I had been trying to get a story out of
him, but he appeared to lack imagination. To him there was no romance
in his gorgeous career, no deeds of daring, no thrills--nothing but
a gray sameness and infinite boredom.

Lions? Oh, yes! he had fought with them. It was nothing. All you had
to do was to stay sober. Anybody could whip a lion to a standstill
with an ordinary stick. He had fought one for half an hour once.
Just hit him on the nose every time he rushed, and when he got
artful and rushed with his head down, why, the thing to do was to
stick out your leg. When he grabbed at the leg you drew it back and
hit hint on the nose again. That was all.

With the far-away look in his eyes and his soft flow of words he
showed me his scars. There were many of them, and one recent one
where a tigress had reached for his shoulder and gone down to the
bone. I could see the neatly mended rents in the coat he had on. His
right arm, from the elbow down, looked as though it had gone through
a threshing machine, what of the ravage wrought by claws and fangs.
But it was nothing, he said, only the old wounds bothered him
somewhat when rainy weather came on.

Suddenly his face brightened with a recollection, for he was really
as anxious to give me a story as I was to get it.

"I suppose you've heard of the lion-tamer who was hated by another
man?" he asked.

He paused and looked pensively at a sick lion in the cage opposite.