creature who was superhuman, and her hand was iron, her wrist was steel.
She held him so that he could not do his worst without such pain as would
drive him mad; she lashed him, and rained on him such blows as almost
made him blind. Once at the very worst, Devil dancing near him, she
looked down from his back into John Oxon's face, and he cursed aloud, her
eye so told him his own story and hers. In those days their souls met in
such combat as it seemed must end in murder itself.

"You will not conquer him," he said to her one morning, forcing himself
near enough to speak.

"I will, unless he kills me," she answered, "and that methinks he will
find it hard to do."

"He will kill you," he said. "I would, were I in his four shoes."

"You would if you could," were her words; "but you could not with his bit
in your mouth and my hand on the snaffle. And if he killed me, still
'twould be he, not I, was beaten; since he could only kill what any
bloody villain could with any knife. He is a brute beast, and I am that
which was given dominion over such. Look on till I have done with him."

And thus, with other beholders, though in a different mood from theirs,
he did, until a day when even the most sceptical saw that the brute came
to the fray with less of courage, as if there had at last come into his
brain the dawning of a fear of that which rid him, and all his madness
could not displace from its throne upon his back.

"By God!" cried more than one of the bystanders, seeing this, despite the
animal's fury, "the beast gives way! He gives way! She has him!" And