In Number Nineteen, on Michael’s right, was a sad and tragic company.  They were mongrels, kept spotlessly and germicidally clean, who were unattached and untrained.  They composed a sort of reserve of raw material, to be worked into established troupes when an extra one or a substitute was needed.  This meant the hell of the arena where the training went on.  Also, in spare moments, Collins, or his assistants, were for ever trying them out with all manner of tricks in the quest of special aptitudes on their parts.  Thus, a mongrel semblance to a cooker spaniel of a dog was tried out for several days as a pony-rider who would leap through paper hoops from the pony’s back, and return upon the back again.  After several falls and painful injuries, it was rejected for the feat and tried out as a plate-balancer.  Failing in this, it was made into a see-saw dog who, for the rest of the turn, filled into the background of a troupe of twenty dogs.

Number Nineteen was a place of perpetual quarrelling and pain.  Dogs, hurt in the training, licked their wounds, and moaned, or howled, or were irritable to excess on the slightest provocation.  Always, when a new dog entered—­and this was a regular happening, for others were continually being taken away to hit the road—­the cage was vexed with quarrels and battles, until the new dog, by fighting or by non resistance, had commanded or been taught its proper place.

Michael ignored the denizens of Number Nineteen.  They could sniff and snarl belligerently across at him, but he took no notice, reserving his companionship for the play-acted and perennial quarrel with Pedro.  Also, Michael was out in the arena more often and far longer hours than any of them.

“Trust Harry not to make a mistake on a dog,” was Collins’s judgment; and constantly he strove to find in Michael what had made Del Mar declare him a ten strike and the limit.

Every indignity, in the attempt to find out, was wreaked upon Michael.  They tried him at hurdle-jumping, at walking on forelegs, at pony-riding, at forward flips, and at clowning with other dogs.  They tried him at waltzing, all his legs cord-fastened and dragged and jerked and slacked under him.  They spiked his collar in some of the attempted tricks to keep him from lurching from side to side or from falling forward or backward.  They used the whip and the rattan stick; and twisted his nose.  They attempted to make a goal-keeper of him in a football game between two teams of pain-driven and pain-bitten mongrels.  And they dragged him up ladders to make him dive into a tank of water.

Even they essayed to make him “loop the loop”—­rushing him down an inclined trough at so high speed of his legs, accelerated by the slash of whips on his hindquarters, that, with such initial momentum, had he put his heart and will into it, he could have successfully run up the inside of the loop, and across the inside of the top of it, back-downward, like a fly on the ceiling, and on and down and around and out of the loop.  But he refused the will and the heart, and every time, when he was unable at the beginning to leap sideways out of the inclined trough, he fell grievously from the inside of the loop, bruising and injuring himself.