“It’s Alphonso—­shillings to pence it is,” Collins called to one of his assistants who was running beside him.  “He’ll get Ralph yet.”

The affair was all but over and leaping to its culmination when Collins arrived.  Castlemon was just being dragged out, and as Collins ran he could see the two men drop him to the ground so that they might slam the cage-door shut.  Inside, in so wildly struggling a tangle on the floor that it was difficult to discern what animals composed it, were Alphonso, Jack, and Michael looked together.  Men danced about outside, thrusting in with iron bars and trying to separate them.  In the far end of the cage were the other two leopards, nursing their wounds and snarling and striking at the iron rods that kept them out of the combat.

Sara’s arrival and what followed was a matter of seconds.  Trailing her chain behind her, the little green monkey, the tailed female who knew love and hysteria and was remote cousin to human women, flashed up to the narrow cage-bars and squeezed through.  Simultaneously the tangle underwent a violent upheaval.  Flung out with such force as to be smashed against the near end of the cage, Michael fell to the floor, tried to spring up, but crumpled and sank down, his right shoulder streaming blood from a terrible mauling and crushing.  To him Sara leaped, throwing her arms around him and mothering him up to her flat little hairy breast.  She uttered solicitous cries, and, as Michael strove to rise on his ruined foreleg, scolded him with sharp gentleness and with her arms tried to hold him away from the battle.  Also, in an interval, her eyes malevolent in her rage, she chattered piercing curses at Alphonso.

A crowbar, shoved into his side, distracted the big leopard.  He struck at the weapon with his paw, and, when it was poked into him again, flung himself upon it, biting the naked iron with his teeth.  With a second fling he was against the cage bars, with a single slash of paw ripping down the forearm of the man who had poked him.  The crowbar was dropped as the man leaped away.  Alphonso flung back on Jack, a sorry antagonist by this time, who could only pant and quiver where he lay in the welter of what was left of him.

Michael had managed to get up on his three legs and was striving to stumble forward against the restraining arms of Sara.  The mad leopard was on the verge of springing upon them when deflected by another prod of the iron.  This time he went straight at the man, fetching up against the cage-bars with such fierceness as to shake the structure.

More men began thrusting with more rods, but Alphonso was not to be balked.  Sara saw him coming and screamed her shrillest and savagest at him.  Collins snatched a revolver from one of the men.

“Don’t kill him!” Castlemon cried, seizing Collins’s arm.

The leopard man was in a bad way himself.  One arm dangled helplessly at his side, while his eyes, filling with blood from a scalp wound, he wiped on the master-trainer’s shoulder so that he might see.