So, on this morning when hell yawned for him, he was ready and eager to meet all comers.  They came, equipped with formulas, nooses, and forked iron bars.  Five of them tossed nooses in through the bars upon the floor of his cage.  He snarled and struck at the curling ropes, and for ten minutes was a grand and impossible wild creature, lacking in nothing save the wit and the patience possessed by the miserable two-legged things.  And then, impatient and careless of the inanimate ropes, he paused, snarling at the men, with one hind foot resting inside a noose.  The next moment, craftily lifted up about the girth of his leg by an iron fork, the noose tightened and the bite of it sank home into his flesh and pride.  He leaped, he roared, he was a maniac of ferocity.  Again and again, almost burning their palms, he tore the rope smoking through their hands.  But ever they took in the slack and paid it out again, until, ere he was aware, a similar noose tightened on his foreleg.  What he had done was nothing to what he now did.  But he was stupid and impatient.  The man-creatures were wise and patient, and a third leg and a fourth leg were finally noosed, so that, with many men tailing on to the ropes, he was dragged ignominiously on his side to the bars, and, ignominiously, through the bars were hauled his four legs, his chiefest weapons of offence after his terribly fanged jaws.

And then a puny man-creature, Mulcachy himself, dared openly and brazenly to enter the cage and approach him.  He sprang to be at him, or, rather, strove so to spring, but was withstrained by his four legs through the bars which he could not draw back and get under him.  And Mulcachy knelt beside him, dared kneel beside him, and helped the fifth noose over his head and round his neck.  Then his head was drawn to the bars as helplessly as his legs had been drawn through.  Next, Mulcachy laid hands on him, on his head, on his ears, on his very nose within an inch of his fangs; and he could do nothing but snarl and roar and pant for breath as the noose shut off his breathing.

Quivering, not with fear but with rage, Ben Bolt perforce endured the buckling around his throat of a thick, broad collar of leather to which was attached a very stout and a very long trailing rope.  After that, when Mulcachy had left the cage, one by one the five nooses were artfully manipulated off his legs and his neck.  Again, after this prodigious indignity, he was free—­within his cage.  He went up into the air.  With returning breath he roared his rage.  He struck at the trailing rope that offended his nerves, clawed at the trap of the collar that encased his neck, fell, rolled over, offended his body-nerves more and more by entangling contacts with the rope, and for half an hour exhausted himself in the futile battle with the inanimate thing.  Thus tigers are broken.

At the last, wearied, even with sensations of sickness from the nervous strain put upon himself by his own anger, he lay down in the middle of the floor, lashing his tail, hating with his eyes, and accepting the clinging thing about his neck which he had learned he could not get rid of.