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Updated: May 22, 2025
Mulcachy was equipped with a long-lashed whip and a sharp-pronged fork of iron. In his belt, loaded with blank cartridges, was a revolver. Bellying closer to the ground, Ben Bolt advanced upon him, creeping slowly like a cat stalking a mouse.
"It's all right," Mulcachy said, day after day, as the teaching went on. "Patience and hard work will pull off the trick. I've got his goat. He's afraid of me. All that's required is time, and time adds to value with an animal like him." Not on that first day, nor on the second, nor on the third, did the requisite something really break inside Ben Bolt. But at the end of a fortnight it did break.
The moment he was free he ripped the ring away with half of his nose along with it. Mulcachy punched St. Elias's right ear. St. Elias tore his right ear to shreds. Mulcachy punched his left ear. He tore his left ear to shreds. And Mulcachy gave in. He had to. As he said plaintively: "We're beaten. There ain't nothing left to make fast to." Later, when St.
For the day came when Mulcachy rapped the chair with his whip-butt, when the attendant through the bars jabbed the iron fork into Ben Bolt's ribs, and when Ben Bolt, anything but royal, slinking like a beaten alley-cat, in pitiable terror, crawled over to the chair and sat down in it like a man. He now was an "educated" tiger.
At signal from Mulcachy, the ten men hauled away. Snarling, struggling, choking, in a fresh madness of terror at this new outrage, Ben Bolt was slowly hoisted by his neck up from the floor, until, quite clear of it, whirling, squirming, battling, suspended by his neck like a man being hanged, his wind was shut off and he began to suffocate.
Then Mulcachy, on the inside, punched his nose. Not lightly as it sounds was this operation. The punch was a perforation. Thrusting the instrument into the huge bear's nostril, Mulcachy cut a clean round chunk of living meat out of one side of it. Mulcachy knew the bear business. At all times, to make an untrained bear obey, one must be fast to some sensitive portion of the bear.
A performing animal is broken. Something breaks in an animal of the wild ere such an animal submits to do tricks before pay-audiences. Mulcachy ordered an assistant to enter the arena with him. Since he could not compel the tiger directly to sit in the chair, he must employ other means. The rope about Ben Bolt's neck was passed up through the bars and rove through the block-and-tackle.
It was a three-months' vacation for Michael, who, well treated but still a prisoner, spent it in a caged kennel in Mulcachy's Animal Home. Mulcachy, one of Harris Collins's brightest graduates, had emulated his master by setting up in business in Chicago, where he ran everything with the same rigid cleanliness, sanitation, and scientific cruelty.
Mulcachy cursed. "Here's where hell coughs," he said. The nooses were introduced again. Again St. Elias, helpless on his side against and partly through the bars, had his nose punched. This time it was the other nostril. And hell coughed. As before, the moment he was released, he tore the ring out through his flesh. Mulcachy was disgusted.
Mulcachy had originated aphorisms of his own which he continually enunciated, among which were: "Take it from me, when an animal won't give way to pain, it can't be broke. Pain is the only school-teacher." "Just as you got to take the buck out of a broncho, you've got to take the bite out of a lion." "You can't break animals with a feather duster. The thicker the skull the thicker the crowbar."
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