and gentle sadness the weight of which was as sweetly and gently borne for an hour i had been trying to get a story out of him but he appeared to lack imagination to him there was no romance in his gorgeous career no deeds of daring no � nothing but a gray and infinite lions f oh yes he had fought with them it by frank house c the man s story was nothing all you had to do was to stay sober anybody could whip a lion to a with an ordinary stick he had fought one for half an hour once just hit him on the nose every time he rushed and when he got artful and rushed with his head down why the thing to do was to stick out your leg when he at the leg you drew it back and hit him on the nose again that was all with the far away look in his eyes and his soft flow of words he showed me his there were many of them and one recent one where a had reached for his shoulder and gone down to the bone i could see the neatly mended rents in the coat he had on his right arm from the elbow down looked as though it had gone through a machine what of the wrought by claws and but it was nothing he said only the old wounds him somewhat when rainy weather came on suddenly his face brightened with a recollection for he was really as anxious to give me a story as i was to get it i suppose you ve heard of the lion who was hated by another man he asked the man s story he paused and looked at a sick lion in the cage opposite got the he explained well the lion s big play to the audience was putting his head in a lion s mouth the man who hated him attended every performance in the hope sometime of seeing that lion down he followed the show about all over the country the years went by and he grew old and the lion grew old and the lion grew old and at last one day sitting in a front seat he saw what he had waited for the lion down and there wasn t any need to call a doctor the man glanced casually over his finger nails in a manner which would have been critical had it not been so sad now that s what i call patience he continued and it s my but it was not the style of a fellow i knew he was a little thin off sword and frenchman de he called himself and he had a nice wife she did work and used to from under the roof into a net turning over once on the way as nice as you please the man s story da had a quick temper as quick as his hand and his hand was as quick as the of a tiger one day because the ring master called him a or something like that and maybe a little worse he him against the soft pine background he used in his knife throwing act so quick the ring master didn t have time to think and there before the audience de kept the air on fire with his knives sinking them into the wood all around the ring master so close that they passed through his clothes and most of them bit into his skin the had to pull the knives out to get him loose for he was pinned fast so the word went around to watch out for de and no one dared be more than barely civil to his wife and she was a sly bit of baggage too only all hands were afraid of de but there was one man who was afraid of nothing he was the lion and he had the self same trick of putting his head into the lion s mouth he d put it into the mouths of any of them though he preferred a big beast who could always be depended upon the man s story ai as i was saying � king we called him � was afraid of nothing alive or dead he was a king and no mistake seen him drunk and on a go into the cage of a lion that d turned nasty and without a stick beat him to a finish just did it with his fist on the nose madame de at an uproar behind us the man turned quietly around it was a divided cage and a monkey through the bars and around the had had its seized by a big gray wolf who was trying to pull it off by main strength the arm seemed stretching out longer and longer like a thick elastic and the unfortunate monkey s mates were raising a terrible din no keeper was at hand so the man stepped over a couple of paces dealt the wolf a sharp blow on the nose with the light cane he carried and returned with a sadly smile to take up his unfinished sentence as though there had been no interruption � looked at king and king looked at her while de looked black we warned but it was no use he laughed at us as he laughed at de one day when he the man s story de s head into a bucket of because he wanted to fight de was in a pretty mess � i helped to scrape him off but he was cool as a and made no threats at all but i saw a glitter in his eyes which i had seen often in the eyes of wild beasts and i went out of my way to give a final warning he laughed but he did not look so much in madame 