For a moment or two the Professor glared steadily at Finn. He undoubtedly had pluck, seeing that he believed the Wolfhound to be as ferocious and deadly a beast as any tiger. Then, slowly, Finn rose from his crouching position, prepared to come forward and to treat his visitor as a friend, even as a possible rescuer from that place of horrid durance. The Professor's plan was all mapped out in his mind, and he did not waver in its execution. Had he been given to wavering he would long ago have been killed by some wild creature. In the instant of Finn's move towards him the Professor took a quick step forward and, with a growling shout of "Down, Wolf!" smote Finn fairly across the head with the red-hot end of his iron bar, so that pungent smoke arose. One portion of the red-hot surface of the iron caught Finn's muzzle, causing him exquisite pain; pain of a sort he had never known before. At the moment of the blow, a terrific snarling roar came from the tiger's cage. Half blinded, wholly maddened, dimly connecting this strange new agony that bit into him with the tiger's roar, Finn sprang at the Professor with a snarl that was itself almost a roar. The red-hot bar met him in mid-air, biting deep into the soft skin of his lips, furrowing his beautiful neck, and stinging the tip of one silken ear. The pain was terrible; the smell of his own burnt flesh and hair was maddening; the deadly implacability of the attack, coming from a man, too, was baffling beyond description. Finn howled, and sank abruptly upon his haunches, giving the Professor time for a flying glance of pride in the direction of the admiring John L. Rutherford. And now, had he been really a wild beast, Finn would probably have remained cowering as far as possible from that terrible bar of fire. Even as it was, he might have done this if the Professor had not made the mistake of raising the bar again, with a suddenly threatening motion. Finn had greater reasoning power, and greater strength of will, than a wild beast. He was robbed of all restraint by his surroundings and by the Professor's absolute and crushing reversal of all his preconceived notions of the relations between man and hound. The snarl of the tiger in his ears, the smell of his own burnt flesh in his nostrils, the pitilessness of the Professor's wholly unexpected attack, filled him with a tumultuous fury of warring instincts which generations of inherited docility were powerless to overcome. But, through it all, he was more capable of thought than a really wild beast, and, as the hot iron was lifted the third time, he leaped in under it like lightning, and with a roar of defiance brought its wielder to the ground, and planted both fore-feet upon his chest, while the iron bar fell clattering from the man's hand between the bars of the cage.