Grip spake no single word; but his wall-eyes flashed white firelight and his long jaws snapped like a spring trap as Jan rebounded from the bump against his buttress of a shoulder. When those same steel jaws parted again, as they did a moment later, an appreciable piece of Jan's left ear fell from them to the ground. Jan let out a cry, an exclamation of mingled anger, pain, bewilderment, and wrath. He turned, leaning forward, as though to ask the meaning of this outrage. On the instant, and again without a sound, the white-toothed trap opened and closed once more; this time leaving a bloody groove all down the black-and-gray side of Jan's left shoulder. At that point the sheep-dealer spoke, just a little too late. "Get out o' that!" he said, with a thrust of his staff at Jan. And--"Come in here, Grip," he added to his own dog. But his orders came too late. For his part, Jan had lost blood and realized that he was attacked in fierce earnest. As for Grip, he had tasted blood, and found it as balm to his aching ribs. This big blundering black-and-gray thing was no sheep, at all events. Then let it keep away from him, or take the consequences. Life was no game for Grip; but rather a serious routine of work, of fighting to kill, of getting food, of resting when he might, and of avoiding his master's ashen staff. Nothing could be more different from Jan's gaily irresponsible and joyously immature conception of life. However, Jan was in earnest now; more so than he had ever been since, more than five months earlier, he had flung his gristly bulk upon the vixen fox who slew his sister in the cave. Some breath he wasted in a second cry--all challenge and fury, and no questioning wonder this time--and then, like a Clydesdale colt attacking a leopard, he flung himself upon the sheep-dog, roaring and grappling for a hold. It seemed that Grip was made of steel springs and india-rubber. The shock of Jan's assault was doubtless something of a blow; for Jan weighed more than the sheep-dog; but he tossed it from him with a twist of his densely clad shoulders, and again as the youngster blundered past him he took toll (this time of the loose skin on the right side of the hound's neck) in his precisely worked jaws. All unlearned though he was in these wolf-like (or any other) fighting tactics, Jan presented an imposing picture of rampant fury as he wheeled again to face his calmly resourceful enemy. David Crumplin had now recognized the young hound as an animal of value and consequence in the world, and in all sincerity was doing his best to separate the pair. But the fight had gone too far now for verbal remonstrances to have any effect, even with disciplined Grip; and as for Jan, he was merely unconscious, alike in the matter of David's adjurations and the thrusts and thwacks of his stave.