Finally there was Ulysses S. Grant, the mettlesome and vicious Poland China boar, who was growing more temperamental daily about his highly commercial amours. Stud often threatened to turn this valuable piece of breeding machinery into second rate ham and bacon, for as sure as some admiring farmer came ten miles with a seductive and highly amenable sow, Ulysses would sulk in his private bath of mud, capricious as a Roman emperor. There was no accounting for his taste which was usually plebeian. But to the judges at the county fair, Ulysses was annually the sweetest thing on cloven hooves. Manicured and groomed as he always was, his pink snout pointed at a most entrancing angle, his tightly curled tail and glowing bristles the picture of health and good breeding, this porcine Apollo usually won in a walk. "All personality and no character," was the way Stud fondly put it. Although a cholera epidemic was rampant that summer, and Gus with pardonable pessimism predicted that Ulysses would contract the disease from sheer pig-headedness, no such thing occurred. He did acquire a singular case of temperament, however. Like the other animals which were to be entered Ulysses was brushed, beautified and pampered for days preceding the fair, and in former years he had seemed to enjoy not only the extra corn but the effortless scratching. This year, however, he squealed with rage whenever Stud entered the pen, gleamed wickedly at his trainers out of small, blood-shot eyes, and more than once tried to annihilate his owner. The boar's private quarters were closed off from the main pig pen by a stout, narrow gate through which one entered at his own risk. One day when Stud brought Sarah down to observe how beautifully the boar was pointing up, he started into the inner pen and was charged by the infuriated animal. Brailsford took one step backward, tripped over a trough, and falling struck his head on a stone. The next moment the boar was upon him. Sarah seized a five-pronged manure fork which was leaning against the fence and drove it with all her strength into the shoulder of the boar, turning him at the crucial moment. Stud leapt to his feet, one arm bleeding, and despite Sarah's cry of warning plunged barehanded into the fight. He kicked the great ringed nose again and again with his heavy boot, grabbed a large hind leg for a brief but titanic struggle to drag the beast back into his pen, at last drove him through the gate with a piece of two-by-four. Gus and Early Ann came running. Sarah managed to use the pitch fork effectively from the top of the fence. But Stud motioned them all away. This was now his fight and he wanted to handle it alone.