More men began thrusting with more rods, but Alphonso was not to be balked. Sara saw him coming and screamed her shrillest and savagest at him. Collins snatched a revolver from one of the men.
“Don’t kill him!” Castlemon cried, seizing Collins’s arm.
The leopard man was in a bad way himself. One arm dangled helplessly at his side, while his eyes, filling with blood from a scalp wound, he wiped on the master-trainer’s shoulder so that he might see.
“He’s my property,” he protested. “And he’s worth a hundred sick monkeys and sour-balled terriers. Anyway, we’ll get them out all right. Give me a chance.—Somebody mop my eyes out, please. I can’t see. I’ve used up my blank cartridges. Has anybody any blanks?”
One moment Sara would interpose her body between Michael and the leopard, which was still being delayed by the prodding irons; and the next moment she would turn to screech at the fanged cat is if by very advertisement of her malignancy she might intimidate him into keeping back.
Michael, dragging her with him, growling and bristling, staggered forward a couple of three-legged steps, gave at the ruined shoulder, and collapsed. And then Sara did the great deed. With one last scream of utmost fury, she sprang full into the face of the monstrous cat, tearing and scratching with hands and feet, her mouth buried into the roots of one of its stubby ears. The astounded leopard upreared, with his forepaws striking and ripping at the little demon that would not let go.
The fight and the life in the little green monkey lasted a short ten seconds. But this was sufficient for Collins to get the door ajar and with a quick clutch on Michael’s hind-leg jerk him out and to the ground.
CHAPTER XXX
No rough-and-ready surgery of the Del Mar sort obtained at Cedarwild, else Michael would not have lived. A real surgeon, skilful and audacious, came very close to vivisecting him as he radically repaired the ruin of a shoulder, doing things he would not have dared with a human but which proved to be correct for Michael.
“He’ll always be lame,” the surgeon said, wiping his hands and gazing down at Michael, who lay, for the most part of him, a motionless prisoner set in plaster of Paris. “All the healing, and there’s plenty of it, will have to be by first intention. If his temperature shoots up we’ll have to put him out of his misery. What’s he worth?”