Welcome back, everyone, to 1001 Best of Jack London, and a powerful Jack London short story called The Leopard Man's Story.

And now our story.

He had a dreamy, faraway look in his eyes, and his sad, insistent voice, gentle-spoken as a maids,

seemed a placid embodiment of some deep-seated melancholy. He was the leopard man, but he did not

look at. His business in life, whereby he lived, was to appear in a cage of performing leopards

before vast audiences, and to thrill those audiences

by certain exhibitions of nerve for which his employers rewarded him on a scale commensurate

with the thrills he produced. As I say, he did not look at. He was narrow-hipped, narrow-shouldered,

and anemic, while he seemed not so much oppressed by

gloom as by a sweet and gentle sadness, the weight of which was as sweetly and gently born.

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 thrills, nothing but a gray sameness and infinite boredom.

Lions? Oh yes, he had fought with them. It was nothing. All you had to do was stay sober.

Anybody could whip a lion to a standstill 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 is stick out your leg. When he grabbed at the leg, you drew it back

and hit him on the nose again. That was all.

With the faraway look in his eyes and his soft flow of words, he showed me his scars.

There were many of them, and one recent one where a tigress had reached for his shoulder and gone down to the bone. I could see the neatly mended rinse in the coat he had on.

His right arm, from the elbow down, looked as though it had gone through the threshing machine.

What of the ravage wrought by claws and fangs?

But it was nothing, he said.

...