"It must have been fearful," he sympathized.
"Why is it," she said with a quizzical smile, "that a woman is always afraid of a bull and a mouse?"
"They wish to be extreme, I fancy!" he laughed.
"Also there is a lot between a bull and a mouse that they are afraid of!" she added.
Her hair was awry and she straightened it as best she could, removing her gloves to do it the better.
He remarked the long, slender fingers, with the filbert nails and the crescents shining at their base--and he stole a look at his own ill-shaped hand, with its thick, formless, heavy-pointed fingers and hairy back. For the first time he regretted the difference.
Her hair temporarily put to rights, she stuck the pins--which were scattered on the ground and which Porshinger collected for her--in her cocked hat, and fastened it into place. Then she got up, suffered him to brush the dust and dirt from her clothes--she helping--and they resumed the walk.
"Adieu, your Taurus Majesty!" she called, with a farewell wave of her hand toward the still indignant and frowning bull.
"I'll see that he is killed to-day," Porshinger volunteered.
"Indeed, you'll not," she said. "He was defending his own pasture and his own kind. You would have done the same if you were a bull."
Porshinger winced despite himself. There was something distinctly unpleasant in the comparison. She had not called him a bull. Yet that, doubtless, was what she considered him--uncouth and untamed, not broken to polite society.
"I suppose so," he said thoughtfully. "It may be an apt comparison."
"Preserve me then from you, if it is apt!" she laughed. "I want no more bulls in mine."
Was he making sport of her or was he serious, she wondered?--and could not decide. Reading his every action through her knowledge of his declared purpose to injure Pendleton and her, she was prone to suspicion. True, he had done what he could to save her from the bull's attack, but any man, were he only half a man, could not have done less.
"Is a bull amenable to invocation?" she replied. "Will he withhold his attack if you pray--very hard?"
She had touched the matter rather closely; and he, not knowing that she knew, was puzzled at its significance. While she, seeing that she had ventured almost too far, tactfully changed the conversation.