All because a heavy something had flung its weight against the side of his lowered head, and a new and unbearable pain was torturing his blood-filled nostrils.
Tenebris swerved. He veered to one side, throwing up his head to clear it of this unseen torment.
As a result, the half-lifted horns grazed the fallen man. The pointed hoofs missed him altogether. At the same moment the weight was gone from against the bull's head, and the throbbing stab from his nostrils.
Pausing uncertainly, Tenebris opened his eyes and glared about him. A yard or two away a shaggy dog was rising from the tumble caused by the jerky uptossing of the bull's head.
Now, were this a fiction yarn, it would be interesting to devise reasons why Lad should have flown to the rescue of a human whom he loathed, and arrayed himself against a fellow-beast toward which he felt no hatred at all.
To dogs all men are gods. And perhaps Lad felt the urge of saving even a detested god from the onslaught of a beast. Or perhaps not. One can go only by the facts. And the facts were that the collie had checked himself in the reluctant journey toward the Mistress and had gone to his foe's defense.
With a flash of speed astonishing in so large and sedate a dog, he had flown at the bull in time—in the barest time—to grip the torn nostrils and turn the whirlwind charge.
And now Tenebris shifted his baleful glare from the advancing dog to the howling man. The dog could wait. The bull's immediate pleasure and purpose were to kill the man.
He lowered his head again. But before he could launch his enormous bulk into full motion—before he could shut his eyes—the dog was between him and his quarry.
In one spring Lad was at the bull's nose. And again his white eye teeth slashed the ragged nostrils. Tenebris halted his own incipient rush and strove to pin the collie to the ground. It would have been as easy to pin a whizzing hornet.