All at once a cyclone seemed to strike him. Mistah Mule plunged and reared and bucked. Johnnie clung to the umbrella with one hand, to the pommel of the saddle with the other. The umbrella turned wrong side out at the very moment when the saddle-girth broke. And the next thing Johnnie Green knew, he found himself sitting in the middle of the road, in a puddle, holding the wrecked umbrella aloft.
Mistah Mule was standing a little distance away with his back to the storm, hunched up, and with his head drooping.
Johnnie didn’t care to mount him again. With the soft mud sucking at his feet with every step he took, he led Mistah Mule home.
“There was a cyclone for a few moments,” he told the family while he dried himself in the kitchen.
Farmer Green had come home. And when he heard all of Johnnie’s story he quickly guessed the truth of the matter. Mistah Mule liked umbrellas even less than Johnnie Green.
XXV
BRIGHT AND BROAD
Mistah Mule was in the back pasture. The only other farm folk there were Farmer Green’s oxen, Bright and Broad. They were a slow-going pair. They always took plenty of time for anything they did. They walked slowly, they lay down and got up slowly, they ate slowly, they thought slowly, they talked slowly. And when they spoke, usually they both said the same thing at the same time, in a sort of deep-toned chant.
Mistah Mule was not pleased with his companions. He thought that Bright and Broad were dull company. However, he had to talk with somebody, for he dearly loved to wrangle. So he stayed near Bright and Broad a good deal of the time.
Now, Bright and Broad were far from ashamed of being slow. On the contrary, they prided themselves on their slowness.
“‘Slow but sure’ is our motto,” they remarked to Mistah Mule, speaking together and wagging their great heads in exactly the same, slow fashion.