Pitkin scarce heard him, he was so intent on crying out his dreadful news. It came in a stumbling burst of half a dozen words.
“Evered’s red bull’s killed Mis’ Evered,” he stammered.
V
EVERED’S red bull was a notorious and dangerous figure in the countryside. It was like some primordial monster of the forests, and full as fierce of temper. Evered had bought it two years before, and two men on horseback, with ropes about the creature’s neck, brought it from town to his farm. Evered himself, there to receive it, scowled at their precautions. There was a ring in the monstrous beast’s nose; and to this ring Evered snapped a six-foot stick of ash, seasoned and strong. Holding the end of this stick he was able to control the bull; and he set himself to teach it fear. That he succeeded was well enough attested. The bull did fear him, and with reason. Nevertheless, Evered took no chances with the brute, and never entered its stall without first snapping his ash stick fast to the nose ring. Those who watched at such times said that the bull’s red eyes burned red and redder so long as Evered was near; and those who saw were apt to warn the man to take care. But Evered paid no heed to their warnings; or seemed to pay no heed.
The bull had never harmed a human being, because it had never found the opportunity. Men and women and children shunned it, kept well away from its stout-fenced pasture, its high-boarded pen and its stall. The creature was forever roaring and bellowing; and when the air was still its clamor carried far across the countryside and frightened children and women, and made even men pause to listen and to wonder whether Evered’s bull was loose at last. Some boys used to come and take a fearsome joy from watching the brute; and at first they liked to tease the bull, pelting it with sticks and stones. Till one day they came—Jimmy Hills, and Will Motley, and Joe Suter, and two or three besides—with a setter pup of Lee Motley’s at their heels. The pup watched their game, and wished to take a hand, so slipped through the fence to nip at the great bull’s heels; and the beast wheeled and pinned the dog against the fence with its head like a ram, and then trod the pup into a red pudding in the soft earth, while Will Motley shrieked with rage and sorrow and fear.
Evered heard them that day, and came down with a whip and drove them away; and thereafter a boy who teased the bull had trouble on his hands at home. And the tale of what the brute had done to that setter pup was told and retold in every farmhouse in the town.
Evered, even while he mastered the bull and held it slave, took pains to maintain his dominance. The stall which housed it was stout enough to hold an elephant; the board-walled pen outside the stall was doubly braced with cedar posts set five feet underground; and even the half-mile pasture in which, now and then, he allowed the brute to range, had a double fence of barbed-wire inside and stone wall without.
This pasture ran along the road and bent at right angles to work down to the edge of the swamp. It was, as has been said, about a half mile long; but it was narrow, never more than a few rods wide. It formed the southern boundary of Evered’s farm; and no warning signs were needed to keep trespassers from crossing this area. When the bull was loose here it sometimes ranged along the fence that paralleled the road, tossing its great head and snorting and muttering at people who passed by, so that they were apt to hurry their pace and leave the brute behind.
It was timid Zeke Pitkin, on his way to North Fraternity, who saw the bull break its fence on the afternoon that Mary Evered was killed. Zeke did not usually take the road past Evered’s place, because he did not like to pass under the eye of the bull. But on this day he was in some haste; and he thought it likely the bull would be stalled and out of sight, and on that chance took the short hill road to his destination.
When he approached Evered’s farm he began to hear the bull muttering and roaring in some growing exasperation. But it was then too late to turn back without going far out of his way, so he pressed on until he came in sight of the pasture and saw the beast, head high, tramping up and down along the fence on the side away from the road. Zeke was glad the bull was on that side, and hurried his horse, in a furtive way, hoping the bull would not mark his passing.