“Because it’s the law,” she said harshly. “But it’s in you to kill—crush and bruise and destroy. Don’t you see the difference? You don’t have to beat a thing, a beast, to make it yield to you. You Evereds.”
“I’m not a horse beater,” he said.
“It’s the blood of you,” she told him. “You will be.”
“There’s some times,” he suggested, “when you’ve got to be hard.”
“I’ve heard your father say that very thing.”
They were moving slowly homeward now, speaking brokenly, with longer silences between. The night was almost as bright as day, the moon in midheavens above them. Ahead the barn and the house bulked large, casting dark shadows narrowly along their foundation walls. There was a fragrance of the hayfields in the air. The rake itself lay a little at one side as they came into the barnyard, its spindling curved tines making it look not unlike a spider crouching there. The bars rattled when John lowered them for her to pass through; and the red bull in the barn heard the sound and snorted sullenly at them.
John said to her, “You’d be having a man handle that bull by kindness, maybe.”
She swung about and said quickly, “I’d be having a man take an ax and chop that red bull to little bits.”
He stood still and she looked up at him; and after an instant she hotly asked, “Are you laughing? Why are you laughing at me?”
He said gently, “You that were so strong against any killing—talking so of the red bull.”