“Or cattle?”
“Of course. What’s that to do with the matter?”
“You might even let your great red Devon bull, as takes so many prizes an’ have got such a douce an’ all of a temper, run loose there, if you was minded to—eh?”
“By Gor!” said Nick Yelland. “If that ban’t an idea!”
“I judge you wouldn’t have no more trouble then, Nicholas. Better’n notice-boards. He’d work quicker, too. One sight of him would be enough for most people.”
“Thank you,” said the farmer. “Thank you very much. You’m a quick-witted chap, for sartain, an’ I’m greatly obliged to you. I’ll turn him in this very evening, an’ be damned to everybody.”
An’ so he did, an’ next day that gert bull was wallowing in a pool o’ mud in the middle of the meadow an’ wondering at his luck.
An’ when young Ben left Yelland he went straight down to see Mary Jane Arscott. A crooked game he played, sure enough!
They had a bit of love-making by the river, for she lived in a cot down that way; an’ then Ben arranged to meet her next day an’ go out upon Bellever Tor an’ pick whortleberries. But he never said no word touching his talk with Nicholas Yelland.
Well, the girl started pretty early from her mother’s cottage down the valley and came up as a matter of course over the path-field past Cator Court; an’ for that matter, Yelland had long since given her special permission to do so. Her was halfway across the great meadow, with nothing in her thoughts but mushrooms an’ whortleberries an’ Benjamin Pearn, when there comed a sound very high-pitched an’ ugly. It got louder an’ deeper till she heard a proper bellow, an’ there, right ahead, she seed Nick Yelland’s great red Devon bull, a-pawing an’ a-prancing as if he was trying to dance the sailor’s hornpipe. If he’d been a thought farther off, no harm could have come, for the path-way ran nigh the hedge; but as it was, Mary Jane had a narrow squeak, for she’d roamed a bit to pick mushrooms, an’ when the old bull went for her, she’d got fifty yards to get to the hedge, an’ he’d got a bit more than a hundred to catch her. He was in a good temper, I believe, an’ never really tried to hurt her; but what’s a joke to a bull may be mighty serious earnest for a twelve-stone female.