“Come, Aurora,” said Patricia, taking up her bag. “There’s no time to lose. He’s really coming this way,” and gathering up her golf bag and skirts, she ran. The Sphynx, meanwhile, still holding his mid-iron in his hand, was undecided. His ball was twenty yards further on, and his eyes shifted uneasily from the bull to an old apple-tree within a reaching distance. The women by this time had reached a convenient stile and were perched upon it shouting.
“Run, Steve!” they cried. “He’s coming!”
Ventnor, who was addressing his ball, glanced up for a moment and then swung. It was the prettiest shot that he had made all day, for the ball started with a low trajectory and soared and soared, clearing the fence on the far side of the field, a carry of two hundred yards, and landed in the next meadow. Then he turned, club in hand, and looked at the bull which now stood twenty paces away, eying them viciously. It was too late to make a sprint for the fence, and like McLemore, Steve wistfully eyed the apple-tree. But he brandished his brassey manfully and prepared to jump aside if the bull lowered his head and rushed him. It was at this moment that Jimmy McLemore, white as a sheet, made up his mind to run. Jimmy’s red vest decided the matter, and scorning Ventnor, with a bellow which lent wings to Jimmy’s feet, the brute lowered its thick head and charged, passing like a tornado under the limb to which McLemore had fled for safety. Steve Ventnor forgot to be frightened and stood leaning on his club roaring with laughter, for the Sphynx’s dignity had always been a fearful and wonderful thing to him. He heard the voices of the women behind him, pleading with him to run, but in his heart Steve Ventnor made a mighty resolution that run he would not. He had no dignity like Jimmy’s to lose, but the spectacle Jimmy made decided him. It took some strength of mind to moderate his pace as he picked up Patricia’s red parasol and walked toward the fence. The bull however, refused to be distracted, and stood pawing the ground beneath the apple-tree, bellowing up at the soles of the Sphynx’s boots and making havoc of the beautiful Campbell mid-iron, which was the only thing of Jimmy’s that he could touch.
The women on the stile were laughing, Patricia frankly, uncontrollably, Aurora nervously, looking at Steve as he came up with a queer little anxious wrinkle between her eyebrows.
“I haven’t any patience with you,” she said. “You might have been gored to death.”
Ventnor was still laughing. “I never saw Jimmy run before,” he said. “We’ll have to get him out of that somehow. I think I’ll have a try at it with Patricia’s parasol.”
But Patricia quickly snatched it from his hand. Her little drama had worked out far more beautifully than she had ever hoped it would, and she didn’t propose to have it ruined now.
“Nothing of the sort,” she cried. “You may do whatever you like with your own skin, but that is a perfectly good French parasol, and it’s mine.” And she put it behind her back.
Meanwhile the Sphynx was pelting the brute below him with apples and shouting anathema, both of which rolled from the animal’s impervious back, as he circled angrily around the tree, up which he showed every disposition to climb. From tragic-comedy the scene had degenerated into broadest farce.