Then I boo-hoo’d right out. All this while I was getting agonized; the brass knob on the stove got so hot that I had to sit on the narrer mantel-piece and hold on to nothing. I dussent move for fear I’d slip off.
Mr. Scruggins came round to the front door, but it was locked, and then he come to the window and opened it. I jumped down and run for the window, and hadn’t more’n got my head out afore I heard that critter a-coming after me. Gracious! but I was in a hurry; more haste, less speed, always; for the more I tried to climb quick the longer it took, and just as I got ready to jump down, that brute of a cow kotched me in the back and turned me over and over out of the window.
Well, when I got right side up, I looked at the window and there stood that cow, with her head between the white and red curtains, and another piece of my dress dangling on her horns.
Well, my husband and me was jest starting for the little alley that runs alongside of the house, when the cow give a bawl, and out of the window she come, whisking her tail, which had kotched fire on the Franklin stove, and it served her right.
Mr. Scruggins and me run into the alley in such haste we got wedged fast. Husband tried to get ahead, but I’d been in the rear long enough, and I wouldn’t let him. That dreadful
cow no sooner seen us in the alley, than she made a dash, but thank goodness! she stuck fast, too.
Husband tried the gate, but that was fast, and there wasn’t nobody inside the house to open it. Mr. Scruggins wanted to climb over and unbolt it, but I wouldn’t let him. I wasn’t going to be left alone again with that desperate cow, even if she was fast; so I made him help me over the gate. Oh, dear, climbing a high gate when you’re skeered by a cow is a dreadful thing, and I know it!
Well, I got over, let husband in, and then it took him and me and four other neighbors to get that dreadful critter out of the alley. She bellered and kicked, and her calf bellered to her, and she bawled back again; but we got her out at last, and such a time! I’d had enough of her; husband sold her for twenty dollars next day. It cost him seventy-five cents to get her to market, and when he tried to pass off one of the five dollar bills he got, it turned out to be a counterfeit.
Mr. Scruggins said to his dying day that he believed the brother of the man that sold him the cow bought it back again. I believe it helped to worry my poor husband into his grave. Ah, my friends, you better believe I know what a cow is.
