‘Who?’ Hacket asked.
‘The mule, you bastard!’ I screamed at him. ‘Do you think I’m going without my mule?’
Reece came towards me. ‘Steady, Farrell,’ he said. ‘We can’t take the mule.’
‘You’ll bloody well take him or we don’t go at all. You leave him there, trailing that cart—’
‘All right. We’ll cut him loose from the cart. But we can’t—’
‘You’ll get him on board or I don’t fly this plane out.’
‘Have some sense, man,’ Racket said. ‘I’m very sympathetic about animals, but, damn it, there’s a limit.’
If I hadn’t been so tensed-up maybe I’d have seen his point. But George was something more to me than just a mule. He’d got me out of Santo Francisco. Just as I wouldn’t leave him in that building, so I wouldn’t leave him now to be slowly burned up by the lava. I went down to the door and wrenched it open. And then Sansevino caught me by the arm. My flesh cringed at his touch. ‘You must not become upset over the mule. After all, what is a mule? He wouldn’t be happy in the plane and anyway we could not get him into the fuselage.’ He was talking to me like a child — like a doctor talking to a mental patient — and all my hate of the man flared up.
‘How would you like to run from the lava trailing a broken cart and then at last be overrun by it and die, smelling your flesh burning?’
‘You have too much imagination. That was always your trouble, my friend. You forget it is an animal, not a human being.’