"Curse you! Curse you!" screamed out an old man who was dancing with rage on the other side of the pailings. "Get down. Can't you see that in a minute you'll bring the whole place down? Get off at once."
But the boys merely gave him retort for curse. The bull turned on to another baiter and dashed away. This boy sprang into the branches of a young tree. The bull, going full speed, hit the stern of the sapling with his forehead, and the youth was shot off, describing a graceful parabola, and landing with a thump on to the ground. Gradually the game drifted to the other end of the plaza and we came down from the fence.
"Señora," said an anxious voice, "I have here a balcony. It is quite respectable, for my wife is there. Pray do not risk your life any longer."
The speaker was the husband of one of the Vinegar girls, one of the nicest men we met in Jijona. He was short and plump, and even as he spoke to me he gazed anxiously towards the end of the plaza. While he was still urging me, the bull made a movement in our direction, and he bolted. This time we sought shelter in an open doorway, accompanied by two priests. One lad tripped and the bull rolled him over with its padded horns, but other lads ran up, one flapped a handkerchief before the animal's nose, another hung on to its tail. Somehow we could not help wondering what would have happened to the bull had twenty public schoolboys been loosed in that plaza!
At last the light faded. First the bull, then the boys grew tired. The animal, captured with ropes, was led away to become meat for future Jijona dinners—eating a playmate, it seemed to me.
Further north in Spain they have a variant of this game. A young bull is put into a wide circle formed of carts. The bull's horns are not padded, and this game is quite dangerous. A Polish painter, a friend of ours, once entered such a ring. He was chased by the bull and to escape sprang for a cart. He was not quite quick enough. With the upward toss the bull thrust a horn through the seat of his trousers, as the painter was in mid-air. Luckily the trousers were an old pair, the seat came out wholesale and the painter tumbled head first into the cart. He says that for the rest of the day he went about with his hat clapped behind him.
The bull-baiting over, we called upon the doctor to whom we carried an introduction from Luis. Then we scrambled up to our Torre, taking with us provisions and candles. We made up our mattress on the floor and slept the more soundly for our hard bed.