“Oh! bless you, Josh!” called the captive of the tree. “I always knew you had a big heart. But don’t be too long, will you; because if he keeps banging the trunk of this rotten old tree all the time and chipping off pieces, I’m afraid he’ll get it down yet. Hurry, now, Josh! Tell the farmer what a mess I’m in; and that he’s just got to bring out some feed, and coax his mountain of beef to be good. Hurry, please, Josh, hurry!”
He watched the tall boy making his way leisurely along, and groaned because Josh seemed determined to let him have quite a siege of it there.
The bull had come back, and was nipping the grass almost under the tree. Now and then he would move off a little distance, and deliberately turn his back on Nick, as though he had forgotten that such a thing as a boy existed. But the captive was not so easily deceived.
“No you don’t Mr. Bull!” he called, derisively. “I can just see you looking this way out of the corner of your eye. Like me to slip down, and try to make that old fence, wouldn’t you? Guess I’d sail over the rails with ten feet to spare. But think what an awful splash there’d be when I landed. I can wait a while, till Josh takes a notion to tell what he came back for.”
Minutes passed, and he grew more and more nervous. Long ago had his tall chum passed out of sight behind the clump of trees that shut off all view of the farmhouse. Nick half suspected that Josh was lying down somewhere, resting, perhaps in a place where he could watch what went on in the pasture.
“Oh! don’t I wish I had wings now?” he kept mumbling, as he shook his head angrily, and watched the movements of the bull. “I’d fly away, and let Josh think the ugly old beast had swallowed me, that’s what. He’d be sorry then he loafed, when I sent him for help. But is that him coming over yonder?”
He thought he had detected something moving; but it was at a point far removed from the place where he expected Josh and assistance to show up.
“Well, I declare, if it ain’t George!” he exclaimed presently. “He must have begun to believe we were having too good a time at the farmhouse; and is on his way over to get his share. George is always looking for a pretty girl. I’ve got half a notion to let him get part way across the field, and then holler at him. When a feller is in a scrape it makes him feel better to see somebody else getting it in the neck too. There he comes across, sure enough!”
The bull had evidently seen George, too; but as he happened to be standing half concealed by the trunk of the tree just then, the boy who so lightly started to cut across the pasture, meaning to head for the house among the trees, failed to discover the bull.
“Oh! my, won’t he be surprised though!” muttered Nick, craning his fat neck in order to see the better; for he did not want his friend to get so far along that, in a pressure, he could not gain the fence before the coming of the wild bull.