Then a sudden thought flashed into that active little brain. She would save her twin brother, her poor Gerry, and if she died in doing it—well, it did not so very much matter, save to her mother—and she was far away. To everyone else she was a plague, a bother, the wrong twin, while Gerald was the pet of all.
This, that takes a minute in the telling, flashed through the child's mind in a second, and she had made her plan.
Just in front of them was a clump of trees. Geraldine dragged her brother to the far side of this clump, and pushed him down so that he lay with one of the trunks of the trees between him and the bull.
"Lie still, Gerry!" she cried. Then out of the tree clump she dashed, not twenty yards from the bull, and before he could turn in his tracks, began to race back towards Joe Gerson, Farmer Donn's cattle-man.
With a snort of rage, Nero paused for a moment, head erect, tail straight out. Once he glanced towards the clump of trees, then back towards the fluttering pink skirt and twinkling feet of the flying child. Then he made up his mind to follow her, and turning, resumed his mad gallop, never seeing, in his headlong, blind rage, that Joe was waiting for him. And the first thing that he knew was a very painful sensation caused by the prongs of the pitchfork—which brought him suddenly to a full stop and gave him something else to think of besides the little light form he had been chasing like the great cowardly bully that he was.
Joe was quickly joined by some stablemen and haymakers, and when a strong cord had been passed through the ring in the great brute's nose, and was held on either side by a man brandishing a hayfork, Nero felt that he had no further chance of making himself famous, and submitted sullenly to being led home and shut up in an outhouse.
[CHAPTER II.]
THE TWINS' JOKE.
AS for Geraldine, when the bull met Joe, and she heard the bellow of pain that showed he had encountered his match, the child had dropped senseless upon the grass. There she lay, while Gerald meanwhile had picked himself up and, none the worse for his hard run, had found his way home. The little girl was still there when Joe came back to look after her, after securing his unruly charge.
"Was there ever such an unselfish, plucky, clever little lady!" said the kind old fellow to himself as he lifted the child tenderly, thankful to see in the small white face signs of returning consciousness.