He was startled back to himself by loud laughter nearby, and, looking up, he saw an old fellow in overalls with a handful of nails and a hammer. He stood among a scattering of uprights which represented, apparently, the beginnings of the skeleton of a barn. Now he leaned against one of these uprights and indulged his mirth. Bull regarded him mildly; he was used to being laughed at.
CHAPTER 14
"That's the way they all do," said the old man. "They all gape the same fool way when they see Diablo the first time."
"Is that the wild horse?" asked Bull in his gentle voice. "That's him. I s'pose after seeing Tod handle him, you'll want to try to ride him right off?"
Bull looked in the direction in which the horse had disappeared. He swallowed a lump that had risen in his throat and shook his head sadly.
"Nope. You see, I dunno nothing about horses, really."
The old man regarded him with a new and sudden interest.
"Takes a wise man to call himself a fool," he declared axiomatically.
Bull took this dubious bit of praise as an invitation and came slowly closer to the other. He had the child's way of eyeing a stranger with embarrassing steadiness at a first meeting and thereafter paying little attention to the face. He wrote the features down in his memory and kept them at hand for reference, as it were. As he drew nearer, the old man grew distinctly serious, and when Bull was directly before him he gazed up into the face of Bull with distinct amazement. At a distance the big man did not seem so large because of the grace of his proportions; when he was directly confronted, however, he seemed a veritable giant.
"By the Lord, you are big. And who might you be, stranger?"