Yet sometimes she stuck to my track so closely that there was nothing for me to do but to turn El Toro loose. Then I could say, "Very well, madam, but in the meantime I must go after the bull." She knew what the bull being loose meant; he carried devastation wherever he went. He was the greatest fighter in the whole county. I had to get my whip and my fastest horse to try and catch him. I can hardly be blamed if I did not catch him till the evening. For in that way I got a wild kind of holiday on horseback and was saved from insanity. Certainly, when El Toro got away on the loose and was looking for other bulls to have a row with I could think of nothing else. Sometimes he got free by the rope rotting close up to his ring. In that case he went headlong. If he took the rope with him he sometimes trod on it and gave himself a nasty check. Usually, however, he got it across his big neck and kept it from falling to the ground. He never stopped for any gate. When he saw one he gave a bellow, charged it and went through the fragments with me after him. If I was really anxious to get him back at once I usually caught him within a mile. When I wanted a rest I only succeeded in turning him five or six miles away, after he had thrashed a bull or two belonging to other ranchers. No fence was any use to keep him out or in. On one occasion he broke into a barn in which a rash young bull was kept. When the row was over that barn stood sadly in need of repair: and so did the young pedigree bull. I may say that on this particular occasion El Toro got away entirely by himself, and I only knew he was free when I found the door of his stable in splinters.
There was a magnificent difference between El Toro as I sat on him and scratched him with a nail and as he was when he turned himself loose for a happy day in the country. In the stable he was as mild as milk. I could have almost imagined him purring like a cat. He chewed the cud and made homely sloppy noises with his tongue, and regarded me with a calm, bovine gaze, which was as gentle as that of any pet cow's. I could have fallen asleep beside him. It is reported that my predecessor Jack, on one occasion, came home much the worse for liquor and was found reclining on El Toro. There was not a soul on the ranch who dared disturb the loving couple. But when the rope was parted and El Toro loped down the road to seek a row as keenly as any Irishman on a fair day, he was another guess sort of an animal. He carried his tail in the air and bellowed wildly to the hills. He threw out challenges to all and sundry. He gave it to be understood that the world and the fatness thereof were his. This was no mere braggadocio; it was not the misplaced confidence of a stall-fed bull in his mere weight; he really could fight, and though he was only on the warpath about once a month, there was not a bull in the valley which had not retained in his thick skull and muddy brains some recollection of El Toro's prowess. The only trouble about this, from my pet bull's point of view, was that he could rarely get up a row. Most of his possible enemies fled when he tooted his horn and waltzed into the arena through a smashed fence. He was magnificent and he was war incarnate.
In that country, which is a hard-working country, there is really very little sport. Further south in California, the ease-loving Spanish people who remain among the Americans still love music and the dance. We worked, and worked hard; only Sundays brought us a little surcease from toil. All our notions of sport centred on our bull. I had many Italian co-workers, some Swedes, and an odd citizen of the United States. All alike agreed in being proud of El Toro. We yearned to match him against any bull in the State. Sometimes of a Sunday morning, after he had devastated the country and was back again, he held a kind of levée. The Italians brought him pears as I sat on him in triumph and combed him in places where he had not been wounded. He always forgot that I had come behind him and laced his tough hide with my stock-whip. He bore no malice, but took his fruit like a good child. I think he was almost as proud of himself as we were. Certainly we were proud of him. As for me, had I not ridden desperate miles after him: had I not interviewed outraged owners of other bulls and broken fences: had I not played the diplomat or the bully according to the treatment which seemed indicated? He was, properly speaking, my bull; I did not care if I had to spend three days mending our home gates and other's alien fences.
Yes, it was a fine thing to gallop through that warm, bright, Californian air after El Toro, with the brown hills on either side and its patches of green vineyard brightening daily. It was freedom after the toil of axle-greasing and the slow work with sheep. It was better than grinding axes and trying to cut the tough knobs of vine stumps: better than grooming horses and milking cows. It made me think even more of the great Australian plains and of the Texas prairie and the round up. Ay de mi, I remember it now, sometimes, and I wish I was on horseback, swinging my whip and uttering diabolic yells, significant of the freedom of the spirit as I rush after the spirit of El Toro. For my pet, my brindled fighter, my own El Toro, whom I combed so delicately with a bent nail, for whom I gathered buckets of bruised but fat Californian pears, is now no more. They told me, when I visited Los Guilucos seven years ago, that he became difficult, morose, hard to handle, and they sold him. They sold this joyous incarnation of the spirit of battle and the pure joy of life for a mean and miserable thirteen dollars! When I think of it I almost fall to tears. So might some coward son of the seas sell a battleship for ten pounds because it was not suitable for a ferry-boat or a river yacht. I would rather a thousand times have paid the thirteen dollars myself and have taken him out to fight his last Armageddon and then have shot him on the lonely hills from which all other bulls had fled. These mean-souled, conscienceless moneymakers, who could not understand so brave, so fine a spirit, sold him to a Santa Rosa butcher! Shame on them, I say. I am sorry I ever revisited the Valley of the Seven Moons to hear such lamentable news. It made me unhappy then, makes me unhappy now. My only consolation is that once, and twice, and thrice, and yet again, I gave El Toro the chance of finding happiness in the conflict. And when I left Los Guilucos, before I returned to England, I sat upon his huge shoulders and scratched him most thoroughly, while ever and again I offered him a juicy and unbruised pear. On that occasion I pulled him the best fruit, and left windfalls for the ranging, greedy hogs. And as I fed and scratched him he lay on his hunkers in great content, and made pleasant noises as he remembered the day before. On that day, owing to the kindly feeling of me, his true and real friend, he had had a great time three miles towards Glenallen, and had beaten a newly-imported bull out of all sense of self-importance. He was pleased with himself, pleased with me, pleased with the world.
BOOKS IN THE GREAT WEST
Since taking to writing as a profession I have lost most of the interest I had in literature as literature pure and simple. That interest gradually faded and "Art for Art's sake," in the sense the simple in studios are wont to dilate upon, touches me no more, or very, very rarely. The books I love now are those which teach me something actual about the living world; and it troubles me not at all if any of them betray no sense of beauty and lack immortal words. Their artistry is nothing, what they say is everything. So on the shelf to which I mostly resort is a book on the Himalayas; a Lloyd's Shipping Register; a little work on seamanship that every would-be second mate knows; Brown's Nautical Almanacs; a Channel Pilot; a Continental Bradshaw; many Baedekers; a Directory to the Indian Ocean and the China Seas; a big folding map of the United States; some books dealing with strategy, and some touching on medical knowledge, but principally pathology, and especially the pathology of the mind.
Yet in spite of this utilitarian bent of my thoughts there are very many books I know and love and sometimes look into because of their associations. As I cannot understand (through some mental kink which my friends are wont to jeer at) how anyone can return again and again to a book for its own sake, I do not read what I know. As soon would I go back when it is my purpose to go forward. A book should serve its turn, do its work, and become a memory. To love books for their own sake is to be crystallised before old age comes on. Only the old are entitled to love the past. The work of the young lies in the present and the future.
But still, in spite of my theories, I like to handle, if not to read, certain books which were read by me under curious and perhaps abnormal circumstances. If I do not open them it is due to a certain bashfulness, a subtle dislike of seeing myself as I was. Yet the books I read while tramping in America, such as Sartor Resartus, have the same attraction for me that a man may feel for a place. I carried the lucubrations of Teufelsdröckh with me as I wandered; I read them as I camped in the open upon the prairie; I slipped them into my pocket when I went shepherding in the Texan plateau south of the Panhandle.