Eris sighed: “He misses his companions,” she said, “and he tells us so.... Poor White Lightning.... And I, also, miss the companionship of all I have never known.... Some day I shall tell you so.... I hope you’ll understand.”
“You talk like a piece in a magazine,” said Odell; “you better quit reading them danged love stories and movin’ pitcher magazines and study into the Farm Journal.”
“You’d be very proud of me if I became a great actress,” she said seriously.
“I’d be a danged sight prouder if you was a great cook,” he grunted. And he went toward the cattle-barn, spinning the patent self-piercing nose ring on his horny forefinger.
Eris called after him: “Have you got to shoot Lightning?”
“Yes, I gotta beef him. He’s no good any more.”
So the great herd-bull, like all “Former Things,” was doomed to “pass away.”
As the Dionysia became the Mithraic Rites, so was taurian glory doomed to pass.... A bullet where Aldebaran shows the way. The way of all bulls.
Neither Odell nor Eris had ever heard of Aldebaran. And the tombs of the Magi were no more tightly sealed than the mind of the father. But the child’s mind hid a little lamp unlighted. A whisper might reveal to her Aldebaran shining in the midnight heavens. Or the Keys of Life and Death hanging on the Rosy Cross....