"If she only wouldn't look at us that way we would get along real nicely with her, wouldn't we?" prattled the dear Bishop, straggling along by my side; "and she is a splendid cow; she gives twenty-one quarts a day, and Uncle Abner says it's more'n half cream."
I assented in all this, thinking that if Buttercup would give up her habit of turning completely round in the road to roll her eyes and elevate her white-tipped eyebrow, she might indeed be an enjoyable companion; but in her present state of development her society would not be agreeable to me even did she give sixty-one quarts of milk a day. Furthermore, when I found that she never did any of these reprehensible things with Bill Jones, I began to believe cows more intelligent creatures than I had supposed them to be, and I was indignant to think Buttercup could count so confidently on our weakness.
One evening, when she was more than usually exasperating, I said to the Bishop, who was bracing himself to keep from being pulled into a way-side brook where she loved to dabble, "Bishop, do you know anything about the superiority of mind over matter?" No, he didn't, though it was not a fair time to ask the question, for he had sat down in the road to get a better purchase on the rope.
"Well, it doesn't signify. What I mean is that we can die but once, and it is a glorious thing to die for a great principle. Give me that rope. I can pull like an ox in my present frame of mind. You run down on the opposite side of the brook, take that big stick, wade right in—you are barefooted—brandish the stick, and, if necessary, do more than brandish. I would go myself, but it is better she should recognize you as a master, and I am in as much danger as you are, anyway. She may try to hook you, of course, but you must keep waving the stick—die brandishing, Bishop, that's the idea! She may turn and run for me, in which case I shall run too; but I shall die running, and Aunt Betty can bury us under our favorite sweet-apple-tree!"
The Bishop's soul was fired by my eloquence. The blood mounted to our brains simultaneously, and we were flushed with a splendid courage in which death looked a mean and paltry thing compared with vanquishing that cow. She had already stepped into the pool, but the Bishop waded in towards her, moving the alder branch menacingly. She looked up with the familiar roll of the eye that had done her such good service all summer, but she quailed beneath the stern justice of the Bishop's gaze.
In that moment she felt ashamed, I know, of the misery she had caused that helpless mite. At any rate, actuated by fear, surprise, or remorse, she turned and walked back into the road without a sign of passion or indignation, leaving us rather disappointed at our easy victory. To be prepared for a violent death and receive not even a scratch makes one fear that one may possibly have overestimated the danger.
Well, we were better friends after that, all three of us, and understood one another better as the summer grew into autumn and the great maple hung a flaming bough of scarlet over the hammock. Uncle Abner found the Bishop very useful at picking up potatoes and gathering apples, but he was going to leave Pleasant River as soon as the harvesting was over.
One warm evening Aunt Betty and I were borrowing half a yeast-cake, and incidentally sitting on Mrs. Sanderson's steps at sunset. Buttercup was being milked on the grassy slope near the shed door. As she walked to the barn, after giving up her twelve quarts of yellow milk, she bent her neck and snatched a hasty bite from a pile of turnips lying temptingly near. In her haste she got more of a mouthful than would be considered good manners even among cows, and as she disappeared in the barn door I could see a forest of green tops hanging from her mouth, while she painfully attempted to grind up the mass of stolen material without allowing a single turnip to escape.
It grew dark soon after, and we went into the house, but as we closed the door I heard the cow coughing, and said to Mrs. Sanderson, "Buttercup was too greedy, and now she has indigestion."