Chapter V

Evered’s red bull was a notorious and dangerous figure in the countryside. It was like some primordial monster of the forests, and full as fierce of temper. Evered had bought it two years before, and two men on horseback, with ropes about the creature’s neck, brought it from town to his farm. Evered himself, there to receive it, scowled at their precautions. There was a ring in the monstrous beast’s nose; and to this ring Evered snapped a six-foot stick of ash, seasoned and strong. Holding the end of this stick he was able to control the bull; and he set himself to teach it fear. That he succeeded was well enough attested. The bull did fear him, and with reason. Nevertheless, Evered took no chances with the brute, and never entered its stall without first snapping his ash stick fast to the nose ring. Those who watched at such times said that the bull’s red eyes burned red and redder so long as Evered was near; and those who saw were apt to warn the man to take care. But Evered paid no heed to their warnings; or seemed to pay no heed.

The bull had never harmed a human being, because it had never found the opportunity. Men and women and children shunned it, kept well away from its stout-fenced pasture, its high-boarded pen and its stall. The creature was forever roaring and bellowing; and when the air was still its clamor carried far across the countryside and frightened children and women, and made even men pause to listen and to wonder whether Evered’s bull was loose at last. Some boys used to come and take a fearsome joy from watching the brute; and at first they liked to tease the bull, pelting it with sticks and stones. Till one day they came--Jimmy Hills, and Will Motley, and Joe Suter, and two or three besides--with a setter pup of Lee Motley’s at their heels. The pup watched their game, and wished to take a hand, so slipped through the fence to nip at the great bull’s heels; and the beast wheeled and pinned the dog against the fence with its head like a ram, and then trod the pup into a red pudding in the soft earth, while Will Motley shrieked with rage and sorrow and fear.

Evered heard them that day, and came down with a whip and drove them away; and thereafter a boy who teased the bull had trouble on his hands at home. And the tale of what the brute had done to that setter pup was told and retold in every farmhouse in the town.

Evered, even while he mastered the bull and held it slave, took pains to maintain his dominance. The stall which housed it was stout enough to hold an elephant; the board-walled pen outside the stall was doubly braced with cedar posts set five feet underground; and even the half-mile pasture in which, now and then, he allowed the brute to range, had a double fence of barbed-wire inside and stone wall without.

This pasture ran along the road and bent at right angles to work down to the edge of the swamp. It was, as has been said, about a half mile long; but it was narrow, never more than a few rods wide. It formed the southern boundary of Evered’s farm; and no warning signs were needed to keep trespassers from crossing this area. When the bull was loose here it sometimes ranged along the fence that paralleled the road, tossing its great head and snorting and muttering at people who passed by, so that they were apt to hurry their pace and leave the brute behind.

It was timid Zeke Pitkin, on his way to North Fraternity, who saw the bull break its fence on the afternoon that Mary Evered was killed. Zeke did not usually take the road past Evered’s place, because he did not like to pass under the eye of the bull. But on this day he was in some haste; and he thought it likely the bull would be stalled and out of sight, and on that chance took the short hill road to his destination.

When he approached Evered’s farm he began to hear the bull muttering and roaring in some growing exasperation. But it was then too late to turn back without going far out of his way, so he pressed on until he came in sight of the pasture and saw the beast, head high, tramping up and down along the fence on the side away from the road. Zeke was glad the bull was on that side, and hurried his horse, in a furtive way, hoping the bull would not mark his passing.

When he came up to where the brute was he saw that the bull was watching something in Evered’s woodlot, beyond the pasture; and Zeke tried to see what it was. At first he could not see; but after a moment a dog yapped there, and Zeke caught a glimpse of it; a half-bred terrier from some adjacent farm, roving the woods.

The dog yapped; and the bull roared; and the dog, its native impudence impelling it, came running toward the pasture, and began to dance up and down, just beyond the bull’s reach, barking in a particularly shrill and tantalizing way.

Zeke yelled to the dog to be off; but the dog took his yell for encouragement, and barked the harder; and then Zeke saw a thing which made him turn cold.

He saw the bull swing suddenly, with all its weight, against the high wire fence; and he saw one of the posts sag and give way, and another smashed off short. So, quicker than it takes to tell it, the bull was floundering across the barbed wires, roaring with the pain of them, and Zeke saw it top the wall, tail high and head down, and charge the little dog.

Zeke might have tried to drive the bull back into its pasture; but that was a task for a bold man, and Zeke was not bold. He whipped his horse and drove on to warn Evered; and when he looked back from the top of the hill the bull and the dog had disappeared into the scrub growth of alder and hardwood along a little run that led down to the swamp. He whipped his horse again, and turned into the road that led to Evered’s farmhouse.

When he got to the farmhouse there was no one at home; and after he had convinced himself of this Zeke drove away again, planning to stop at the first neighboring farm and leave word for Evered. But after a quarter of a mile or so he met the butcher, and stopped him and told him that the bull was loose in his woodlot.

Evered asked a question or two; but Zeke’s voluble answers made him impatient, and he left the other and hurried on. At home he stabled his horse, got his ash stave with the snap on the end, and as an afterthought went into the house for his revolver. He had no illusions about the bull; he knew the beast was dangerous.

While he was in the house he marked that his wife was not there, and wondered where she was, and called to her, but got no answer. He knew that John and Ruth MacLure, his wife’s sister, were in the orchard on the other side of the farm from the pasture and woodlot; and he decided that his wife must have gone to join them there. So with the revolver in his pocket and the stave in his hand, Evered went down past the barn and through the bars into the woodlot. Somewhere in the thickets below him he expected to find the bull. He could hear nothing, so he understood that the little dog which had caused the trouble had either fled or been killed by the beast. He hoped for the latter; for he was an impatient man, and angered at the whole incident. Also, the sultry heat of the day had irked him; irked him so that he had cursed to himself because his wife was not at home when he wished to speak to her.

In this impatient mood he began to work down through the woodlot. He went carefully, knowing the treacherous temper of the brute he was hunting. He passed through a growth of birches along a little run, and across a rocky knoll, and through more birches, and so came out upon the lower shelf of his farm, a quarter of a mile from the house, and halfway down to the borders of the swamp.

He remembered, when he had come thus far, that there was a spring in the hillside a little below him, with two or three old trees above it, and some clean grass beside it. His wife occasionally came here in the afternoon, when her work was done, to sit and read or rest or give herself to her thoughts. Evered knew of this habit of hers; but till this moment he had forgotten it. The spot was cool; it caught what air was stirring. He had a sudden conviction that she might be there now; and the idea angered him. He was angry with her because by coming down here she had put herself in a dangerous position. He was angry with her because he was worried about her safety. This was a familiar reaction of the man’s irascible temperament. Two years before, when Mary Evered took to her bed for some three weeks’ time with what was near being pneumonia, Evered had been irritable and morose and sullen until she was on her feet again. Unwilling to confess his concern for her, he expressed that concern by harsh words and scowls and bitter taunts, till his wife wept in silent misery. His wife whom he loved wept in misery because of him.

Thus it was now with him. He was afraid she had come to the spring; he was afraid the bull would come upon her there; and because he was afraid for her he was angry with her for coming.

He went forward across the level rocky ground, eyes and ears alert; and so came presently atop a little rise from which he could look down to the spring. And at what he saw the man stopped stock-still, and all the fires of hell flared up in his heart till he felt his whole body burn like a flaming ember.

His wife was there; she was sitting on a low smooth rock a little at one side of the spring. But that was not all; she was not alone. A man sat below her, a little at one side, looking up at her and talking earnestly; and Mary Evered’s head was drooping in thought as she listened.

Evered knew the man. The man was Dane Semler. Dane Semler and his wife, together here, talking so quietly.

They did not see him. Their backs were toward him, and they were oblivious and absorbed. Evered stood still for a moment; then he was so shaken by the fury of his own anger that he could not stand, and he dropped on one knee and knelt there, watching them. And the blood boiled in him, and the pulse pounded in his throat, and the breath choked in his lungs. His veins swelled, his face became purple. One watching him would have been appalled.

Evered was in that moment a terrible and dreadful spectacle, a man completely given over to the ugliest of angers, to the black and tempestuous fury of jealousy.

He did not stop to wonder, to guess the meaning of the scene before him. He did not wish to know its explanation. If he had thought soberly he must have known there was no wrong in Mary Evered. But he did not think soberly; he did not think at all. He gave himself to fury. Accustomed to yield to anger as a man yields to alcohol, accustomed to debauches of rage, Evered in this moment loosed all bounds on himself. He hated his wife as it is possible to hate only those whom we love; he hated Dane Semler consumingly, appallingly. He was drunk with it, shaking with it; his lips were so hot it was as though they smoked with rage.

The man and the woman below him did not move. He could catch, through the pounding in his own ears, the murmur of their voices. Semler spoke quickly, rapidly, lifting a hand now and then in an appealing gesture; the woman, when she spoke at all, raised her head a little to look at the man, and her voice was very low. Evered did not hear their words; he did not wish to. The very confidence and ease and intimacy of their bearing damned them unutterably in his eyes.

He was like a figure of stone, there on the knoll just above them. It seemed impossible that they could remain unconscious of his presence there. The unleashed demons in the man seemed to cry out, they were almost audible.

But the two were absorbed; they saw nothing and heard nothing; nothing save each other. And Evered above them, a concentrated fury, was as absorbed and oblivious as they. His whole being was so focused in attention on these two that he did not see the great red bull until it came ponderously round a shoulder of the hill, not thirty paces from where the man and woman sat together. He did not see it then until they turned their heads that way, until they came swiftly to their feet, the man with a cry, the woman in a proud and courageous silence.

The bull stood still, watching them. And in the black soul of Evered an awful triumph leaped and screamed. His ash stave was beside him, his revolver was beneath his hand. There was time and to spare.

He flung one fist high and brought it smashing down. It struck a rock before him and crushed skin and knuckles till the blood burst forth. But Evered did not even know. There was a dreadful exultation in him.

He saw the bull’s head drop, saw the vast red bulk lunge forward, quick as light; saw Semler dodge like a rabbit, and run, shrieking, screaming like a woman; saw Mary Evered stand proudly still as still.

In the last moment Evered flung himself on the ground; he hid his face in his arms. And the world rocked and reeled round him so that his very soul was shaken.

Face in his arms there, the man began presently to weep like a little child.