WHO he was and what he was and where he came from no one knew. How he
came to be in Crosby Corners was a mystery, and at harvesttime
Connecticut farmers are too busy to peer into mysteries. He could not
speak much English beyond “Yes,” “No,” “Hungry,” and “Go Hell.” He could
gesture, however. He could gesture with his hands, his elbows, his eyes,
his feet. He appeared to be trying by pantomime to convey the idea that
he had been forcibly seized in his native land, which was remote, had
been pressed into service aboard a ship, had been very ill at sea, had
escaped at a port, had fled on a train, and had dropped, or been
dropped, at Crosby Corners. The farmers, however, had no time to
interpret pantomime. Farm-hands were scarce, and if a man had two hands
and at least one good eye, they did not delve into his past or his
pedigree; they put him to work. It was thus that the small, scared man
in the velvet trousers entered the employ of Ben Crosby, richest farmer
in that region.
“I found the little rascal,” Ben Crosby told his wife, “squealing like a
pig in a hornet’s nest, and frightened almost out of his wits, with
Constable Pettit marching him along by the ear. ‘Constable,’ I says,
‘what is that and where did you get it?’ He says to me: ‘I dunno what it
is, Ben, but it looks foreign. I found it down by the railroad tracks
trying to eat a raw potato. When I asked it what its name was, it said:
“See.”’ I says to the constable, ‘He may be a Gipsy or he may be a
Hindu, and he looks as if he suspected you of being a cannibal. But,’ I
says, ‘he seems wiry and he didn’t get that lovely tobacco-brown finish
of his at a pink tea or from working in an office. Now I need hands
worse than ducks need ponds. So turn him over to me ’stead of sticking
him in the calaboose, and I’ll give him a job.’ Pettit didn’t want to be
bothered with him, so he turned him over to me, and there he is out at
the pump washing the dirtiest pair of hands I ever did see, and now and
then rubbing his belly to show how hungry he is. I’ll send him to the
back door, Hannah; you give him a lining of ham and eggs and pie, and
then send him down to me. I’ll be in the twenty-acre lot.”
Presently there came a knock on the back door of the Crosby house. It
was not at all a robust knock; it was a tap as faint and timid as a
butterfly’s kick. Mrs. Crosby opened the door, and saw a small man
standing there; his face was a rich brown, his eyes were black and
apprehensive; he appeared to be ready to flee if the occasion demanded
it. When he saw Mrs. Crosby, however, he bowed deeply. Such a bow had
never before been executed in Crosby Corners except in the moving
pictures. It was a sweeping, courtly thing, that bow, in which the small
man swept off his wide felt hat and dusted the steps with it. Then he
smiled; it was a humble, ingratiating smile. He looked toward the stove,
where the sizzling ham was sending its aroma heavenward, and sighed.
Mrs. Crosby pointed to a chair at the kitchen table, and he, with
another bow, took it, and presently he was eating hungrily and freely.
Mrs. Crosby now and then lifted an eye from her canning to regard the
exotic stranger; she had a doubt or two at first whether it was quite
safe for her to stay there. You never can tell what the foreigners may
do, even if you are past forty and the mother of a grown daughter. She
glanced into the dining-room, where, above the mantel, hung Grandpa
Crosby’s Civil-War sword, a long, heavy weapon, and its presence
reassured her. As she studied the man, she decided that any fear of him
was quite groundless; if anything, he was afraid of her. His hair, she
observed, was blue-black and long, but arranged in a way that suggested
that he was a bit of a dandy. The stranger’s trousers surprised her
greatly; they were of black velvet, really painfully tight, except at
the bottom of each leg, where they flared out like bells. He had no
belt, but instead a scarlet sash. His shirt, when new and clean, must
have been a remarkable garment; it had been plaid silk, but it was now
neither new nor clean. His boots were of patent leather and excessively
pointed.
When he had eaten a very great deal he arose, bowed, smiled
beatifically, and made gestures of gratitude. Mrs. Crosby pointed in the
direction of the twenty-acre lot, and he understood. She saw him picking
his way down the path; he was the first man she had ever seen whose gait
at one and the same time included a mince and a swagger.
When Ben Crosby came in to his late supper that evening he announced:
“I was wrong about that new little fellow. He doesn’t seem to have done
farm work. He’s willing enough, but he handles a hay-fork as dainty as
if it was a toothpick. And, say, he certainly is the most scary human
being I ever set eyes on. You should have seen him when the tractor came
into the field with the mowing-machine. He gave a yelp and jumped on the
stone wall, and if there’d been a tree handy, I guess he’d have climbed
it. He looked as if he was afraid the machine would eat him. Pete High,
who was driving it, said, ‘I guess it ain’t only his skin that’s
yellow.’ I hope Pete isn’t right. I hate a coward.”
“Don’t you let Pete High pick on him,” admonished Mrs. Crosby. “Perhaps
the man never saw a mowing-machine before. I remember how scared I was
when I saw the first automobile come roaring and snorting along the
road. And so were you, Ben Crosby.”
“Well, I didn’t let on I was,” replied her husband, harpooning a potato.
“No, you old hypocrite, maybe you didn’t; but I saw you looking around
for a tree.”
He laughed, and was on the point of sending a potato to its final
resting-place, when they both heard a cry—a high, terrified cry that
came through the dusk. He started up.
“That’s not Janey?” he asked.
“No; she’s still in town taking her music lesson.”
“Who is it, then?” he asked quickly.
They heard the patter of running feet on the path outside; they heard
the sound of feet landing after a leap to the porch; they heard someone
banging frantically on the front door. Ben Crosby called out:
“What’s the matter?”
A flood of words in a strange tongue answered him.
“It’s Velvet Pants,” he exclaimed, and flung open the door. The small
man, breathless, tumbled in.
“What in the name of thunderation?” demanded Ben Crosby. The small man
pointed through the open door with quivering fingers.
“I don’t see anything out there but the evening,” said Ben Crosby.
“Ice!” cried the man, very agitated. “Ice!”
“What do you want ice for?” asked Ben Crosby.
The man made eloquent gestures; first he pointed at his own face, then
he pointed outside; his index finger stabbed at the gloom once, twice, a
dozen quick times.
“Ice! ice! ice! ice! ice! ice!” he said.
“Why, Ben, he means ‘eyes,’” exclaimed Mrs. Crosby.
“Eyes? What eyes, Hannah? I don’t see any eyes. There’s nothing out
there but lightning-bugs.”
One of the circling fireflies flew quite near the open door. The small
man saw it coming, and made an earnest, but only partly successful,
attempt to climb into the grandfather’s clock that stood in the corner
of the hall.
Ben Crosby threw back his head and laughed.
“Why, dog my cats! if the little cuss ain’t afraid of lightning-bugs!”
he said. “Hey, Velvet Pants, look here.”
He plucked the man out of the clock with one big hand, and with the
other captured the firefly, and held it near the stranger’s wide eyes.
“Look,” said Ben Crosby in the loud tone that is supposed to make the
American language intelligible to those who do not understand it when it
is spoken in an ordinary tone of voice. “Bug! Bug! No hurt!
Lightning-bug. LIGHTNING-BUG!”
The small man pulled away from the insect.
“Not know lightning-boogs,” he said.
Ben released his hold on the small man, and pointed up-stairs; then Ben
gave a highly realistic imitation of a snore. The man comprehended, and
his velvet-clad legs twinkled up-stairs toward his bedroom. Ben Crosby
returned to his supper, shaking his head.
“It beats me,” he remarked to his wife. “He’s afraid of mowing-machines
and he’s afraid of lightning-bugs. I wonder if he’s afraid of the dark.
I need farm-hands, but may I be fried like a smelt if I’ll tell ’em
bedtime stories or sing ’em to sleep. What’s the world coming to,
anyhow? Can you imagine a real, honest-to-goodness farm-hand like Pete
High being afraid of lightning-bugs?”
“Boneheads are seldom afraid of anything,” remarked Mrs. Crosby, pouring
buttermilk.
They heard the front door open.
“There’s Janey,” said Mrs. Crosby. “Hello, dear. Come right to the
table. I’ve made ice-cream—coffee, the kind you like.”
Janey, daughter of the household, came in, bearing her guitar. She
kissed both her parents. Janey was nearly eighteen, a pretty, elf-like
girl. All the masculine hearts in Crosby Corners beat a little faster
when she went down the village street; her blue eyes had been the cause
of many black eyes. Her father told her of the new man, of his
extraordinary velvet trousers, and of his still more extraordinary
fears.
“Poor little fellow!” she said.
As the harvest days hurried along, Velvet Pants atoned somewhat for his
lack of expertness as a farmer by his unfailing good nature. He even
learned to speak a little English of a certain hesitant species, but he
had little opportunity to talk with his fellow-workers. Mostly they
ignored him, or, if they addressed him at all, did so loftily and with
contempt; a man who paled at the sight of mowing-machines and
lightning-bugs was not of their stout-hearted kind.
The incident at the swimming-hole added little to Velvet Pants’
reputation for bravery. The swimming-hole was Sandy Bottom, where all
the workers, hot from their day in the fields, went for a cool plunge
after work. They noticed that Velvet Pants never went with them.
“How does he keep so neat and clean?” they asked. It was Pete High who
solved this mystery.
“Yesterday morning,” said Pete, “I woke up earlier than usual, and what
do you suppose I see? Well, I hear a tap, tap, tap, like somebody was
stealing down-stairs on his tiptoes. I peek out o’ the door, and it’s
Velvet Pants. Just for fun, I follow him. He goes down to the creek, not
to Sandy Bottom, but a couple of rods down-stream, where the water ain’t
more than ankle-deep. He strips, and takes a stick about the size of a
cane and goes like this, ‘Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah,’ and pokes at the
bushes each time he says ‘ah.’ Then he gives one big loud ‘Ahhhhhhh,’
and lunges with his stick at the bushes; then he bows low, like he was
an actor in a show. He takes a bath, then, dabbing a little water on
himself like a cat does; but he doesn’t go in above his ankles. I guess
he’s afraid of the water.”
“Mebbe he ain’t much on swimming,” said one of the other hands, “but he
sure can twang a mean guitar. He’s giving Janey Crosby lessons.”
Pete High scowled.
“He is, is he? First I heard about it. Well, the first thing he knows he
won’t know nothing. I’m not going to have any wop——”
“She likes him,” teased the other man. “Says he’s got such lovely
manners; just like what you ain’t, Pete.”
“She don’t know how yella he is,” Pete High growled, “but she will.”
On Saturday afternoons most of Crosby Corners, men, women, and children,
comes to Sandy Bottom, bringing bathing-suits. It is not a very big
pool; at its deepest part it is not much over six feet deep.
How it happened that the small man with the velvet trousers should be
passing Sandy Bottom that Saturday noon at the precise moment when
freckled Johnny Nelson was floundering in the water and calling loudly
for help does not matter. Why Johnny Nelson should be drowning at all is
something of a puzzle, for he was the best swimmer in the county. It
also happened that just as Johnny was going down for the ninth or tenth
time and was calling piteously for Velvet Pants to dive in and save him,
Janey Crosby and a party of girl friends came down to the pool.
They saw Velvet Pants, his dark face ivory colored, trying to reach
Johnny with a young tree wrenched from the bank. The small man was a
picture of frantic helplessness.
“Save me, Velvet Pants! Save me!” bawled Johnny, submerging, and coming
up for the fourteenth time.
“Not know how,” screamed Velvet Pants in agony. “Not know how.”
Janey Crosby and her companions grew mildly hysterical; Johnny Nelson
went down for the seventeenth and eighteenth time, respectively. Velvet
Pants, finding that he could not reach Johnny with the tree, had fallen
on his knees, and with clasped hands was praying aloud in his own
tongue. Then, it also happened, that Pete High came racing through the
bushes.
“I’ll save you, Johnny,” he cried dramatically. Overalls and all, he
plunged in and brought the dripping Johnny to the bank. The prayers of
Velvet Pants became prayers of thanksgiving. Pete High stood regarding
him with disgust.
“Oh, Velvet Pants,” said Janey Crosby, “why didn’t you jump in and save
him?”
Slowly, sadly the small man shrugged his shoulders.
“Not know water,” he said; “not know sweem.”
He did not seem nearly so abashed as he said this as he might very well
have been in the circumstances; he said it very much as if he were
stating a fact, a lamentable fact the truth of which he regretted, but a
fact, nevertheless. He looked dismayed and surprised when Janey Crosby
and the others turned away from him.
After that Velvet Pants was an outcast. The men spoke to him only when
it was necessary to do so, and then briefly and even harshly. He did not
seem to understand; he would try to tell them things, making many
gestures; but he had not the words to make himself clear, nor had they
the inclination to listen to him.
In the evening, when the men were sitting about the porch, competing for
Janey Crosby’s smiles, there was no place for him there. He had tried to
join in their talk and play, to be friendly, to be one of them; they
froze him out, and still he did not seem to understand that they did it
because he was so flagrant a coward. At last he seemed to accept his
status as a pariah without really understanding it, for he would take
his guitar, which he had constructed from the ruin of an old one, and go
alone into the woods. It was said that he sang there to himself, sad
songs in his native tongue.
Janey Crosby’s birthday came toward the end of the harvest season, and
it was the most important social event of the year in Crosby Corners.
All the village was invited, and all the village came, the girls in
their fresh dimities, the men, soaped and collared and uncomfortable,
but happy. They brought presents, as if they were bringing tribute to a
queen, and Janey, as graciously as a reigning sovereign, took them all,
and smiled.
The party was held in the masonic hall, and it was an affair of
considerable tone, with dancing, two helpings of ice-cream all around,
and a three-piece orchestra.
The dancing was half over. Janey and Pete High, her current partner, had
gone out on the porch; a harvest moon silvered the village streets.
“Look,” exclaimed Pete, “what’s that sitting down there on the
horseblock?”
“It’s a man,” said Janey, her eyes following his pointing finger.
“But who can it be?”
The girl looked again, and made out a small, bent figure sitting there,
chin on hands, eyes turned toward the lighted hall, ears toward the
music and the buzz and laughter of the guests.
“Why, it’s Velvet Pants!” she exclaimed.
“Shall I chase him away?” asked Pete, swelling out his chest and looking
belligerent. Janey laid a restraining hand on his arm.
“No; don’t chase him, Pete. Let him stay. The poor fellow’s probably
lonesome. Everybody is here but him.”
“He deserves to be lonesome,” said Pete; “he’s yella.”
“Would you jump in to save a person from drowning if you didn’t know how
to swim?” asked Janey.
“Of course I would,” replied Pete, promptly. “Now, see here, Janey
Crosby, don’t you go sticking up for that wop. He’s not fit to associate
with white men.”
She sat gazing at the small, miserable figure; then she made a sudden
resolution.
“I’m going to ask him to come up to the party,” she said.
“No, you ain’t.”
“Whose birthday is this, Pete High? I guess it won’t do any harm to give
him a dish of ice-cream. You don’t have to associate with him. Run down
and tell him I’d like to see him, Pete.”
Pete mumbled protests, but he went. Very diffidently, as if he
momentarily expected to be kicked, Velvet Pants approached the porch.
Janey Crosby saw that he was wearing a new, clean shirt, that his black
locks had been parted and buttered, and that his shoes had been
rigorously shined. Over his shoulder was slung his wreck of a guitar.
“This is my birthday, Velvet Pants,” said the girl. “I want you to help
me celebrate it. Pete, will you get another plate of ice-cream?”
The small man seemed overcome; he bowed twice very low. Then he spoke.
He spoke mechanically, as if the words had been often rehearsed.
“I haf no gif’ for you on your birthday, Mees Crosby, but I haf learn a
song American to seeng for you. I hear heem on funnygraf. I hope you
like.”
He said it humbly, but not without a certain pride that attends the
accomplishment of a difficult feat.
Janey laughed delightedly.
“So you learned an American song just for my birthday? Well, now, wasn’t
that a sweet idea! Wait! I’ll call the others; no, better still, you
come in the hall and sing, so they can all hear.”
Velvet Pants looked horrified at this suggestion.
“But, no,” he protested. “I do not seeng good.”
“That’s all right. They won’t know the difference,” said Janey,
laughingly. “Come along.”
She pushed him through the open doorway. The guests looked up; what
would Janey Crosby do next?
“Folks,” announced Janey Crosby, “Mr. Velvet Pants is going to sing for
us. He learned a little American song just for my birthday. Wasn’t that
nice of him?”
It was evident from the face of Pete High, who stood in the doorway,
that he did not think it was particularly nice.
The small brown man glanced uncertainly about the hall; then he began to
play chords on his guitar. Some of the girls tittered. In a round, clear
tenor Velvet Pants began to sing:
“Kees me hagain, kees me hagain,
Kees me hagain, and hagain.”
His memory seemed to go back on him at this point; he groped for a
moment for the words, then plunged on:
“Kees me hagain, kees me hagain,
Kees me hagain, and hagain.
Kees me hagain, kees me hagain,
Kees me hagain and hagain,
Kees me hagain, kees me hagain,
Kees me, kees me, hagain!”
When he had finished, Velvet Pants bowed deeply first to Janey, then to
the rest. There was a slight, dubious ripple of applause that was
checked suddenly. Pete High had strode up to Velvet Pants and was facing
him.
“Just a minute there,” said Pete. “You and me has got a little bone to
pick. Wadda you mean by singing a song like that to Miss Crosby?”
The small man looked puzzled.
“It ees only song American I know,” he said.
“Yeah? Well, I’m goin’ to teach you to sing it out of the other side of
your mouth. Come outside with me.”
“Pete High,” broke in Janey, “don’t you go fighting with him. He didn’t
mean any harm; he probably doesn’t know what the words mean.”
“I told him never to say anything to you whether he understood it or
not,” stormed Pete. “Come on, you.”
Velvet Pants made an attempt to steal away, but Pete blocked his path.
“You’re going out on the lawn with me,” said Pete.
“And seeng?” asked the little man, who seemed somewhat dazed by what was
happening.
“No; fight.”
“Fight?”
“Yes; fight.”
“But I do not hate you, Meester Pete.”
“Well, I hate you. Come on.”
“But how we fight?” inquired the small man; he was pale beneath his tan,
and trembling. For answer Pete thrust a clenched fist under the man’s
nose. The man drew his head back and shivered.
“No!” he said, shaking his head; “no! no! no! no! no!”
“You won’t fight?”
“No.”
“You’re a coward,” declared Pete.
Velvet Pants shrugged his shoulders.
“Not know hand-fights,” he said.
Pete slapped him across the face with his open hand.
“Now will you fight?”
“Not know hand-fights,” said the man, drawing away. Pete, contempt on
his face, gave him a push into the night. They heard the sound of feet
on the path; Velvet Pants was running.
“Not know hand-fights,” Pete mimicked. “Did you ever in your life see
such a rat?”
Next day excitement swept Crosby Corners. Defender Monarch had gone
crazy, and when that news spread, they forgot all about the conduct of
Velvet Pants on the night before. As for him, he went about his work
with a puzzled and hurt look on his brown face; he seemed still
uncertain why the others did not respond to his smiles and attempts at
friendliness.
Defender Monarch was the pride, and the terror, of the county. His
owner, Ben Crosby, had raised him from a gawky calf, wobbly on his legs,
into a massive ton-and-a-half bull, with a chest like a haystack, a
voice of thunder, and the temper of a gouty demon. Ben Crosby had not
dehorned him, because in cattle shows a good pair of horns is considered
a point of merit in judging bulls, and the giant bull had won many blue
ribbons. On this day Ben Crosby wished most earnestly that he had
foregone the blue ribbons and taken off those horns. A savage bull
without horns is bad enough, but a savage bull with a pair of sharp,
wicked horns is just about the most dangerous animal that walks.
Perhaps on that morning Defender Monarch had realized that he had
reached the end of his usefulness, and that before very long he was
doomed to end a proud career, ingloriously, as steak, roast, and stew.
He stood in his pasture, roaring a challenge to the world that he would
die fighting. By blind luck Ben Crosby was able to trick him into
entering the big pen, but in the process Defender Monarch had given a
sample of his viciousness by ripping Johnny Nelson’s arm from elbow to
shoulder and had failed by a hair’s-breadth in a sincere attempt to
crush the life out of Ben Crosby himself. Once confined in the pen,
Defender Monarch’s rage knew no bounds. He hurled himself against the
thick board sides so furiously that they creaked and trembled, and the
crowd that had gathered to see him darted back to places of greater
safety.
Luckily, the pen was a stoutly built affair; it was not really a pen at
all, but a small corral, perhaps fifty feet square. About it moved
Defender Monarch, his small eyes blazing, alert. And, perched on boxes
and ladders, Crosby Corners, fascinated as all men are by dangerous
things, watched the mad king of the herd.
“Isn’t he just too terrible,” said Janey Crosby to Pete High.
“Oh, I don’t know,” answered Pete, airily. “I’ve worked round him
often.”
“But not since he went crazy, Pete.”
“No,” admitted Pete, “mebbe not. I’m used to cattle of all kinds, but I
never saw one that acted this way. Just plain bulls I’m none too fond of
fooling with, but a crazy one! Excuse me.”
“See how he’s looking right at us with those mean little eyes of his,”
said Janey. “It’s just as if he were saying, ‘If I only had you down
here for a minute!’ I’m scared, Pete.”
“I’m here,” said Pete High, reassuringly. “Look, Janey, he’s getting
another fit; he’s going to try to buck that opposite wall.”
Janey Crosby, to get a better view, climbed to the very top of the
stepladder that leaned against the wall of the corral. There was a sharp
crack as the top rail gave way, then horrified cries. She had fallen
into the pen, and lay unconscious almost at the feet of the mad bull.
The women screamed, the men ran about aimlessly, wildly, shouting orders
at one another.
“Help! Janey’s fallen into the pen!”
“Oh, he’ll kill her! he’ll kill her! he’ll kill her!”
“Get pitchforks!”
“Get a gun!”
“No use; we’ve only got bird-shot. It would just make him madder to hit
him with that.”
“Someone will have to jump in.”
“Where are you running to, Pete High?”
“To get a rope or something.”
“You’ll be too late.”
Defender Monarch looked down at the girl, and his eyes were evil. Then
he looked at the ring of white faces that lined the top of the corral.
He seemed to understand the situation; he seemed to know that he had
plenty of time, and he gloated. He turned away from Janey, trotted to
the farther end of the corral, wheeled about, and surveyed the distance
between himself and the girl’s body; then he lowered his head with his
gleaming prongs, and gathered his body for a charge.
The aghast onlookers became aware that something was in the corral
besides the girl and the bull. A figure had come through the gate of the
inclosure, silently and swiftly. It was a small man in velvet trousers
and he was strolling toward Defender Monarch as casually and placidly as
if the bull were a rose-bush. On the brown face of Velvet Pants there
was not the slightest trace of fear; indeed, he was smiling, a slight,
amused smile. Otherwise he was as matter of fact as if he were about to
sit down to his breakfast. A brown-paper cigaret hung limp from one
corner of his lips; with the mincing strut they had noticed and made fun
of, he walked slowly quite near to Defender Monarch. The animal,
distracted, stood blinking at the little man. Within a few feet of the
bull, Velvet Pants halted; with magnificent nonchalance he blew a cloud
of smoke into the bull’s face, and then they saw a flash of something
red. It was Ben Crosby’s red flannel undershirt that a few moments
before had been drying on the line. The small man had flicked it across
the bull’s face. Defender Monarch forgot for the moment his plan for
smashing Janey Crosby; he saw the red, and he plunged toward it. The
women turned their heads away, the men clenched their teeth. They saw
Velvet Pants slip aside with the quickness of a jungle cat, and the
bull, unable to check himself, jolt his head against one of the sides of
the corral. Velvet Pants turned round, smiled pleasantly, and bowed very
low to the spectators. They saw that he had in his right hand something
long and bright that caught the rays of the sun; they realized that it
was Grandpa Crosby’s old Civil-War sword that had hung in the
dining-room. He was holding it as lightly and as easily as if it were a
butter-knife.
Defender Monarch, recovering from his fruitless charge against the wall,
spun about; once more the red shirt was deftly flapped before his
bright, mad eyes. Once more, with a roar of wrath, he launched his bulk
straight at Velvet Pants. Then something happened to Defender Monarch.
It happened with such speed that all the onlookers saw was a flash; then
they saw the huge frame of the bull totter, crumple, and sink down.
Sticking from the left shoulder of the bull they saw the hilt of Grandpa
Crosby’s sword; they saw the hilt only, for Velvet Pants had driven the
point into Defender Monarch’s heart.
The people of Crosby Corners allege that Ben Crosby kissed the little
tanned man on both cheeks, but this he denies; he admits, however, that
he hugged him and patted him, and said many husky words of gratitude and
admiration to Velvet Pants, who seemed abashed and quite unable to
understand why everyone was making so much of a fuss about him.
“And I called you a coward,” Ben Crosby kept saying. “I called you a
coward, and you went in and faced a mad bull without batting an
eyelash.”
“It was nuzzing,” murmured the small brown man.
“Nothing to face a mad bull?”
Velvet Pants shrugged his shoulders.
“But I am a toreador,” he said. “In my country, Andalusia, I keel one,
two, t’ree bull every Sunday for fun. Why should I fear bulls? I know
bulls.”