Mama was there under the flowering dogwoods, and, as she saw us, she waved her red sunshade. Somebody had left a bull down there, near the creek, and he saw Mama wave the sunshade too and he started for Mama. Gramp yelled and picked up a two-by-four fragment of lumber. I followed. Mama saw the bull, she turned, looked around her and very bravely Stood her ground. It would have been foolish to run on the boggy soil. As the bull came near, she ducked behind a tree. The bull skidded, braked, and turned to meet Gramp swinging the two-by-four timber. The two-by-four hit the bull on (he nose and the creature bellowed and backed. Gramp stepped forward and banged again and the bull, outraged, went off rubbing his sore nose in the cooling mud. I've never been much impressed by bullfighters since.
The encounter cheered everyone and we drove up and over the sand roads north, singing “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” Mama admitted she had been afraid. “But the thing that worried me most was the fear he would disfigure my face, and that I would look a horror in my coffin. Somehow, I don't fear death, Gramp; it's dying I find a problem.”
Gramp looked proudly at Mama, and paid her the highest compliment he could think of. “Sari, what a man you would have made.”
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