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The Bull Called Emily
by
“I goes back to where Emily is hitched, and she’s weaving to and fro on her legs and watering at the mouth until she just naturally can’t control her own riparian rights. She’s done smelt that smell too.
“‘Honey gal,’ I says to her, ‘it shore looks to me like you’re due to get your fullupances of the succulential ground-pea of the Sunny Southland this day.’
“She’s so grateful she tries to kiss me, but I ducks. All through her turn she dribbles from the chin like a defective fire-hydrant, and I can tell that she ain’t got her mind on her business. She’s too busy thinking about peanuts. When she’s got through and taken her bows, the manager leaves the curtain up and Emily steps back behind a rope that a couple of the hands stretches acrosst the stage, with me standing on one side of her and Windy on the other; and then a couple more hands shoves a wooden runway acrosst the orchestra rail down into one of the side aisles; and then the house-manager invites Emily’s young friends to march up the runway and crosst over from left to right, handing out their free-will offerings to her as they pass.
“During this pleasant scene, as the manager explains, Emily’s dauntless owner, the world-famous Professor Zendavesta Jordan, meaning Windy, will lecture on the size, dimensions, habits and quaint peculiarities of this wondrous creature. That last part suits Windy right down to the ground, him being, as I told you before, the kind of party who’s never so happy as when he’s started his mouth and gone away and left it running.
“For maybe a half a minute after the house-manager finishes his little spiel, the kids sort of hang back. Then the rush starts; and take it from me, little one, it’s some considerable rush. Here they come up that runway–tiny tots in blue, and tiny tots in red, and tiny tots in white; tiny tots with their parents, guardians or nurses, and tiny tots without none; tiny tots that are beginning to outgrow the tiny tottering stage, and other varieties of tiny tots too numerous to mention. And clutched in each and every tiny tot’s chubby hand is a bag of peanuts, five-cent size or ten-cent size, but mostly five-cent size. As Emily sees ’em coming, she smiles until she looks in the face like one of these here old-fashioned red-brick Colonial fireplaces, with an overgrown black Christmas stocking hanging down from the centre of the mantel.
“Up comes the first and foremost of the tiny tots. The Santy Claus stocking reaches out and annexes the free-will offering. There’s a faint crunching sound; that there sack of peanuts has went to the bourne from out which no peanut, up until that time, has ever been known to return; and Emily is smiling benevolently and reaching out for the next sack. And behind the second kid is the third kid, and behind the third kid still more kids, and as far as the human eye can reach, there ain’t nothing on the horizon of that show-shop but just kids–kids and peanuts.
“It certainly was a beauteous spectacle to behold so many of the dear little ones advancing up that runway with peanuts. To myself I says: ‘I guess I’m a bad little suggester, eh, what? Here’s Emily getting all this free provender and Windy talking his fool head off and the house getting all this advertising and none of us out a cent for any part of it.’
“In about ten minutes, though, I’m struck by the fact that Emily’s original outburst of enthusiasm appears slightly on the wane. It seems to me she ain’t reaching out for the free-will offerings with quite so much eagersomeness as she was displaying a spell back. Also I takes notice that the wrinkles in her tum-tum are filling out so that she’s beginning to lose some of that deflated or punctured look so common amongst bulls.