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PAGE 8

The Bull Called Emily
by [?]

“Emily hesitates as she reaches the sidewalk, as though she ain’t decided yet in her own mind just where she’ll go, and then her agonised eye falls on all them peanut-roasters standing in a double row alongside the curbings on both sides of the street. The Italian and Greek gents who owns ’em are already departing hence in a hurried manner, but they’ve left their outfits behind, and right away it’s made plain to me by her actions that Emily regards the sight as a part of a general conspiracy to feed her some peanuts when she already has more peanuts than what she really required for personal use. She reaches out for the first peanut-machine in the row, curls her trunk around it and slams it against a brick wall so hard that it immediately begins to look something like a flivver car which has been in a severe collision and something like a tin accordion that’s had hard treatment from a careless owner. With this for a beginning, Emily starts in to get real rough with them roasters. For about three minutes it’s rainin’ hot charcoal and hot peanuts and wooden wheels and metal cranks and sheet-iron drums all over that part of the fair city.

“Having put the enemy’s batteries out of commission, Emily now swings around and heads back in the opposite direction with everybody giving her plenty of room. I heard afterward that some citizens went miles out of their way in order to give her room. Emily’s snout is aimed straight up as though she’s craving air, and her tail is standing straight out behind, stiff as a poker except that about every few seconds a painful quiver runs through it from the end that’s nearest Emily to the end that’s furtherest away from her. Windy is hoofing it along about fifty feet back of her, uttering soothing remarks and entreating her to listen to reason, and I’m trailing Windy; but for oncet Emily don’t hearken none to her master’s voice.

“Out of the tail of my eye I see a fat lady start to faint, and when she’s right in the middle of the faint, change her mind about it and do a back flip into a plumber’s shop, the purtiest you ever seen. I see a policeman dodge out from behind a lamp-post as Emily approaches, and reach for his gun. I yells to him not to shoot, but it’s unnecessary advice, because he’s only chucking his hardware away so’s to lighten him up for a couple of hundred yards of straightaway sprinting. I see Emily make a side-swipe with her nozzle at a stout gent who’s in the act of climbing a telegraph-pole hand over hand. She misses the seat of his pants by a fraction of an inch, and as he reaches the first cross-arm out of her reach, and drapes his form acrosst it, the reason for her sudden animosity towards him is explained. A glass jar falls out of one of his hip pockets and is dashed to fragments on the cruel bricks far below, and its contents is then seen to be peanut butter.

“I sees these things as if in a troubled dream, and then, all of a sudden, me and Emily are all alone in a deserted city. Exceptin’ for us two, there ain’t a soul in sight nowheres. Even Windy has mysteriously vanished. And now Emily, in passing along, happens to look inside a fruitstore, and through the window her unhappy glance rests upon a bin full of peanuts. So she just presses her face against the pane like Little Mary in the po’m, and at that the entire front end of that establishment seems to give away in a very simultaneous manner, and Emily reaches in through the orifices and plucks out the contents of that there store, including stock, fixtures and good will, and throws ’em backward over her shoulder in a petulant and hurried way. But I takes notice that she throws the bin of peanuts much farther than the grapefruit or the pineapples or the glass show-cases containing the stick candy. The proprietor must of been down in the cellar at the moment, else I judge she’d of fetched him forth too.