nose with the cruel quirto.  The bull’s dignity vanished.  With the quadrupedian capacity for measuring distance, he inferred that the blow had been inflicted by the bear, who sat some twenty feet away, mildly licking his paws.  He made a savage onset.  The bear, with the dexterity of a vaquero, leaped aside and sprang upon the assailant’s neck, his teeth meeting argumentatively in the rope-like tendons.  The bull roared with pain and rage and attempted to shake him off, but he hung on; both lost their footing and rolled over and over amidst clouds of dust, a mighty noise, and enough blood to satisfy the early thirst of the beholders.  Then the bull wrenched himself free; before the mountain visitor could scramble to his feet, he fixed him with his horns and tossed him on high.  As the bear came down on his back with a thud and a snap which would have satisfied a bull less anxious to show what a bull could do, the victor rushed upon the corpse, kicked and stamped and bit until the blood spouted into his eyes, and pulp and dust were indistinguishable.  Then how the delighted spectators clapped their hands and cried “Brava!” to the bull, who pranced about the plaza, dragging the carcass of the bear after him, his head high, his big eyes red and rolling!  The women tore off their rebosos and waved them like banners, smashed their fans, and stamped their little feet; the men whirled their sombreros with supple wrists.  But the bull was not satisfied; he pawed the ground with demanding hoofs; and the vaqueros galloped into the ring with another bear.  Nor had they time to detach their reatas before the bull was upon the second antagonist; and they were obliged to retire in haste.

Estenega, who stood between Chonita and myself, watched The Doomswoman attentively.  Her lips were compressed fiercely:  for a moment they bore a strange resemblance to his own as I had seen them at times.  Her nostrils were expanded, her lids half covered her eyes.  “She has cruelty in her,” he murmured to me as the first battle finished; “and it was her imperious wish that the bull should win, because he is the more lordly animal.  She has no sympathy for the poor bundle of hair and quivering flesh that bounded on the mountain yesterday.  Has she brutality in her?—­just enough—­”

“Brava!  Brava!” The women were on their feet; even Chonita for the moment forgot herself, and beat the railing with her small fist.  Another bear had been impaled and tossed and trampled.  The bull, panting from his exertions, dashed about the plaza, still dragging his first victim after him.  Suddenly he stopped; the blood gushed from his nostrils; he shivered like a skeleton hanging in the wind, then fell in an ignominious heap—­dead.

“A warning, Diego,” I said, rising and shaking my fan at him.  “Be not too ambitious, else wilt thou die of thy victories.  And do not love the polar star,” I murmured in his ear, “lest thou set fire to it and fall to ashes thyself.”