“So far it was clever, neat work on the part of the capeadors, but nothing wonderful, nothing to match Juan’s work on the horse.  The crowd wanted livelier action, and there were cries of ‘Torellas!  Torellas!’ The bugle sounded, and Torellas came.  ‘Ah-h,’ sighed they—­you could hear them—­’now we shall see something.’  Torellas, holding the red cape before him, lured the bull, turned him skilfully, and, spinning on his heel, tempted the bull to wheel and charge again, and when the bull did so, and yet again and again, Torellas, holding him always at arm’s length, swung him back and forth, himself retreating a step at a time, and with every step the bull plunging on after him.  It was just as if he were snapping the bull on the end of the cape, snapping him back and forth across his path, as he made his way backward.  Torellas was never so far away but what the bull, with one unexpected lunge, would get him.  But Torellas kept the bull too well in hand for any accidental lunge.  At short range he kept him going, drawing him half way across the ring at one time, until at last the bull himself, seeming to understand that he was being fooled, stopped short, and Torellas pulled up, too, and let his cape hang loosely by his side; but as he did so, instantly and at full tilt at Torellas went the bull again; but that seeming carelessness on the part of Torellas was part of his play.  With a light upward bound, as the bull lowered his head to gore him, Torellas stepped between the horns, and when the great head came up, with the spring of his leap to the toss of the bull’s head, away he went sailing, twenty feet beyond the bull and landing like a breath of air on his feet.

“While the people were still making the air explode with their applause, Cogan saw Torellas look wistfully up to where Valera and her people sat.  Cogan looked too.  She, leaning back between her mother and Senor Guavera, with her face cloaked, was almost hidden.  Her mother and Guavera were talking across her as if all this bull-fighting was of all in the world the thing least interesting to them.  Cogan looked back to the matador.  He was bowing, even smiling, to the audience, but Cogan, who was close enough to mark every line of his face, saw that he was getting no great joy of his triumph.

“Torellas left the ring, and the banderilleros took possession.  These were the men with the wooden stakes of the length of a man’s arm and the thickness of a thumb, and wrapped around in gay colored paper ribbon streamers, and at one end a thin iron spike about as long as a man’s little finger.  The banderilleros had to stand in front of the bull, with a stake in each hand, and, as he charged, to step in between his horns and reach over and plant a stake on each side of his neck.  ‘It is most simple,’ explained Ferrero, as he left Cogan to do his part—­’only—­surely—­we must not make mistake.’  And Cogan could not help thinking that bull-fighting was like a thousand other games, a man mustn’t make mistakes.