Page:Czechoslovak stories.pdf/211

 would cook up a snake for me the first day. Josífek is a good boy, but he doesn’t fit among us. He is neither for the herd nor the plow, and it wouldn’t be proper to put him at the spinning-wheel. Still I might keep him behind a frame and under glass for exhibition.”

Elška, too, had to laugh at her notion, but after a while she asked Bára very earnestly, “Then there is truly no one whom you are fond of?”

“Listen, Elška!” Bára said, after short deliberation. “Last fall it happened often that alone with Lišaj I took the herd out. Father had a sore foot and could not stand up. One afternoon the mayor’s cow, Plavka, and Milost’s cow, Březina, got into a fight and began to gore each other with their horns. One must never let them get into a rage or they’d dig out each other’s horns. So I seized a pail and ran to the river for some water to throw on their heads. Before I returned to the herd some huntsman approached from the wood and, seeing the cows with their locked horns, tried to drive them apart.

“Away, Go away!” I shrieked at him. “I’ll separate them myself. Don’t let the bull see you, he’s wicked!” The huntsman turned around, but in that instant the bull, also, had caught sight of him. Luckily, the cows ran off in different directions when I splashed the water over them or it would have been hard for the huntsman to escape. It was all I could do to seize the bull, restrain and calm him, for even father can’t hold