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Rh just as el Tato or Lagartijo might have done, and bam, bourn, the bull falls all in a lump, while Juan Araquil turns to the toreros and says to them, laughing all the while: 'You see, you fellows—it is easy enough!'

"But that is not the whole of the story. It made the toreros furious, wild with anger, to hear the shouts of the crowd, the bravos with which they saluted Araquil and the hisses that they visited upon the espada; they get together and surround Araquil, intending to take him to task for his audacity and perhaps, eh! parbleu, play him some nasty trick. Ah! well, very good! Araquil gives a look at this circle of enraged men. He gathers himself up, jumps clean over the head of the torero who is in front of him and makes his escape to the benches, leaving unbroken the circle that was about to close in on him and kill him. That evening he and one of the toreros fought with knives behind the circus and the torero buried his knife right in his chest. Juan Araquil kept his bed for two weeks, but when the two weeks were up he was as sound as ever. He was ready to kill another bull, and a torero as well, this time, should there be need of it.

"When our toreros are wounded, you know, they don't regard it as a matter of much consequence. Their skin unites again, their flesh heals quickly. They are carried off riddled with wounds from the bulls' horns, they are given up for dead—a sign of the cross, well, requiescat!—and at the month's end there they are, back again, with the espada or the banderilla in their hand. That was the kind of clay that Juan Araquil was made of! A slash of a knife or a blow from a tennis-racket—nothing hurt him. He was a man of iron, a genuine Basque.