Page:The Valley of Adventure (1926).pdf/148

 Sergeant Olivera said, considering it for its merits with an unprejudiced mind. "It may be more comfortable for the beasts, if any man is such a fool as to devise arrangements for that."

"Put yourself in the place of an ox," Borromeo proposed in entire seriousness, "and imagine me in the place of another, yoked to you horn by horn. There is a diabolical fly with a green head on my ribs; another, maybe its wife, on yours. I fling my head to knock off the beast that is sucking my blood; you do the same. Then where do we go, my friends? for the way one head goes, that way the other must go. So we suffer from these animals that eat us alive while head pulls against head and our eyes roll white as onions."

"It is for the flies that this humane Don Juan has devised the beautiful yoke, then?" Sergeant Olivera mocked.

"An ox is like a man, take him as you will," said Borromeo. "Give him comfort and he works with spirit. And that is one thing. Another thing is that one span of oxen will draw a load as heavy as three span yoked in the old way. And that is something else, heh?"

"It is something to consider," Sergeant Olivera admitted, honestly interested in what he had heard.

"And Don Juan has made a plow that throws a furrow like a wave, a great wide plow with one turning-side to it, not like the iron-shod beam that has been used in Spain for eight"