His eyes closed again. The woman made haste to get him something. In a few minutes she returned with a basin of broth. He took it eagerly, but with a look of gratitude that went to her heart. Before he tasted it, however, he set it on the ground, broke in half the great piece of bread she had brought with it, and gave the larger part to his dog. Then he ate the other with his broth, and felt better than for many a day. Some of the men said he could not be very hungry to give a cur like that so much of his dinner; but the evil thought did not enter the mind of the woman. “You’d better be taking your beast away,” said the woman, who by this time understood the affair, to the two men. They were silent, evidently disinclined for such another tussle. “You’d better be going,” she said again. “If anything should happen with that animal of yours, and one of ours was to get loose, the devil would be to pay, and who’d do it?” “They’d better wait for me, ma’am,” said Clare, rising. “I’m just ready!--They won’t tell me where they want to take him, but it’s all one, so long as I’m with him. He’s my friend!--Ain’t you, Nimrod? We’ll go together--won’t we, Nimrod?” While he spoke, he undid the ropes from the ring in the bull’s nose. Gathering them up, he handed them politely to one of the men, and the next moment sprang upon the bull’s back, just behind his shoulders, and leaning forward, stroked his horns and neck. “Give me up the dog, please,” he said. The owner of the menagerie himself did as Clare requested. All stood and stared, half expecting to see him flung from the creature’s back, and trampled under his hoofs. Even Nimrod, however, would not easily have unseated Clare, who could ride anything he had ever tried, and had tried everything strong enough to carry him, from a pig upward. But Nimrod was far from wishing to unseat his friend, who with hands and legs began to send him toward the road. “Are you going that way?” he asked, pointing. The men answered him with a nod, sulky still. “Don’t go with those men,” said the woman, coming up to the side of the bull, and speaking in a low voice. “I don’t like the look of them.” “Nimrod will be on my side, ma’am,” answered Clare. “They would never have got him home without me. They don’t understand their fellow-creatures.” “I’m afraid you understand your fellow-creatures, as you call them, better than you do your own kind!” “I think they are my own kind, ma’am. That is how they know me, and do what I want them to do.” “Stay with us,” said the woman coaxingly, still speaking low. “You’ll have plenty of your fellow-creatures about you then!” “Thank you, ma’am, a thousand times!” answered Clare, his face beaming; “but I couldn’t leave poor Nimrod to do those men a mischief, and be killed for it!” “You’d have plenty to eat and drink, and som’at for your pocket!” persisted the woman.