Almost simultaneously with the sound of my voice, the bull stopped again. He placed himself broadside, at perhaps a three-quarter angle, so that, by turning his head slightly, he was looking back at us. He was directly between the cow and the calf, and the girl’s bullets continued to rip into him. I remember that I cried out in protest, but she did not sense my words. Every fiber of her being was strung to the thrilling achievement of that crime. She was deaf and blind to the nobility of the great-hearted beast who, in my eyes, was deliberately sacrificing his life. The flaming lust to kill had driven all other things out of her heart and soul. Her father had run up, and brother and father cried out in triumph when the old bull sagged suddenly in the middle and almost fell to his knees. Four times he had been struck when again he went on. From my experience in big-game hunting, I knew that he was done for. Yet, even in these moments when he was dying, the glorious soul of him was unafraid. Three hundred yards away he stopped and turned again, giving the cow and the calf a last chance to reach the timber. The girl fired her last shots, and missed. Then the bull swung after the cow and the calf and disappeared in the cover. But, as he went, there came back to us a terrible, deep-chested cough, and my heart gave up its hope. It told me the heroic old bull was shot through the lungs. I did not hurry after the girl and her father and brother as they ran over the blood-stained trail. I continued to hear the coughing for a few moments. Then it was silent. When I came up to them, just inside the timber, the three were standing in triumph close to the dead body of the bull. Hardly more than twenty paces from it was the yearling calf, dying, but not quite dead. The brother had ended it with a revolver-shot. And then I looked at the creature who had committed this double murder. Many times I had done this same crime, but with me, crude and rough, with all the inborn savagery of man, killing had not seemed quite so horrible. And standing there, a little later,--red-lipped, her face aflame, her eyes glowing, exquisite in her beauty,--the girl had her picture taken in triumph as she stood with one booted little foot on the neck of her victim. When I hear of the vaunted human soul, and when men and women tell me there is no soul but the soul of a human, my mind goes back to that day. I might tell of a hundred other instances that are convincing unto myself, but that one stands out with unforgettable vividness.