California -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, American; Western stories
I did, but not in the way I expected. There was a bullfight at San
Antonio the next Saturday afternoon, the usual Sunday performance being
changed in deference to the Sabbatical habits of the Americans. An
additional attraction was offered in the shape of a bull-and-bear fight,
also a concession to American taste, which had voted the bullfight
“slow,” and had averred that the bull “did not get a fair show.” I am
glad that I am able to spare the reader the usual realistic horrors, for
in the Californian performances there was very little of the brutality
that distinguished this function in the mother country. The horses were
not miserable, worn-out hacks, but young and alert mustangs; and the
display of horsemanship by the picadors was not only wonderful, but
secured an almost absolute safety to horse and rider. I never saw
a horse gored; although unskillful riders were sometimes thrown in
wheeling quickly to avoid the bull's charge, they generally regained
their animals without injury.
The Plaza de Toros was reached through the decayed and tile-strewn
outskirts of an old Spanish village. It was a rudely built oval
amphitheater, with crumbling, whitewashed adobe walls, and roofed only
over portions of the gallery reserved for the provincial “notables,” but
now occupied by a few shopkeepers and their wives, with a sprinkling of
American travelers and ranchmen. The impalpable adobe dust of the arena
was being whirled into the air by the strong onset of the afternoon
trade winds, which happily, however, helped also to dissipate a reek
of garlic, and the acrid fumes of cheap tobacco rolled in cornhusk
cigarettes. I was leaning over the second barrier, waiting for the
meager and circuslike procession to enter with the keys of the bull pen,
when my attention was attracted to a movement in the reserved gallery.
A lady and gentleman of a quality that was evidently unfamiliar to the
rest of the audience were picking their way along the rickety benches
to a front seat. I recognized the geologist with some surprise, and the
lady he was leading with still greater astonishment. For it was Miss
Mannersley, in her precise, well-fitting walking-costume--a monotone of
sober color among the parti-colored audience.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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