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"Sounds like something good being cooked, don't it? I s'pose there'll be a bit o' something to eat soon. I'm growing streaky, and could eat anything, from biscuit up to bull-beef. Well, what's the matter?" he cried, as a fiercer shrieking came along with clouds of vapour. "That go in the wrong place? Well, will that do?" He shifted the direction of the nozzle, but the noise was as bad as ever.
The impatient young trooper had eaten a supper of tough bull-beef and "those everlasting yams," as he called them, with his Cuban friends, and was pacing restlessly to and fro a short distance beyond a camp-fire, about which they smoked their cigarettes, when a ragged, slouch-hatted figure approached him. "Señor Americano." "Well, what do you want?"
The streets, in fact, after his long absence in the East, afforded him much food for thought: the curious smugness of the passers-by; the utterly unending bustle; the fearful medley of miserable, over-driven women, and full-fed men, with leering, bull-beef eyes, whom he saw everywhere in club windows, on their beats, on box seats, on the steps of hotels, discharging dilatory duties; the appalling chaos of hard-eyed, capable dames with defiant clothes, and white-cheeked hunted-looking men; of splendid creatures in their cabs, and cadging creatures in their broken hats the callousness and the monotony!
The grain of cow-beef is closer, and the fat whiter, than that of ox-beef; but the lean is not so bright a red. The grain of bull-beef is closer still, the fat hard and skinny, the lean of a deep red, and a stronger scent. Ox-beef is the reverse; it is also the richest and the largest; but in small families, and to some tastes, heifer-beef as better still, if finely fed.
Here they killed three cows, which were the first they had been able to get, having heretofore had to content themselves with bull-beef, which at this season of the year is very poor. The hump meat and tongues afforded them a repast fit for an epicure.
His worship was gawky, flustered, and uncertain, and listened like a scared rabbit to mine host, a man of much talk, who explained proudly what was to be done. "This is 'im, y'r worship," he said. "A dirty 'oss-thief as badly wants 'anging. Copped in the act, y'r worship, of riding into this 'ere yard o' mine, as big as bull-beef, sitting on the very 'oss 'e'd stolen from his lordship 'ere."
"If she dies to-night you can send me word in the morning; that will be soon enough; and if I don't hear from you I'll call again to-morrow." "She ain't goin' to die if I can stop her," said grandma when he had departed. "I'll bring her to with a powltice. I ain't given to be cumflummixed by what a doctor says; many a one they give up is walking about as strong as bull-beef to-day.
However, the masts did not go overboard; and by and by we scrambled down, so sober, that we had to pass the flip again, though the savage salt spray bursting down the forecastle scuttle, rather too much diluted and pickled it to my taste. The beef was fine tough, but with body in it. They said it was bull-beef; others, that it was dromedary beef; but I do not know, for certain, how that was.
Under the ancient arcades are the stalls of the butchers, rich with the mutton of Castile, the hams of Estremadura, and the hero-nourishing bull-beef of Andalusian pastures. At night the town is given up to harmless racket. Nowhere has the tradition of the Latin Saturnalia been fitted with less change into the Christian calendar.
The city hall clock chimed ten, the hour when the saloons set out the mock-turtle soup and potato salad, the bull-beef and sour beans as lagniappe to the heavy-laden schooner. The editor remembered that Christ first came eating and drinking, sat with publicans and sinners and was denounced therefore as a wine-bibber and a glutton by the Prohibitionists and other Miss Nancys of Palestine.
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