Some Buried Caesar

He grunted and returned to his reading. I stayed on the edge of the chair and returned to my thoughts. I don't know when I began it, since it was unconscious, or how long I kept it up, but when Wolfe spoke again I became aware that I had been rubbing the back of my left hand with the finger tips of my right as I sat staring at various spots on the floor.

"You should realize, Archie, that that is very irritating.

Rubbing your hand indefinitely like that."

I said offensively, "You'll get used to it in time." He finished a paragraph before he dog-eared a page and closed the book, and sighed. "What is it, temperament? It was a shock, of course, but you have seen violence before, and the poor monstrosity life leaves behind when it departs-"

"I can stand the monstrosity. Go ahead and read your book. At present I'm low, but I'll snap out of it by morning. Down there you mentioned professional instinct. I may be short on that, but you'll allow me my share of professional pride. I was supposed to be keeping an eye on that bull, wasn't I? That was my job, wasn't it? And I sat over by the roadside smoking cigarettes while he killed a man."

"You were guarding the bull, not the man. The bull is intact."

"Much obliged for nothing. Phooey. You're accustomed to feeling pleased because you're Nero Wolfe, aren't you? All right, on my modest scale I permit myself a similar feel- ing about Archie Goodwin. When did you ever give me an errand that you seriously expected me to perform and I didn't perform it? I've got a right to expect that when Archie Goodwin is told to watch a pasture and see that nothing happens to a bull, nothing will happen. And you tell me that nothing happened to the bull, the bull's all right, he just killed a man… what do you call that kind of suds?"

"Sophistry. Casuistry. Ignoratio elenchi."

"Okay, I'll take all three."

"It's the feeling that you should have prevented the bull from killing a man that has reduced you to savagery."

"Yes. It was my job to keep things from happening in that pasture."

"Well." He sighed. "To begin with, will you never learn to make exact statements? You said that I told you the bull killed a man. I didn't say that. If I did say that, it wouldn't be true. Mr. Osgood was almost certainly murdered, but not by a bull."

I goggled at him. "You're crazy. I saw it."

"Suppose you tell me what you did see. I've had no de- tails from you, but I'll wager you didn't see the bull impale Mr. Osgood, alive, on his horns. Did you?"