'Madness!' Captain Bill mooed.
'Could I suggest you keep your voice down?' Norma replied. 'If Bertha hears you...and you might want to take your hat off, it's clearly sticking up above the hedge.'
Captain Bill did as Norma suggested.
'Madness!' he whispered. 'She's gone too far this time.'
'Look,' Norma replied, 'I'm really not interested in the rights and wrongs of it all, I just don't want to see anyone get hurt, that's all.'
For a time Norma and Captain Bill stood in silence as they watched Bertha test firing the giant stapler.
'What's she firing them at anyway?' Captain Bill asked after a while. 'From here it looks like some sort of demented bovine! It's not Annie is it?'
Norma hesitated. '......it's a kind of model.......a dummy.'
'Not very well made,' Captain Bill observed. 'The head's fallen off.'
'She's been having trouble with it,' Norma replied.
'Well, there's no question about it,' Captain Bill continued, 'it's mutiny! It'll have to be dealt with. You have to nip this sort of thing in the bud. A firm hoof needs to be taken. Discipline has to be maintained or one thing leads to another.'
Norma waited for a few minutes.
'Oh, I'll go and talk to her,' she muttered.
'If you could?' Captain Bill replied. 'Be so very grateful. Probably best coming from you. I've always suspected that she's secretly overawed by my presence.'
So Norma went off to try for one last time to talk to Bertha.
'Why can't people just get along?' she thought to herself as she walked. What she needed, she reasoned, was some sort of giant distraction to help diffuse the situation. But she didn't get any further with her thoughts because, at that very moment, she was completely and thoroughly distracted.
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