"Here I am, old fellow," answered Archibald, reeling rather than stepping forward. "A crack on the skull, that's all. Hope you're none the worse?" His own face was bleeding from a nasty graze on the right temple.
"H'm?" said Letcher. "Mean it? You'd better mean it by—!" he snarled suddenly, his face twisted with pain or malice. "You weren't too smart, the first go. Why the deuce didn't you hamstring the brute? You heard them shouting?"
"That's asackly what I told 'en," put in the butcher.
"Oh, stow your fat talk, you silly Devonshire-man!" The butcher's tongue was too big for his mouth, and Letcher mimicked him ferociously and with an accuracy quite wonderful, his exhaustion considered. He leaned back and panted. "The brute touched me—under the thigh, here. I doubt I'm bleeding." He closed his eyes and fainted away.
They found, on lifting him, that he spoke truth. The bull had gored him in the leg: a nasty wound beginning at the back of the knee, running upward and missing the main artery by a bare inch. A squad of soldiers had run out, hearing the shot, and these bore him into the Citadel, Master Archibald limping behind.
The crowd began to disperse, and I made my way back to Miss Plinlimmon.
"A providential escape!" said she on hearing my report. "I am glad that Archibald acquitted himself well." She went on to tell me of a youthful adventure of her own with a mountain bull, in her native Wales.
Some days later she sent me a poem on the occurrence:
"Lo, as he strides his native scene,
The bull—how dignified his mien!
When tethered, otherwise!
Yet one his tether broke and ran
After a military man
Before these very eyes!"
"Lo, as he strides his native scene,
The bull—how dignified his mien!
When tethered, otherwise!
Yet one his tether broke and ran
After a military man
Before these very eyes!"