Seeing a way out of the difficulty, he pointed obliquely over the injured man’s shoulder, and said, “Will, there is a plump and sweet partridge in that tree;—no, lower down;—further on;—hadn’t you better shoot it for him?”
After a moment’s deliberation the man who loved a good silver ring agreed to be satisfied with the partridge.
Yet an evil smile curved his lips—a smile that foreboded mischief to something—perhaps to the partridge.
Will had no sooner fired than a howl of awful agony burst from the man’s lips, and having spread his huge hands over the region where the ignorant suppose their vitals are situated, he bowed his body downwards, and there passed over his face a look of suffering that, in sublime tragedy, almost equalled the frightful spasms so graphically portrayed in our patent medicine almanacs.
Almost—nothing can quite come up to the patent medicine almanacs in that respect.
With a voice that was appalling in its unrestrained vehemence, he fell to delivering hideous ecphoneses,—too hideous, in fact, to be repeated here,—and then gasped faintly, “You’ve done it now!”
Poor Will! He was nearly crazed with grief.
“Oh!” he groaned, “have I killed him? Have I taken a fellow-creature’s life? Has my hastiness at last had a fatal result?”
“Oh,” Marmaduke murmured, “how could Will’s ball glance so as to enter that man’s body?”
For several seconds the two unlucky hunters stood perfectly still, held to the spot by devouring horror and anguish.