To contend with the smug incredulity of those millions of human kind who spend their lives in little brick-and-mortar boxes set one on top of another in long double rows is the fate of all chroniclers of the important aspects of nature. But truth is mighty and will prevail. Let us therefore proceed calmly with the facts.
When Clarence had repeated his instructions several times, Reginald gave three sharp, intelligent grunts and ran straight to the barnyard gate. With his stiffened snout he began furiously attacking the hard earth beneath the lower bar.
“Not there, you idiot!” squealed the colt. “The other end. The other end, where the iron hinges are!”
Reginald stood corrected. While the dirt flew from under the hinged end of the gate, Gustavius galloped foolishly around the yard with his tail aloft, and William, with a coolly calculating eye on those hinges, backed away slowly, with significance understood by all the other conspirators. Mrs. Cowslip looked on benignantly. Presently the pig got his sturdy shoulders under the gate and heaved with all his might. William, with head down, leaped to the assault. The crash of his horns on those hinges reëchoed between orchard and wooded hills. But the gate was raised only an inch or two, and Reginald stuck fast. His squeals as he struggled would have melted a heart of stone. William backed away for another assault. It was while he was in mid-air that Clarence shrilled:—
“Not the hinges! The pig, the pig!”
William understood. This time all the weight behind his horns landed with a resounding smack on Reginald’s inviting posterior. In the midst of heart-rending squeals the gate rose in the air and the barnyard prisoners looked out on liberty. Instantly Reginald was off in the direction of the artichokes.
“Stop!” shrieked Clarence. “As I’m a thoroughbred, you shall feel my heels among your spareribs!”
Reginald looked back, and seeing immediate menace in the lowered horns of Mrs. Cowslip and Gustavius, turned about, ran to the barn-door, stood on his hind-legs, seized with his teeth the leather string at which the colt was frantically snapping, gave one sharp pull—and the deed was done. If Amanda, a moment later, had looked up from her strawberry-picking, she would have seen, circling over the half-lawn, half-pasture between the barn and the house, all tails in the air, a triumphant procession consisting of one yearling colt, one cow with a crumpled horn, one bull-calf, one he-goat making short stiff-legged jumps with horns lowered, and one pig bringing up the rear with a tail now so tightly kinked that it lifted his hind-quarters clear of the ground at every second leap.
But Amanda’s mind was glued on strawberries; and for the present other matters of moment require us, too, to leave the escaped prisoners to their own devices.