All ready. Colonel Bones, with a grunt and a grin, fires at the signal. His ball goes clear through Jericho’s bosom, knocking off a button in its passage, and striking itself flat against a pile of bricks.
“A dead man!” cried the doctor, running to Jericho.
“My friend!” exclaimed Candituft. “Have you made your will?”
“Eh! What’s the matter?” said Jericho.
“Matter!” exclaimed Doctor Dodo, and he pointed his cane to the hole in the front of Jericho’s coat, immediately over the region of his heart; and then, walking round him, stared at the hole between the fourth and fifth rib. “Matter! It’s the first time, I ever heard a man with a bullet clean through his heart, ask—what’s the matter!”
“I’m blessed if here ain’t the ball, as flat as a penny, with the waddin about it,” cried Bob Topps, picking up the lead.
“What! Eh? Why, gentlemen,” said the Doctor, taking the ball, and peeling from it the fragments of paper—“are you so rich that you wad with bank-notes?”
The Colonel’s ball had passed through Jericho’s bank-note-paper heart; and Jericho lived and moved, and was none the worse for it. Jericho fired in the air; whereupon the Colonel and Thrush, with a strange leer at him avowed themselves more than satisfied. Jericho declared the whole matter to be a good joke, and was about to enter the Doctor’s carriage. “I beg your pardon, sir,” said the Doctor, “but no man, or devil, or whatever he may be, rides in my carriage, who can live with a hole through his heart.” And the Doctor jumped inside, shouted “home,” and was whirled from the ground.
Neither Thrush nor Bones cared to ride back; indeed, they proposed to walk. Whereupon, Jericho beckoned to Topps—“Not if you’d turn these fields into gold and give ’em me,” cried Bob; and he jumped on his box, and drove away.
“Dev’lish impudent fellow,” said Jericho to Candituft: but Candituft made no answer. He cared not to talk even to the Man of Money, the money having a hole in its heart.