She dropped her basket an’ ran for her life. She weren’t built for running, but nature will do a great deal, even for the roundest of us, in a pinch like this, an’ for once her got over the ground in very fine fashion. She’d reached within ten yards of the hedge, when she heard a shout, an’ a man came tearing along; but he was too late. Mary Jane went head first into the hazel hedge, screaming to the Everlasting to spare her; an’ the bull’s horn just gave her the ghost of a touch—enough to swear by after—as she went through, all ends up. She weren’t really hurt, an’ only took a chair a thought gingerly for a day or two; but by God! her temper didn’t heal so easy, I promise you—not by no means; an’ presently, when the man as had shouted an’ runned to help her took the poor maiden home, she let him know what she thought about the world in general an’ Nicholas Yelland in particular, so soon as she had got wind enough to tell with.
Of course the man was Benjamin Pearn. An’ he knowed really that the path-field ran nigh the hedge, an’ he’d been dead sure as Mary Jane would not get into no real danger. Besides, he had planned to be there in plenty of time, an’ it wasn’t till he actually seed Mary Jane flying an’ the bull a-bellowing after her with his tail up an’ his head down, that he knowed what he’d done. Then he rushed out from the hedge, where he was hid, an’ thanked his stars in secret, for everything had happened just ezacally as he wanted it to—though I don’t suppose he ever wished for the maiden to have such a narrow shave.
“To think!” gasped Mary Jane. “To think as I might be a lifeless jelly this moment but for my own legs! As ’tis, that gert beast’s horn have horched me somewheres, an’ I may die of it yet. An’ if you’m a man, Benjamin Pearn, you’ll go an’ get your gun an’ shutt him.”
“God’s goodness! you don’t mean Mr. Yelland?” said Ben.
“No, I don’t; you can leave him to me,” the maiden answered; “I won’t have no living soul come between me an’ Nicholas Yelland now. He’ll be sorry as he was born afore his dinnertime, if I’ve got a tongue in my head; an’ he shall have all Postbridge hooting at him in the open street—an’ Widecombe too—come to-morrow. But ’tis your part to shutt thicky beastly bull wi’ a gun; an’ if you love me, you’ll do it. He shan’t take no more prizes, if I can stop him.”
“As to shooting the bull, they’d put me in prison for it,—not that I’d mind that if you’d have me when I comed out,” said Ben, very eager like. “But,” he added as an after-thought, “the dashed luck of it is, I haven’t got a gun.”
Her black eyes flashed an’ her gipsy-dark face growed darker still. She still panted an’ puffed a bit. But Ben confessed arter that she never looked so lovely afore or since as she did when he pulled her out of the brambles in the hedge an’ comforted her.
“You’d best to borrow a gun, then,” she told him. “Anyway, I won’t marry you while that bull’s alive; an’ if you was a man, you’d never sleep again till you’d put a bullet through it.”
Same afternoon she went up with her mother to Cator Court an’ gave Nicholas Yelland the whole law an’ the prophets, by all accounts. I seem his ears must have tingled to hear her; but he was a pretty cool hand; an’ when she’d talked herself out of breath an’ falled back on torrents an’ oceans of tears; an’ when her mother had also said what she comed to say, which was mere tinkling brass after Mary Jane, Nick popped in a word or two edgeways.
“If you’ll be so very kind as to hold your noise a minute,—the pair of you,—I’ll tell you how the bull got in the field,” he said. “’Twasn’t my idea at all. Ben Pearn put me up to it. So you’ve got to thank him, not me. I didn’t know as you was coming that way to-day, God’s my Judge, or I’d have been at the stile to meet you an’ see you over the meadow safe; but Pearn knowed you was coming, an’ any fool can see that he wanted to kill you.”