“Have you still a mind to go in there, parson?” he asked, rather maliciously. “You clergymen are holy men, as we all know, but things have changed since Daniel’s time, and I doubt, no offence to you, whether he’d have got off so well if he’d been pitched into a lion’s cage at the Zoo as he did among those old Persians!”
The vicar looked nervous, certainly. But he still stuck to his resolution of going into the room. Ned shrugged his shoulders, and whistled softly, staring into his companion’s face as he fumbled with the keys, and seeming rather to enjoy the notion of the change which would come over that pink, plump, mildly jolly countenance when the fangs of one of the hounds should meet in the clerical anatomy. He felt quite sure that it was the vicar’s entire ignorance of hungry bloodhounds and their little ways which gave him such an appearance of placid pluck.
“Are you ready?” he asked, as he put the key in the door. “We shall have to dash in pretty quick to prevent the brutes from coming out.”
The vicar nodded, and came close up beside him. Ned gave him a last and, as it were, a farewell look, and opened the door. The hounds, with hungry growls and jaws dripping with foam, rushed at the opening. Ned Mitchell was too quick for them; he was in the room, with the door closed behind him, before either of the brutes could get so much as his nose outside. Quick as he was, however, the portly vicar was before him, and was well in the middle of the small room by the time the door closed.
Then Ned Mitchell found, cool as he was, that in fancying himself able to master these two fierce brutes, he had reckoned without his host. In a moment he discovered that it was only when satisfied with food and carefully muzzled, as they had been for their journey in the small hours that morning, that he could attempt to cope with them successfully. Both together they now flew at him, springing, the one at his throat, the other at his right hand. The attack was so sudden, so fierce, that he staggered back against the door, in danger of being overpowered, and struck out with unsure aim, failing to beat them off. He had been forced to drop his candle when the hounds set upon him, and it was almost in darkness that the struggle went on, the man cursing and the animals growling, while they bit at and worried him with the savagery of ravenous hunger.
The vicar was standing, motionless, in the middle of the room. Ned saw his portly figure in outline between him and the faint light, and in the midst of his own occupation wondered, not having any great respect for the physical powers of the Church, that Mr. Brander did not edge further away from the scene of combat, or show some other sign of nervousness.
“Shall I help you?” asked the vicar, tranquilly, when the struggle between man and hounds had gone on for several exciting moments.
Ned was too busy, trying to keep off the dogs, to express the astonishment he felt at these words and the tone in which they were spoken.
“Yes, for Heaven’s sake, yes, if you can!” he panted out.
He had scarcely uttered these words in answer, when the vicar came to his aid with a promptitude and dash which a professional tamer of beasts could scarcely have exceeded. Seizing by the throat first one of the hounds and then the other, he choked them off his half-bewildered companion, and held them, yelping and gurgling, while Ned, savagely angry at “the parson’s” superiority more than grateful for his timely help, picked up and relit the candle with affected unconcern.