Having assured himself that the drunken men were not dead, Mr. Jonstone sighed like a furnace and started down the mountain.
His hand hurt him like the devil, but the pain was first cousin to delight.
[XXVII]
The Camp was much concerned to hear of poor Mr. Jonstone's accident. A round stone, he said, had rolled suddenly under his foot and precipitated him down a steep pitch of path. He had put out his hands to save his face and, it seemed, broken a bone in one of them. And at that, the attempted rescue of his face had not been an overwhelming success.
It was not until the doctor had come and gone that Mr. Jonstone told his cousin what had really happened. Colonel Meredith was much excited and intrigued by the narrative.
"And you've no idea who she was?" he asked.
"No, Mel; I've thought that the voice was familiar. I've thought that it wasn't. It was a very well-bred Northern voice—but agitated probably out of its natural intonations. Voices are queer things. A man might not recognize his own mother's voice at a time when he was not expecting to hear it."
"Voices," said Colonel Meredith, "are beautiful things. This wasn't a motherly sort of voice, was it?"