My heart paused in its quick beating. In one mad moment of indiscretion I had destroyed her confidence in me, had brought down in crashing ruins my hopes, my dreams, my new-found joy.
I felt that I must go hence—that I must quit that domicile forever, and the sooner the better. With my brain in a whirl, I looked about me for my hat and my umbrella.
A loud and a compelling voice spoke behind me. I faced about. In the doorway through which she had just fled stood a fearsome apparition. It was her uncle, that man so given to carnage among the beasts and birds of the field, that unerring, that unfailing marksman. He was in his shirt sleeves, his arms bared to his elbows. Upon his face was a fixed grin of demoniac determination—the look of one who smiles even as he slays his prey. And in his hands—ah, dreadful final detail of this dreadful picture—he held outstretched, extended and presented in my general direction, a double-barrelled fowling piece, enormous in size and glittering with metal ornamentation.
"Young man," he cried out, "have one look at this!"
In times of the most extreme peril the thoughts clarify with inconceivable rapidity. In a flash I comprehended all. She had told him of the insult to her maidenly modesty, and for it he meant to have my heart's blood. I was about to become an extinct and bleeding corse. But before he could raise the hideous instrument of death to his shoulder an expedient occurred to me. I would save myself from slaughter and coincidentally save him from the crime of dyeing his hands with the gore of a fellow being. A low window at the west side of the room, immediately adjacent to the couch whereon I had been seated, providentially stood open. I would leap from it and flee. Without a moment's hesitation I did so.
In such emergencies one does not choose with care one's means of exit. One departs by the egress most convenient to one. As I plunged through the opening I remembered that a considerable distance intervened between the window I had chosen and the sward below. Even as I bounded forth into space I thought of this. But when one is in mid-air one does not turn back; a law of physics involving the relation of solid bodies to the attraction of gravitation prevents. Nor did I indeed desire to turn back. My one desire was to go. I dropped and dropped, as though for miles. I struck with terrific force upon a grass-covered but hard and unyielding surface. A pang of agony, poignant in its intensity, darted in an upward direction through my lower right limb and I dropped prostrate upon the earth.
But now in the window above stood my would-be destroyer, a wild gleam in his wide open eyes and that awful lethal object still in his grasp. His eyes roved this way and that into the darkness without, seeking to find the victim. The light from behind shone full upon him. Thwarted for the moment tho' he had been, his purpose was all too plainly revealed.
Heedless of the pain, I leaped to my feet and darted away into the sheltering night. Somehow, I know not how, I scaled the fence. There was a gate, but what time had I to seek out gates? I staggered adown the street. I reached the corner below and there I fell, unable to proceed another rod be the consequences what they might. Merciful unconsciousness succeeded. I knew no more.
When after a lapse I recovered my senses familiar objects surrounded me, and faces well known to me yet for the time wearing a strange aspect, bent over me. I remember my first words.
"Where am I?" I uttered feebly, and would have started up had not those close at hand restrained me with gentle force.