“Go to Miss Gladstone! A mad dog! a mad dog!”
It was all that she could say, for she immediately after sank down helpless in a violent fit of hysterics, while the women, with white faces, huddled together in fear and trembling, and the men, with horrified eyes and quaking hearts, ran hither and thither in search of Star.
Then there had come that quick, sharp report, directing them to the spot, and telling them that all danger to them was past. But the terrible question arose:
“Was Miss Gladstone safe?”
Ralph Meredith, his feet winged with love and fear, was, as we have seen, first upon the scene of the tragedy, and caught her frantically to his heart just as she was falling to the ground.
“Is she bitten?” he cried, in a voice of agony, and with ashen lips, to the stranger, who stood, gun in hand, over the dead dog.
“No; she has not even a scratch; she has merely fainted from fright,” he answered; and throwing down his gun, he took a long pocket-flask filled with brandy from his hunting-pouch, and approached the unconscious girl.
He knelt upon the ground beside her and poured a few drops between her lips, though his hands trembled violently from the terrible excitement and anxiety under which he had been laboring.
“Go for some water,” he said to his son, who, having heard the report of his father’s fowling-piece, now appeared upon the scene.
He darted away like a fawn, and was back in less than three minutes with a pitcherful, which he had seized from the camp, while a frightened crowd followed at his heels.