“You are Walter North,” I said. “And what’s to do?”
His imploring eyes in their pitiful pain looked up to mine, as if he would question how I needed to ask it. Then he pulled his fustian coat aside and pointed to his side. It made me start a step back. The side was steeped in blood.
“Oh dear, what is it?—what has caused it? An accident?”
“I have been shot,” he answered—and I thought his voice sounded ominously weak. “Shot from over yonder.”
Looking across the field in front of us, towards which he pointed, I could see nothing. I mean, nothing likely to have shot him. No men, no guns. Off to the left, partly buried amidst its grounds, lay the old house called the Granary; to the right in the distance, Vale Farm. The little child was stretched on the ground, quiet now, her head resting on his right shoulder; it was the left side that was injured. Suddenly he whispered a few words to her; she sprang up with a sob and darted into the wood. The child, as we heard later, had been sent out by her mother to look for her father: it was in seeking for him that she had come upon our tea-party and peeped at us. Later, she found him, fallen where he was now, just after the shot which struck him was fired. In her terror she was flying off for assistance, and met me. The man’s hat lay near him, also an old drab-coloured bag, some tin basins, and a Dutch-oven.
“Can I move you, to put you easier?” I asked between his groans. “Can I do anything in the world to help you?”
“No, no, don’t touch me,” he said, in a hopeless tone. “I am bleeding to death.”
And I thought he was. His cheeks and lips were growing paler with every minute. The man’s diction was as good as mine; and, tramp though he was, many a gentleman has not half as nice a face as his.
“If you don’t mind being left, I will run for a doctor—old Featherston.”
Before he could answer yes or no, Harry Vale, who must have espied us from their land, came running up.