For some seconds the flight-sub was too dazed to take any active interest in the sequence of events, but when at length he picked him self up and ran to the smithy door, Butterfly's heels were just visible as at a good fifteen miles an hour she disappeared round the corner of the street.
CHAPTER XV
RECALLED BY WIRE
"SHE'S off home, sir," said the smith. "Don't you fash yousen about 'er. The cart? Run it in 'ere. 'Twill be all right."
Billy paid for the shoeing and walked slowly down the street.
"No good going to see Betty at lunchtime," he soliloquised. "Might just as well see about something to eat."
He made his way towards the cornmarket. Here the traffic was at its height. Nobody would have thought that twelve hours ago a Zeppelin had sought to terrorise these Lancashire folk with a display of "frightfulness," and that within two hundred yards a devastated street bore testimony to the Huns' feeble efforts.
"By Jove, if this had been Karlsruhe or Berlin, wouldn't the Kaiser be shedding floods of tears!" thought Billy. "Good old British public. 'Carry on, carry on—we'll come out top-dog all in good time'—that's the spirit."
A crowd outside the window of a news office attracted his attention. He crossed the road in order to read a broadsheet giving the latest war news. It was cheerful enough, in all conscience:
"Two Zeppelins Down. Official."