I sipped a mouthful, and felt much revived.
“Now,” continued Peterkin, “I’ll tell you what has happened. We’ve floored a rhinoceros and a giraffe and a lion, which, to my thinking, is a pretty fair bag to make after dusk of a Saturday night! And my big rifle has floored you, which is the least satisfactory part of the night’s entertainment, but which wouldn’t have occurred had you remembered my instructions, which you never do.”
“Oh, I recollect now,” said I, as the spirits revived me. “I’m all right.—But, Jack, I trust that you have not received damage?”
“Not a scratch, I’m thankful to say; though I must confess I was near catching an ugly wound.”
“How so?” I inquired quickly, observing a peculiar smile on Jack’s face as he spoke.
“Oh, make your mind easy,” put in Peterkin; “it was just a small bit of an escape he made. When you let drive at the lion so effectively, one of the balls went in at his mouth and smashed its way out at the back of his skull. The other ball shaved his cheek, and lodged in a tree not two inches from Jack’s nose.”
“You don’t mean it!” cried I, starting up, regardless of the pain occasioned to my injured shoulder by the movement, and gazing intently in Jack’s face.
“Come, come,” said he, smiling; “you must not be so reckless, Ralph. Lie down again, sir.”
“Peterkin, you should not talk lightly of so narrow an escape,” said I reproachfully. “The fact that such a terrible catastrophe has nearly occurred ought to solemnise one.”
“Granted, my dear boy; but the fact that such a catastrophe did not occur, ought, I hold, to make us jolly. There’s no managing a fellow like you, Ralph. I knew that if I told you of this gravely, you would get into such a state of consternational self-reproachativeness, so to speak, that you would infallibly make yourself worse. And now that I tell it to you ‘lightly,’ as you call it, you take to blowing me up.”