The dun smoke crept along the mound, and slipped with sudden draught into the rabbit-buries, and hung low over the ash-tops. With a hiss and roar and rattle the shot tore its way, biting hungrily at the branches as it passed. The ash-boughs, tough and sinewy, though half-severed, hung together still; the willow split, and let the lead slip through its feeble wood; the hard crab-tree and blackthorn, with fibres torn and jagged, held and stopped it; the briar, with its circular pith, snapped and drooped. Through the broad burdock leaves and hollow hemlock stems and “gicks” the hasty pellets drilled round holes, or buried themselves in the bark of the larger tree-trunks, some glancing off at a sharp angle like Tyrrell’s arrow. The maple, all scored and dotted, and partly stripped of leaves by the leaden shower, gave less cover than the ash-stole; and Geoffrey, with shot-holes in his hat, and the pellets hissing past his ears, yielded ground and retreated, firing as he went. Valentine immediately advanced, and thus, like Indians in the backwoods, they glided from thicket to thicket, from tree to tree, stalking, but shooting wildly, baffled by the branches.
In a few minutes Geoffrey came to a great oak, rugged and moss-grown at the roots, which stood near the edge of the ditch that, at the end of the double mound, divided the hedge from the wood. Behind this he took his stand; and Valentine, advancing too rapidly, was stung by a pellet that glanced from a branch and struck his arm. He hastily rushed behind an ash-tree—it was not broad enough to shield him completely; but by its side grew a thicket of bramble and brake fern that helped to hide him from sight. He blazed rapidly at the edge of the oak; in return the shot came rushing through the fern, and scoring the bark of the ash. Suddenly Geoffrey’s fire ceased: the next moment Valentine guessed the truth—that his opponent’s last cartridge was gone—and surely mad with rage stepped from his cover eager to seize the advantage. At the same moment Geoffrey, saying to himself that he would not die like a dog cowering behind a tree, walked out from the oak and faced his doom.
In that second—in the tenth of a second—he saw the sunbeams glance on the levelled barrel, and behind the twin circular orifices of the muzzle the smoke-blackened, frowning brow of the man who once had loved him.
“Fair play in the army!” shouted a hoarse voice, and a long stick of briar suddenly projected from the fern at Valentine’s side fell with a crash upon his barrel. The blow diverted the aim, but the charge exploded. Geoffrey uttered a sharp cry, turned round and put out his hand as if to lean against the oak, and then dropped.
“We used to have fair play in the army,” said Augustus Basset, stepping up from the ditch out of the fern, with a briar in one hand, and a vicious ferret in the other—struggling hard, but dexterously grasped just behind the forelegs, the first finger in front of the legs, so that it could not bite. “You make a ring, look here!” in his incoherent way.
But Valentine, all aghast with sudden revulsion of feeling, had already rushed to his fallen friend and knelt beside him, feeling a pressure upon his heart and a dizziness of sight. For the blood of life was spouting from the right shoulder, and already the yellow fern and the grey grass were spotted and stained, and the lowly creeping ivy streaked with crimson.
“Speak, Geof, old fellow!” cried Valentine, becoming of a more deadly pallor than the wounded man.
“Plug the hole,” said Augustus, who, though he had never seen service, like most old soldiers had some smattering of surgery. “You’ve lost your head. Here, let me. Hold pug;” and he pushed the ferret into Valentine’s hands.
Pulling out his handkerchief, none of the cleanest, Augustus pressed it on the wound, and succeeded in reducing the flow of blood. Geoffrey moved, and Valentine, flinging the ferret aside, held him up.
“Speak to me!” he cried.