“He seems bright enough and that stuff he’s boiling smells good,” he mused. “Hope he gives me some. Wonder how he lives? Hunting, I suppose. But what weapons?”
As if reading his thoughts, the hunchback stepped to a dark corner and brought forth two bows.
One Johnny recognized at once as his own.
“That’s fine,” he told himself. “When I am strong enough to leave this place I won’t starve at once. Shows some intelligence, his saving my bow for me.” His joy in this matter was destined to be short lived.
But now his eyes fell on the other bow.
“A back breaker,” he told himself. “Never saw such a bow. Must take a pull of eighty-five, perhaps a hundred pounds to shoot it. Man, Oh, man!” His knowledge of the hunchback’s powers was growing. Nor was it lessened when this strange man nocked an arrow fully thirty-six inches in length and, with the greatest ease, drew his bow to send the arrow crashing into the opposite wall.
The next move sent consternation into the boy’s heart. Seizing Johnny’s fifty pound yew bow, the hunchback picked up a second arrow of the same length and nocked it for a shot.
Now Johnny used twenty-eight inch arrows. To bend his bow for a thirty-six inch arrow was to court disaster. His mouth opened in a cry of alarm. But too late. The iron arm of his curious host drew back. For the fraction of a second the bow stood the strain, then, just as the arrow sped, there came a rending crash, and the bow broke.
Standing there, dazed, with the two fragments of the bow still in his hand, the giant hunchback, as if expecting an explanation to this startling affair, stared stupidly about him.
Of a sudden, dropping the shattered bow, he seized his own bow and, pointing at it, began jabbering in a tongue which Johnny understood not at all.