“‘Oh,’ said he, ‘you’re all right then. The horses are feedin’ out yonder to the no’th-east, an’ Blissville lays south.’
“It was with few misgivings that I now resumed my journey. In the tonic autumn air my spirits rose exultantly, and I walked with a brisk step, whistling and knocking off the golden tops of the hawk-bit with my cane. The country about Maybury is a high, rolling plateau, for the most part open pasture-ground, with here and there a shallow, wooded ravine, and here and there a terrace of loose bowlders with bramble-thickets growing between. I was soon beyond the cultivated fields, past the last of the fences. I had climbed one of those rocky terraces, and made a couple of hundred yards across the delightful breezy down, when, behind a low knoll, I caught sight of a group of horses quietly pasturing, and remembered with a qualm the morning’s tragedy. Could this, I asked myself anxiously, be the herd containing that mad stallion?
“I halted, and was about to retrace my steps unobtrusively, in the hope that I had escaped their notice. But it was too late. Two or three of the animals raised their heads and looked toward me. One in the group snorted with a peculiar half-whinny, at the sound of which my heart sank. Then I caught sight of one in the centre that seemed to be jumping up in the air off all four feet at once. The next moment this creature, a great black animal, appeared outside the group, plunging and biting at his flank. Two or three times he sprang into the air in that strange, spasmodic way I had already observed, and threw his head backward over his right shoulder with an indescribable gesture of menace and defiance. Then with a short, dreadful sound he darted toward me, open-mouthed.
“Up to this point I had stood my ground, eying the brute resolutely, with an appearance of fearlessness which I was very far from feeling. But now I saw that my only hope, and that a desperate one, lay in flight. I was accounted at college a first-rate sprinter, and now I ran my best. The two hundred yards that lay between me and the terrace I had just left must have been covered in not much more than twenty seconds. But as I reached the brow of the slope the mad brute was close on my heels.
“I had no time to check myself, and even less notion to do so. In fact, I fell, and rolled headlong down, dropping bruised and bewildered into a crevice between two bowlders. The next instant I saw the black mass of my pursuer dashing over me in a splendid leap. Before he could turn and seize me I had rolled farther into the crevice, and found that one of the rocks overhung so as to form a little narrow cave into which I could squeeze myself so far as to be quite beyond the animal’s reach.
“Never before or since have I discovered so unexpected and providential a refuge. The raving stallion came bounding and leaping up to the very door of my burrow, but I felt safe. He would roll back his lips, lay his ears flat to his head, spring straight into the air, and shriek through his wide, red nostrils his fury and his challenge. The latter I did not think it incumbent upon me to accept. I waived it in disdainful silence.
“For a time the brute kept up his boundings and those strange, proud jerkings of his head; but at length he actually tried to stretch his neck into my burrow, and reach me with his frightful naked teeth. This was a vain attempt; but I resented it, and picking up a stone which lay at hand, I struck him a heavy blow on the nose. This brought the blood from those cruel nostrils, and made him even, if possible, more furious in his rage; but he returned to his former demonstrations.
“It must have been for nearly an hour that I watched the mad creature’s antics from my den. The rest of the herd had approached, and were feeding indifferently about the foot of the terrace. From time to time my enemy would join them, and snatch a few restless mouthfuls of grass. But almost immediately he would return to his post at my door, and his vigilant watch was on me all the time.
“I was beginning to cast about somewhat anxiously for a way of escape from this imprisonment, when I saw the pasturing herd suddenly toss up their heads, and then go scurrying away across the down. My adversary saw this, too, and turned his attention away from me. I peered forth cautiously, and to my profound relief I observed a party of men, several carrying ropes and halters, and others armed with rifles, approaching below the terrace. One man walked a little ahead of the others, and held out a peck measure, in which he shook something which I presume to have been oats.
“The stallion eyed them sombrely for an instant; and then his mane rose like a crest, and his head went back with a shrill cry. In the self-same way as he had greeted my appearance he bounced into the air twice or thrice, and then he dashed upon the party.