They heard a sound like a moan quite near them, and it grew louder; something—some animal—was suffering intensely.
“Look!” she cried.
In a ditch by the roadside lay a horse, thin, so thin that his bones seemed as if they would come through his skin. A few children clustered round, throwing stones at it at intervals and poking it with sticks. Blood slowly oozed from a wound in its head, and its poor body was covered with sores.
“Do something,” she said, and her voice quivered with the horror of it. “Can’t we put it out of its misery? Whose horse is it?”
Paul had driven away the children, and gone close to it.
“Someone has half shot it; it must be in torture.”
“Go and borrow a rifle,” she said. “I will stay here and keep away those little fiends. Do go.”
“You are not afraid?”
“Afraid? No, only so sorry. What horrible, unavailing suffering! Go, and be quick.”
He walked briskly away, and she strolled up and down. The children came near to stare at her, but they ceased to torment the horse. She could not bear its eyes; they seemed to beg of her to kill it, and she could do nothing. She clasped her hands together with such force that they hurt her as she longed and longed for Paul’s return. It began to grow dusk. She had forgotten tea, and the rest of the party—would they be looking for her, and imagining all sorts of things? Meanwhile the horse’s moans grew louder; the young squaw with the baby came slowly down the road—the baby was crying.