WITH A CRY SHE COULD NOT QUITE STIFLE, SHE RUSHED AWAY INTO THE WOODS.
"She ain't aiming it right," thought Flea, regretfully, as Miss Emily raised the short fowling-piece awkwardly but boldly to her shoulder, and laid her cheek down upon the stock. There was a report, and a rain of bird-shot fell, not in the water this time, but upon the clump of bushy shrubs in which Flea was hiding, and she felt a sharp cut across her cheek. With a cry she could not quite stifle she rushed away into the woods, too much frightened to do anything but fly from the chance of a second shot.
She did not hear the shout of laughter from the bridge.
"You peppered a pig that time, Miss Emily," said the teacher to the unskilful sportswoman. "You did not come within fifty feet of the stump. It's lucky the pig was so far off. I heard him squeal as he scampered into the woods. So you did hit something after all. That's a good one!"
He went off into another fit of laughter.
The blood was oozing from the cut when Flea stopped running, and she put up her hand to feel how much she was hurt. It was a mere scratch, for the shot was light and almost spent by the time it reached her. Her fright over, her spirits arose with a bound. A happy thought had entered her ever-active brain.
Major Duncombe had no patience with carelessness in the use of firearms. She had seen him angry but once in her life, and that was when one of his boys pointed an empty gun at his brother. The father had laid his riding-whip smartly about the boy's shoulders, and forbidden him to touch a gun again for a month.
"I would cowhide any man who aimed even a broomstick at me," he said. "'Gun' and 'fun' should never go together except in a rhyme."
Miss Emily would be scolded by her father and made fun of by everybody else, and feel dreadfully besides if anybody ever found out what she had done. Flea would lock up the secret in the recesses of her own heart, as any other heroine would, for the sake of the beloved object. She hoped the scratch would leave a scar—just a tiny thread of a scar—that would not disfigure her, and would always be a token of how much she loved her dear, dear Miss Emily.
"It would be a badge of merit—an honorable scar!" she said, aloud. "I am glad, glad it happened!"