Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/24

 held him motionless. His eye never shifted its objective till the last wheel of the blue wagon had disappeared around the corner into that open pasture where the city might be said entirely to cease and the country definitely to begin. Slowly, like one recovering consciousness and memory, the boy turned toward his spade and his newspaper, but before he got to either, a piercing scream had reached his ears—from down the road and round the corner.

George leaped the fence and darted toward the cries. On rounding the corner, a truly piteous spectacle met his alarmed but valorous gaze. Flannigan's brindled goat, the monster! a depraved and bewhiskered old patriarch of no graces and no uses that any one could discover, was attacking the white goats of the little red queen, and with consequences the more disastrous to her majesty because, when a goat attacks, he does not, as the comic supplements portray, double up like a ball of springs and launch himself with lowered head. As a fact of biology, your butting goat elevates himself high upon his hind legs, stiffens himself like a ramrod from horn to heel, then falls like a leaning tower toward the object of his attack, forehead set to smite.

So Flannigan's outlawed billy reared and fell upon the goats of the queen, and so her white steeds reared to meet the attack and fell forward