Page:Some account of the wars, extirpation, habits.djvu/84

76 started, a good deal after the maner of Hamlet at the sight of his father's ghost; but his fears being more strongly upon him than those of the Dane, his placidity and pluck evaporated simultaneously, and he dropped his wife's arm as quickly as if she had the plague, made for the garden fence (to which he had secured his horse not ten minutes before) cleared it at one leap like a kangaroo, and next vaulting into the saddle, the line fellow was off with the velocity of Camilla herself,—or as M'Kay in his half-poetical phraseology says, "he hooked it," so quickly that some of the natives coming out for a shot at him, went in again at observing him quite out of range already.

As he was tearing along like the spectre huntsman and hell-dogs of Boccaccio, he chanced to meet my honest friend M'Kay, who, accompanied by a lot of blacks, was in pursuit of the very tribe from whom the astounded shepherd-militant was fleeing like a mardi-hare. Finding himself placed, as his disordered imagination suggested, between two fires, namely, the vagabonds who had captured his citadel following hard behind, while another set of villiansvillains [sic] were coming on him in front, the excessive peril of his situation as he believed it, gave him a spark of that false courage that is generated by despair; and raising his gun, which everyone carried then, he was about sending a shot through M'Kay, but was thrown off his guard by the cool impudence of the latter, quietly enquiring, "What the devil had put him in such a flutter?" An explanation now took place that satisfied the military man he was in no danger from the new comers, and M'Kay who was then a match even for a professional walker, hurried raipidly forward to the rescue of the lady, whom her husband had left in the hands of the blacks. But they were gone; and she was nowhere to be found, an idea naturally arose that they had carried her off, and for a while the worst fears were entertained for her safety.

But enquiry soon brought the fact to light, that after the captain's flight, the clatter of horses' hoofs and the shouts of riders were distinguished by the sharp-eared natives, and the greater part of them made off in a body, but not quite all, a few groups of them still hovering about the premises like disappointed spirits. But directly the coast was thus far cleared and the premises vacated, the lady re-entered them alone, and securing a loaded pistol that her husband had left behind him in his precipitation, she marched undauntedly from room to room, and finally into one of the back ones, of which the window was unglazed, calico supplying temporarily the place of glass. As she entered, she observed the head of a black, who was outside, placed against the temporary weather screen as if he were