Page:The Specimen Case.djvu/146

Rh with a double-barrelled duck-gun couldn't have stopped him at that moment, but the net did. It held good and firm and the more he plunged and reared the more he wrapped himself up in it. What he did with his ramping was to pull up a gooseberry bush that was in the net behind him and to jerk it forward so that it sprang on to his shoulders and lapped its branches round his neck. Then everything that he'd ever heard as a boy about the Devil and Hell and the 'net spread to catch sinners' came back to him—and owing to his parents having been Particular Revivalists and regular at chapel, it ran mostly on fire and brimstone and claws and such-like.

He's got me!' they heard him wail in a despairing sort of way, and then he seems to have fainted dead off.

"By this time a good many people were beginning to come round. Jane hearing an uproar ran into Lukie's room with a light. Lukie was sitting up in bed and apparently on the point of going off into hysterics. Jane, whose remedies were simple but practical, seized her by the arm and thumped her several times soundly on the back. Lukie coughed twice, put her hand up to her mouth, and produced Hankins's lamp, none the worse for its travels. That ended her chief trouble.

"Misgivings about what Mo Andrews might say when he was brought up began to worry her a little when she thought of it the next day. Being a sensitive woman, besides the disagreeableness with William Hill's people she disliked the idea of the low jokes that would be sure to be made about having electric lights and such matters. As it happened, she had nothing to fear. It took three men upwards of half-an-hour with scissors and pocket-knives to get Mo clear of the net and he came out of it a changed man. By the time he appeared before the Court he had got religion solid.

Well, Andrews,' said the magistrate, who had seen