l have a fine chance at him from
here."

He placed the gun in my hands, already cocked, and was gone, noiselessly,
in an instant. I watched those bushes eagerly, and once again saw the big
tops of those antlers above the alders. Behind me everything was
wonderfully still, and I could hear the beating of my heart. The doctor
seemed to have been swallowed up by the wilderness, and I have never felt
so entirely alone as at that moment. An instant later I realized that a
strange thing was happening; I was no longer nervous, and my hands were
perfectly steady. After this, away to the right, I heard the faintest
crackling of branches and the horns appeared again, absolutely still for
a moment. Then another little branch cracked, and there was a turmoil in
the bushes, a splashing over the shallow, gravelly bottom of the little
stream, and the great, gray-brown body and white, arching neck of the
stag appeared, like a thing out of a fairy book. The head was noble,
poised on that snowy neck, and the antlers looked like a tangle of brush.
The lithe thing stopped, the sensitive ears went back, and he started
again.

But the gun had gone up to my shoulder, Aunt Jennie, quite instinctively,
and for a fraction of a second I saw that wonderfully feathered neck
in the notch of the sight, then a brown place that was the beginning of
the shoulder, and I pulled the trigger. His long trot changed to a
furious, desperate gallop. A leap up the further bank carried him out of
my sight, and I was now so flurried that I never gave him a second shot.
Indeed I felt so badly that I wanted to sit down and have a good cry.

I heard the doctor, who was tearing through the bushes, just as Harry
Lawrence used to butt his way through a football line.

"You've got him," he yelled. "They never run like that unless mortally
wounded. We'll have him in a moment!"

"Do you really think so?" I cried, breathlessly.

"Come on and see for yourself," he answered, and in our turn we splashed
through the shallow water and found the track on the other side. This we
very carefully studied, so as to be able to distinguish it from others,
and then we went on, very cautiously, both walking on tiptoe. He was
ahead of me, with the cocked rifle in his hand, but after going a short
distance he stopped, suddenly, and began to fill his pipe, with the most
exasperating coolness.

"Why don't you go on?" I asked, indignantly.

"Don't you think I deserve a pipe?" he said.