The shot was fired at longest pistol-range, and its force was almost spent before it reached its mark. Yet it bit its way through the uniform coat and the shirt-sleeve, and inflicted a light flesh-wound in the forearm.
The shock of the blow knocked the rein from Dad’s left hand and numbed his left arm to the shoulder. At the jerk on the bit the great roan swerved sharply in surprise.
Dad caught the loose-flung rein in his right hand and guided the terrified horse back into the road’s center.
As he did so a chinkapin and live-oak forest shut him off from the view of the floundering guerrillas.
“They never knew I was hit,” he growled. “That’s one comfort.”
He glanced down at his left arm. Already an inordinately large patch of blood was discoloring the blue uniform on either side of the bullet hole.
“Must have tapped a big vein or maybe an artery,” he conjectured, as he saw the blood trickle fast from the edge of his cuff. “At this rate, I’ll be too weak in a few minutes to sit in the saddle. I’ll have to stop somewhere to stanch it.”
He looked back. No sign yet of the guerrillas. He had been too far away from the larger cavalry column, he knew, for any of its riders to distinguish himself or his uniform. The thick woods still closed in the road on either side.
Dad looked for a likely spot to penetrate the forest.
But on both sides of the road a high snake-fence arose, a fence too high for any horse to jump.
There would be no time to dismount, tear down a panel of the fence, lead his horse through, and repair the gap so that the guerrillas’ sharp eyes would not detect the recent break.
So on he galloped, hoping for a gate or a lane farther ahead.
With a deal of wriggling Dad got his right arm out of his jacket and managed to wind the jacket itself roughly around his left arm, that a trail of bloodspots on the road’s dust might not mark his path to his pursuers.
Around another bend swept the galloping roan. And now both forest and snake-fence stopped abruptly, to continue a furlong farther on. The intervening space was filled by a soft, green lawn dotted with trees, and cut off from the road by a four-foot stone wall.
Far back on the lawn and bowered by oaks stood a rambling house of colonial style.