The little man in the big periwig came in looking testy, and not to be trifled with. The men trooped in after him, while the Squire passed his flask round to the gentlemen, and condoled with them satirically on having drawn a “blank.” Stephen Gore in the chimney heard them gossiping there awhile before they tramped out into the court-yard to take horse for Battle Town before dusk fell. The thunder of hoofs went over the timbers of the bridge, and slowly, almost eerily, as the water of a stagnant pool settles over the stone that has been thrown into it, the heavy silence closed again over Thorn. It was probable that my lord felt some elation over his escape, and that he was not a little eager to be out of so black and draughty a refuge. He was also very stiff and cold from having stood in that narrow recess for over an hour. At all events, he began the descent clumsily and carelessly, and, bearing too much weight on one of the nails that he had driven into the wall, the thing broke away from the rotten mortar, and, though he drove out his knees and elbows in an attempt to wedge himself in the chimney, his weight and bulk carried him heavily to the hearth below. Coming down on his right flank, his right thigh struck one of the iron fire-dogs about a hand’s-breadth below the great trochanter of the hip. And Stephen Gore felt the bone snap as a dead branch snaps across a man’s knee. In the agony of it he rolled over and over till his body was stopped by the couch that Squire Oxenham had drawn forward from the window. He gripped the lower stretcher of the wood frame with both hands and took the sleeve of his coat between his teeth, as a seaman will clinch his teeth upon a rope’s-end to save himself from screaming when the surgeon’s hot iron sears the stump of a mangled limb. Then he lay on his back, breathing deeply and slowly, his hands tugging at the collar of his shirt as though the band were tight about his throat. His right foot had fallen outward, and when he tried to move the limb there was nothing but a spasm of the muscles and a sense of bone gritting against bone. XLIII