In a moment the good fellow was licking my wounded head. A pellet of shot, it seemed, had glanced along my skull, cutting the skin and going right through one of my ears. The wound bled a good deal, but it was not a serious one, and after I had got my breath back, and after my heart had ceased thumping as though it would burst, I felt very little the worse, and announced that I was quite ready to start home. But Rusty, more cautious, refused to move. ‘That fellow with the gun may be waiting in the road for us,’ he said. ‘Much better stay here a bit. The shadows are still short, and we shall have plenty of light for our journey home.’ His advice seemed good, so we waited where we were for an hour or more. My wound stopped bleeding, but my head was very sore. It was not, however, so badly hurt as my feelings. That I should have been shot at and nearly killed in the garden of the Hall seemed beyond belief, and what made it worse was that I had impressed on Rusty over and over again that whatever the dangers in our coppice, the Hall grounds, at any rate, were a safe refuge. One thing I was deeply grateful for—that he had not been harmed. With all the intensity of my squirrel nature I hated the intruders who had put the insult upon me. How I longed that Jack might have been there to take vengeance on our persecutors! [Illustration: CLIMBING INTO ONE OF THE LARGEST TREES, WE LAY PANTING AND TIRED OUT.] Rusty, good fellow that he was, forebore to add to my self-reproaches by any remarks about what had happened. When I made some sort of apology for bringing him into trouble, he merely smiled, and, licking his lips, said: ‘I shan’t forget those nuts in a hurry. Wouldn’t mother like a few of them!’ At last, when the shadows were beginning to lengthen towards the east, we made a move. Under Rusty’s direction we worked back very quietly through the plantation to the edge of the road, and took a careful survey from the top of the tallest tree. All was still, the only sounds that broke the quiet of the windless autumn afternoon being the scrape of Simpson’s saw as he lopped away branches from the Hall trees, and the distant ‘Gee!’ and ‘Haw!’ of a ploughman at work in a field to the right of the larch plantation.