From the woods at the left came a brisk breeze. Someone seemed to be airing a blanket such as I have described above. Before I had time to investigate, a huge white ball rolled toward me, with no visible means of propulsion. There was no incline and the speed of it was tremendous. Deep, pointed excavations marked the trail over which it came, and my hair was raised far beyond the potential power of the lost tonic. So swiftly that I was breathless with wonder, the thing rolled into my fire.
Then there was a shrill cry of pain, but the momentum was too great, and it went straight on through, stopping on the other side of my woodland hearthstone, singed, and apparently dead. Trembling with excitement, I made my way toward it, but before I could offer my sympathetic assistance, it had assorted itself and was standing up on four singed and shaky legs.
How a Goat had penetrated that fastness, where the hands of few white men had ever trod, was beyond me, but it was a condition and not a theory which confronted me. Here, at my hospitable door, so lately made desolate by the departure of Tom-Tom and Little Upsidaisi, was a new and wonderful creature. The singeing had overpowered the Indian blanket _motif_ and made way for the softer notes of the hair tonic. Jagg was plainly intoxicated, and immediately upon my recognition of it, I named him.
His suffering was pathetic. The burns were merely superficial, but he was very much soiled, and his head was swollen far beyond its normal limits. His tongue, which he promptly offered for my inspection, was dark brown and fuzzy. He sat down, stroked his brow wearily with one of his four feet (fore, if you prefer), and stuttered out an hysterical bleat.
My friends in the telegraph office used to characterise me occasionally as a Goat, and I am not prepared to admit that there is not something in the theory of reincarnation, for at that moment a great pity dominated me.
“Jagg, old man,” I said, tenderly, “you have misjudged your capacity and you are full. Come.”
He followed me into the cabin, eager, yet shamefaced, and I lifted him to my bed. I anointed his burns with carron oil and tied a cold wet bandage over his temples. He was only an ordinary Goat, with the customary tuft of spinach in the maxillary region, now badly singed, but there was something very human in the grateful look he gave me just before closing his eyes for twenty-one hours of sodden sleep.