"'And what have they done to the brute?' I inquired, with a fierce anger stirring in my veins.
"'Well,' answered Boniface, 'this afternoon there's a crowd goin' out to ketch him an' tie him up. If he's too bad fur that,--an' if I know anything about horses he's jest gone mad, stark mad,--why, they'll have to shoot him off-hand, to save their own necks.'
"'I wonder if I'll run any risk of meeting him?' I queried rather anxiously. I had no weapon but my heavy walking-stick, and I had an almost sentimental regard for the integrity of my neck.
"'Which way be you bound?' inquired Boniface.
"'Oh,' said he, 'you're all right then. The horses are feedin' out yonder to the no'th-east, an' Blissville lays south.'
"It was with few misgivings that I now resumed my journey. In the tonic autumn air my spirits rose exultantly, and I walked with a brisk step, whistling and knocking off the golden tops of the hawk-bit with my cane. The country about Maybury is a high, rolling plateau, for the most part open pasture-ground, with here and there a shallow, wooded ravine, and here and there a terrace of loose bowlders with bramble-thickets growing between. I was soon beyond the cultivated fields, past the last of the fences. I had climbed one of those rocky terraces, and made a couple of hundred yards across the delightful breezy down, when, behind a low knoll, I caught sight of a group of horses quietly pasturing, and remembered with a qualm the morning's tragedy. Could this, I asked myself anxiously, be the herd containing that mad stallion?
"I halted, and was about to retrace my steps unobtrusively, in the hope that I had escaped their notice. But it was too late. Two or three of the animals raised their heads and looked toward me. One in the group snorted with a peculiar half-whinny, at the sound of which my heart sank. Then I caught sight of one in the centre that seemed to be jumping up in the air off all four feet at once. The next moment this creature, a great black animal, appeared outside the group, plunging and biting at his flank. Two or three times he sprang into the air in that strange, spasmodic way I had already observed, and threw his head backward over his right shoulder with an indescribable gesture of menace and defiance. Then with a short, dreadful sound he darted toward me, open-mouthed.