The blood was flowing
freely from a face-wound, and my unhappy kinsman was senseless. At
this moment we heard a voice, as of one clamantis in eremo, cry
"Fore!" to which paying no heed in the natural agitation of our
spirits, we hurried to lift my fallen opponent and examine his
wound. Upon a closer search it proved to be no shot-wound, but a
mere clour, or bruise, whereof the reason was now apparent, he
having been struck by the ball of a golfer (from us concealed by
the dunes, or bunkers, of sand) and not by the discharge of my
weapon. At this moment a plebeian fellow appeared with his arma
campestria, or clubs, cleeks, irons, and the like, under his arm,
who, without paying any attention to our situation, struck the ball
wherewith he had felled my kinsman in the direction of the hole.
Reflection directed us to the conclusion that both pistols had
missed their aim, and that Sir Hew had fallen beneath a chance blow
from this fellow's golf-ball. But as my kinsman was still hors de
combat, and incapable of further action, being unwitting, too, of
the real cause of his disaster, Inchgrabbit and Strathtyrum, in
their discretion as seconds, or belli judices, deemed it better
that we should keep a still sough, and that Sir Hew should never be
informed concerning the cause of his discomfiture. This resolution
we kept, and Sir Hew wore, till the day of his late lamented
decease, a bullet among the seals of his watch, he being persuaded
by Strathtyrum that it had been extracted from his brain-pan, which
certainly was of the thickest.
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