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It was sheer good luck the horse came down in Hankey, and not either
before or after the houses had been passed.
No one knows how the horse came down, whether it stumbled or whether the
rat on the off side really got home with one of those slashing down
strokes of the teeth (given with the full weight of the body); and the
doctor never discovered that he himself was bitten until he was inside
the brickmaker's house, much less did he discover when the bite
occurred, though bitten he was and badly--a long slash like the slash of
a double tomahawk that had cut two parallel ribbons of flesh from his
left shoulder.
He was standing up in his buggy at one moment, and in the next he had
leapt to the ground, with his ankle, though he did not know it, badly
sprained, and he was cutting furiously at a third rat that was flying
directly at him. He scarcely remembers the leap he must have made over
the top of the wheel as the buggy came over, so obliteratingly hot and
swift did his impressions rush upon him. I think myself the horse reared
up with the rat biting again at its throat, and fell sideways, and
carried the whole affair over; and that the doctor sprang, as it were,
instinctively. As the buggy came down, the receiver of the lamp smashed,
and suddenly poured a flare of blazing oil, a thud of white flame, into
the struggle.
That was the first thing the brickmaker saw.
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