I jinked like a snipe. My only cover was the mare herself. I cannot explain in any detail what happened. At one moment I was under her chest and hanging on to the martingale with one hand while trying to thrust the Mauser into a pocket with the other. I had released the awkward holster butt. I don’t know how or when.
Looking back at it in cold blood, I think I should have shot the mare. That I didn’t was not due to any compunction. I repeat —she was the only cover I had. She was precious. As I saw it then, he could kill me as she fell to her knees or while he was coming off.
If he had had a saber he could have cut me down three times over. A .45 Colt from a frantic, rearing horse was a less reliable weapon. Where the shots went I do not know, but they didn’t hit. One nicked the point of the mare’s shoulder, for I remember vividly the smell of burned hair and I think I saw a streak of blood. That was the end. The mare shied and fought him, and I was into the trees before he could regain control.
I dropped onto the carpet of beech leaves gasping for breath. To be at the receiving end of a cavalry charge is not a sport for a man in his forties. It took me some time to realize that I was unhurt, and longer still before my hand was steady enough to shoot. I told myself that honors were even. St. Sabas had found out with little risk to himself that I was not dead. On the other hand I was safely in cover and could at last fight my battle under conditions which I understood. An optimistic view, but good for morale. If ever a man had been defeated, I had.
Now for the first time I realized that there was going to be no quick end to this duel. When I put forward my desperate proposal which allowed us at last to rise from that garden table, I had imagined an affair of dishonor in the last of the daylight which ten minutes would settle. I did not foresee the low, gray cloud sweeping across the Cotswolds and bringing night half an hour too soon. My life was going to depend on chancy snapshooting in darkness, and the question of ammunition supply was vital.
Had St. Sabas got an extra magazine? Very improbable. He must have ridden out that afternoon assuming — if one could guess what murderers assumed — that one or, at the most, two shots would do. How many had he fired from his mare? Was it three or four? I was ashamed of not knowing, but it had seemed like a dozen. Only by counting the reports in my memory — as a man can count afterwards the number of times a single cylinder has fired though at the moment the roar was nearly continuous — could I work out the truth. It was four, plus his first shot from the edge of the trees. That left St. Sabas three in his magazine against eight in the Mauser. Better say four in the magazine in case he started with one up the spout. And he would. By this time I knew him.
Both of us were now on foot and under the beeches. The windbreak was a rough oval with a diameter of a hundred and fifty yards one way and about a hundred the other. That sounds a small arena for terror and uncertainty, but visibility was down to twenty feet if the enemy moved and nothing at all if he didn’t. Wherever a man lay down he automatically created an ambush. So, on the face of it, the odds were heavily against the attacker. But it was not much use to crouch and wait and switch a tail unless the prey could be attracted out of a thousand possible squares of darkness into the right one. And that meant that the defender had to make some noise while the attacker could afford to move silently.
The only moonlit space was the clearing in the center of the copse which led to the barn. It gave an impression of being longer than it really was and looked like an avenue. At the head of it the entrance to the barn showed as a black arch, flanked on the left by a broken outline of black where were the remains of an old dung heap and a pile of rubbish.
St. Sabas was on the other side of this avenue. If he wanted to attack he had either to cross the open, which was suicide, or to work his way round the back of the barn into my side of the wood. I could faintly hear him on the move, so I decided to let him take the initiative.
I tiptoed silently to the back — the north side — of the barn, where the belt of trees was narrow, and waited for him to enter my territory. But he was up to that one. He left the trees and took to the open hillside, reentering the wood behind me and in my half of it. He did not seem to be taking the precaution of moving silently, so I knew that he meant me to hear what he was doing. I could not make it out at all.
Had he decoyed me round to the back of the barn so that he could enter it by the door? I returned to the front and covered the door, though I had an uneasy instinct that the move was what he intended me to make and I paid more attention to my own security than the threshold of the barn.
But he was nowhere near the barn. To my astonishment I saw him cross the bottom of the clearing. He then started another round of the copse, sometimes out on the hillside, sometimes penetrating deeply into the trees. It was little use trying to intercept him or hunt him down. His movements were quite unpredictable.
This was nerve-racking. It only made sense on the theory that he was testing me to see if I were fool enough to fire at random. He used his mare, too — twice slapping her away to trot on her own through the darkness. I began to wonder if he had gone mad under the strain. This circling and darting back reminded me of an inefficient beater ordered to drive the game into the center of the cover and thoroughly apprehensive about what might break back.
It was I, however, who was apprehensive and beginning to be fascinated. Tiger? He was more like a stoat or a weasel playing the fool in order to attract a bird’s curiosity. Well, if he wanted me to come fluttering up to him, I was not going to.
His occasional dashes on the other side of the clearing took him nearer and nearer to the barn. So that was it, I thought; he meant to distract my attention so that he could get inside and make me winkle him out. The next time I heard him safely turning somersaults on the north side I crossed the front and dropped into the shadows of the old manure heap. As soon as another dash for the barn began, I crawled in and turned round to cover the edge of the trees and the doorway. I must admit I was thankful to be inside. I had never been asked to study forest fighting against the lunatic crashings of a poltergeist without a plan.
I suppose he continued beating the bounds for another quarter of an hour. Meanwhile, knowing that he was engaged outside, I took stock of the barn and freely used my torch in the corners which were out of sight of the doorway. During the afternoon I had merely glanced over the place with a view to making Nur Jehan comfortable, and had not examined it in detail.
In the lefthand wall as I faced the doorway was a long, narrow window, the sill of which was about six feet from the ground. A man entering from outside would make a good deal of noise, but it offered an easy way out from the inside, for there was a pile of loose hay beneath the window. The floor of the barn was fairly clear of obstructions, except for an old chaff-cutter, some bits of iron and balks of timber which had been part of a cart, and a pile of hazel rods close to the door. Against the back wall were three dilapidated stalls for horses or cattle.
At last there was silence under the trees. I lay down a little back from the doorway preparing for the final shot. After a while I heard a horse walking placidly over the turf of the clearing towards me. I suspected that St. Sabas was going to charge the door. It was not a bad idea if he thought that I was outside the barn and he wanted to get in through my covering fire. But I refused to be dazed by haute ecole stuff this time and I was not going to be caught on the ground again.