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"And yet only yesterday," he said, with a sombre smile, "you had twenty men risking their lives to give you some snake-tails for playthings." "But my old friend Rufus was not among them," rejoined Kitty quietly; and once more she watched the venom working in his blood. "No," he replied, "he refuses to compete with Bill Lightfoot at any price."
Scarcely had the sound died away, when a movement, accompanied by a low snorting, was heard in the high-fenced cow-yard, into which Lightfoot had been turned for safe keeping. The whistle was soon repeated, and the next moment the sagacious animal was seen rearing herself nearly upright in the air, and then, with a prodigious leap, throwing herself over the fence into the field beyond.
There was a degree of shade cast by all these obtrusive circumstances across this honeymoon, but there came a day and hour when the bear was largely eaten, and fairly dug away as to much of the rest of him, and then, quite suddenly, his head and fore-quarters toppled forward into the cave, leaving the passage free, and when Ab and Lightfoot followed, one shouting and the other laughing, one coming again to his fortress and his weapons and his power, and the other to her hearth and duties.
I want her to stay, but I must drive this fellow out. I'll make him fight. That's what I'll do; I'll make him fight! I'm not afraid of him, but I'll make him fear me." Lightfoot stamped his feet and with his great antlers thrashed the bushes as if he felt that they were the enemy he sought. Could you have looked into his great eyes then, you would have found nothing soft and beautiful about them.
The worst of the matter was, that Martin Lightfoot, who had drank most of the poison, and had always been dreamy and uncanny, in spite of his shrewdness and humor, had, from that day forward, something very like a bee in his bonnet.
Strange as it may seem, Lightfoot is a splendid swimmer, despite his small, delicate feet. He enjoys swimming. But now Lightfoot was terribly tired from his long run ahead of the hounds. For a time he swam rapidly, but those weary muscles grew still more weary, and by the time he reached the middle of the Big River it seemed to him that he was not getting ahead at all.
"None so swift or sure," said the house steward, "as Martin Lightfoot." Lady Godiva shook her head. "I mistrust that man," she said. "He is too fond of my poor of the Lord Hereward."
It seemed to him that until he found her he could know no happiness. Once more Lightfoot the Deer was playing hide and seek in the Green Forest. But it was a very different game from the one he had played just a short time before. You remember that then it had been for his life that he had played, and he was the one who had done all the hiding.
So the big stranger wanted to avoid a fight if possible. But he wanted still more to find that beautiful young visitor with the dainty feet for whom Lightfoot had been looking. He wanted to find her just as Lightfoot wanted to find her, and he hoped that if he did find her, he could take her away with him back to the Great Mountain.
"Do not hurt me," half shrieked a stifled voice; and Martin Lightfoot, to his surprise, found that he had grasped no armed man, but the slight frame of a young girl. "I am the Princess," she whispered; "let me in." "A very pretty hostage for us," thought Martin, and letting her go seized the key, locking the door in the inside.
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