Seeing that he was hopelessly outnumbered, the waggoner, who was almost
too drunk to understand what had happened, became a little quieter and
gave us his name, and we copied the name of the miller who employed him
from the name-plate on the waggon, giving similar information to the
driver concerning ourselves; but as we heard nothing further about the
matter, we concluded the case was settled out of court.
We all congratulated my brother on his almost providential escape from
what might have been a tragic ending to his long walk. He had told me he
had a foreboding earlier in the evening that something was about to
happen to him. From the position in which he was seated in the bottom of
the trap he could not see anything before him except the backs of the
three men sitting above, and he did not know what was happening until he
thought he saw us tumbling upon him and myself jumping in the air over a
bush.
He described it in the well-known words of Sir Walter Scott:
The heart had hardly time to think.
The eyelid scarce had time to wink.
The squeeze, as he called it, had left its marks upon him, as his chest
was bruised in several places, and he was quite certain that if we had
slid backwards another half-inch on our seat in the trap we should have
finished him off altogether--for the back of the trap had already been
forced outwards as far as it would go.
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