At the gate of the wall stood Mrs Mackenzie waiting for us.
When her eyes fell upon us, however, she shrieked out, and covered
her face with her hands, crying, 'Horrible, horrible!' Nor were
her fears allayed when she discovered her worthy husband being
borne upon an improvized stretcher; but her doubts as to the
nature of his injury were soon set at rest. Then when in a few
brief words I had told her the upshot of the struggle (of which
Flossie, who had arrived in safety, had been able to explain
something) she came up to me and solemnly kissed me on the forehead.
'God bless you all, Mr Quatermain; you have saved my child's
life,' she said simply.
Then we went in and got our clothes off and doctored our wounds;
I am glad to say I had none, and Sir Henry's and Good's were,
thanks to those invaluable chain shirts, of a comparatively harmless
nature, and to be dealt with by means of a few stitches and sticking-
plaster. Mackenzie's, however, were serious, though fortunately
the spear had not severed any large artery. After that we had
a bath, and what a luxury it was! And having clad ourselves
in ordinary clothes, proceeded to the dining-room, where breakfast
was set as usual. It was curious sitting down there, drinking
tea and eating toast in an ordinary nineteenth-century sort of
way just as though we had not employed the early hours in a regular
primitive hand-to-hand Middle-Ages kind of struggle.
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