‘Once a woman gave me some dried skin from a fish,’ said the Jackal. ‘I had hoped to get her baby, but horse-food is better than the kick of a horse, as the saying is. What did thy woman do?’
‘She fired at me with a short gun of a kind I have never seen before or since. Five times, one after another’ (the Mugger must have met with an old-fashioned revolver); ‘and I stayed open-mouthed and gaping, my head in the smoke. Never did I see such a thing. Five times, as swiftly as I wave my tail – thus!’
The Jackal, who had been growing more and more interested in the story, had just time to leap back as the huge tail swung by like a scythe.
‘Not before the fifth shot,’ said the Mugger, as though he had never dreamed of stunning one of his listeners – ‘not before the fifth shot did I sink, and
