He placed the gun in my hands, already cocked, and was gone, noiselessly, in an instant.  I watched those bushes eagerly, and once again saw the big tops of those antlers above the alders.  Behind me everything was wonderfully still, and I could hear the beating of my heart.  The doctor seemed to have been swallowed up by the wilderness, and I have never felt so entirely alone as at that moment.  An instant later I realized that a strange thing was happening; I was no longer nervous, and my hands were perfectly steady.  After this, away to the right, I heard the faintest crackling of branches and the horns appeared again, absolutely still for a moment.  Then another little branch cracked, and there was a turmoil in the bushes, a splashing over the shallow, gravelly bottom of the little stream, and the great, gray-brown body and white, arching neck of the stag appeared, like a thing out of a fairy book.  The head was noble, poised on that snowy neck, and the antlers looked like a tangle of brush.  The lithe thing stopped, the sensitive ears went back, and he started again.

But the gun had gone up to my shoulder, Aunt Jennie, quite instinctively, and for a fraction of a second I saw that wonderfully feathered neck in the notch of the sight, then a brown place that was the beginning of the shoulder, and I pulled the trigger.  His long trot changed to a furious, desperate gallop.  A leap up the further bank carried him out of my sight, and I was now so flurried that I never gave him a second shot.  Indeed I felt so badly that I wanted to sit down and have a good cry.

I heard the doctor, who was tearing through the bushes, just as Harry Lawrence used to butt his way through a football line.

“You’ve got him,” he yelled.  “They never run like that unless mortally wounded.  We’ll have him in a moment!”

“Do you really think so?” I cried, breathlessly.

“Come on and see for yourself,” he answered, and in our turn we splashed through the shallow water and found the track on the other side.  This we very carefully studied, so as to be able to distinguish it from others, and then we went on, very cautiously, both walking on tiptoe.  He was ahead of me, with the cocked rifle in his hand, but after going a short distance he stopped, suddenly, and began to fill his pipe, with the most exasperating coolness.

“Why don’t you go on?” I asked, indignantly.

“Don’t you think I deserve a pipe?” he said.

“You don’t deserve anything,” I told him.  “I want my stag.”

“Mademoiselle est servie” he said, laughing.  “And you are indeed a most lucky young woman.”

“Where is it?  Where is it?” I cried.  “You are trying to be as mean as can be just now, and I won’t speak to you again to-day or any other day if you don’t stop.”

But I was looking around as I spoke and suddenly, under a little clump of birches, I saw something that made my heart beat fast again, and I dashed away, shouting, as I verily believe, and running as fast as the deer when I had last seen him.  I had the advantage of the start and I beat the doctor to the quarry.  It was lying there, the most splendid thing you ever saw, and I am sure I spoke in awed tones, as one does in a big cathedral.