I lurched on, my whole being a prayer.

The goats surged across the street, I could hear their numberless, disharmonious separate bleatings, their acrid stink burdened the air.

As I turned the next corner I glanced back.

Away at the entrance to the street the baggage-train was blocked by the goats. Drovers were cursing. The curses became frantic and still the animals milled aimlessly, effectively. Among them, not in the least dignified, flailing his arms and lashing out with his boots, was the big black and scarlet threat.

So now I had a head-start.

I doubled through a long tavern room. It was crammed with good Southern gentlemen who had come in to refresh themselves during their hard day’s work, and who’d stayed till now incapable, poor dears, of throwing a single stone. I knocked against several who hit their neighbours, either because they blamed the knock on them or because they aimed for me and missed. As I nipped out of the back window I saw the General caught in the fighting, moiling room. At first exasperated, temper still in his face from the goat-incident, he tried to shoulder his way through the drunken turmoil but soon had to defend himself from fists eager for any mark. He shoved men aside and struck down others, impatiently, but was caught and had to fight in earnest. That would keep him going for some time. I clambered over the sill and for an instant between the fighters in the length of the room he looked up and saw me.

I felt the same stab in the diaphragm that I have had several times from him.

I found myself in the tavern’s back yard, a tiny square almost all taken up with a vast, peak-topped dung-hill.

I skirted this but found the paling-fence behind it impossible to climb. I tried again and again, but it was just too tall, the paling had pointed tops, and my foot slipped even when I could get it between them. I hurt my feet, wrenching them desperately out when they got jammed, I had no time to ease them out properly, and my hands were full of long nasty splinters. It was one of those ventures when every movement slips and ends wrong, my chin descended heavily on the points of the palings as my feet and hands slipped, and I bit my tongue, and my chin hurt so sore and was covered in blood, and I think I wailed. I turned frantically to find another means of getting out of the yard.

There was a door into the kitchen, full of fires and movement but perhaps no one would stop me, but meanwhile a figure had appeared at the window. Landing a last blow on someone behind him, he swung out. I hid behind the dung-heap. I had wasted my precious hard-won breathing space on that wretched paling fence.