The Mule Was On Her Back, All Entangled In The Twisted Ruination Of Her Gaudy Gear, Kicking Out In That Restrained And Genteel Fashion In Which A Mule Always Kicks When She Is Desirous Of Protesting Against Existing Conditions, But Is Wishful Not To Damage Herself While So Doing.

The tourists, aided by half a dozen peasants, had dragged the driver out from beneath the heavy cart and had carried him to a pile of mucky straw beneath the eaves of a stable.

He was stretched full length on his back, senseless and deathly pale under the smeared grime on his face. There was no blood; but inside his torn shirt his chest had a caved-in look, as though the ribs had been crushed flat, and he seemed not to breathe at all. Only his fingers moved. They kept twitching, as though his life was running out of him through his finger ends. One felt that if he would but grip his hands he might stay its flight and hold it in.

Just as we jumped out of our carriage a young peasant woman, who had been bending over the injured man, set up a shrill outcry, which was instantly answered from behind us; and looking round we saw, running through the bare fields, a great, bulksome old woman, with her arms outspread and her face set in a tragic shape, shrieking as she sped toward us in her ungainly wallowing course. She was the injured man's mother, we judged - or possibly his grandmother.

There was nothing we could do for the human victim. Our guides, having questioned the assembled natives, told us there was no hospital to which he might be taken and that a neighborhood physician had already been sent for. So, having no desire to look on the grief of his mother - if she was his mother - a young Austrian and I turned our attention to the neglected mule. We felt that we could at least render a little first aid there. We had our pocket-knives out and were slashing away at the twisted maze of ropes and straps that bound the brute down between the shafts, when a particularly shrill chorus of shrieks checked us. We stood up and faced about, figuring that the poor devil on the muck heap had died and that his people were bemoaning his death. That was not it at all. The entire group, including the fat old woman, were screaming at us and shaking their clenched fists at us, warning us not to damage that harness with our knives. Feeling ran high, and threatened to run higher.

So, having no desire to be mobbed on the spot, we desisted and put up our knives; and after a while we got back into our carriage and drove on, leaving the capsized mule still belly-up in the debris, lashing out carefully with her skinned legs at the trappings that bound her; and the driver was still prone on the dunghill, with his fingers twitching more feebly now, as though the life had almost entirely fled out of him - a grim little tragedy set in the edge of a wide and aching desolation!

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