and hung.

I became intensely alert and clear-headed. I held by that branch for a
moment and then looked about me, and caught at another, and then found
myself holding to a practicable fork. I swung forward to that and got a
leg around it below its junction, and so was able presently to clamber
down, climbing very coolly and deliberately. I dropped ten feet or so
from the lowest branch and fell on my feet. "That's all right," I said,
and stared up through the tree to see what I could of the deflated and
crumpled remains that had once been Lord Roberts A festooned on the
branches it had broken. "Gods!" I said, "what a tumble!"

I wiped something that trickled from my face and was shocked to see my
hand covered with blood. I looked at myself and saw what seemed to me
an astonishing quantity of blood running down my arm and shoulder.
I perceived my mouth was full of blood. It's a queer moment when one
realises one is hurt, and perhaps badly hurt, and has still to discover
just how far one is hurt. I explored my face carefully and found
unfamiliar contours on the left side. The broken end of a branch had
driven right through my cheek, damaging my cheek and teeth and gums,
and left a splinter of itself stuck, like an explorer's fartherest-point
flag, in the upper maxillary. That and a sprained wrist were all my
damage. But I bled as though I had been chopped to pieces, and it
seemed to me that my face had been driven in. I can't describe just the
horrible disgust I felt at that.

"This blood must be stopped, anyhow," I said, thickheadedly.

"I wonder where there's a spider's web"--an odd twist for my mind to
take. But it was the only treatment that occurred to me.

I must have conceived some idea of going home unaided, because I was
thirty yards from the tree before I dropped.

Then a kind of black disc appeared in the middle of the world and rushed
out to the edge of things and blotted them out. I don't remember falling
down. I fainted from excitement, disgust at my injury and loss of blood,
and lay there until Cothope found me.

He was the first to find me, scorching as he did over the downland
turf, and making a wide course to get the Carnaby plantations at their
narrowest. Then presently, while he was trying to apply the methodical
teachings of the St. John's Ambulance classes to a rather abnormal case,
Beatrice came galloping through the trees full-tilt, with Lord Carnaby
hard behind her, and she was hatless, mud