Thus while sitting on the wagon shaft he thought: "If I pitched myself
off and let the wheels go over me, that would be _likely_, just the
accident that fools are always making, but it wouldn't fulfil the
other conditions that have been laid on me. Also it might fail. I
might only mess myself up, and not quite kill myself."
Half an hour afterward, as he walked beside the empty wagon back to
his hay fields, he was still hammering away at the dominant idea.
A gun and a hedge--no accident can be more common than that. Say you
want to shoot some rats that have been showing their ugly whiskers in
the field ditches; take your gun, well charged, and blow your brains
out among the brambles of an untrimmed hedge.
Or these motor-cars! He thought of the way they came racing down the
highroad from Old Manninglea. How would it be to wait for one of these
buzzing, crashing, stinking road monsters over there on the edge of
the heath, and jump out just in front of it? If one stooped down and
took the full shock on one's forehead, it would mean a mess that there
would be no patching together again. But one could not attempt that in
daylight, because the driver would jam the breaks on, swerve round
one, do anything desperate rather than run into one.
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