“Good heck! Bill Kennedy! Well, come on. You couldn’t go back with them, that’s sure. I’ll take you home, girl.” He was leading her by the arm to the fence behind the house. “Wait, I’ll lift a wire; can you crawl under?”
“Now, I’ve torn it! I heard it rip. And it isn’t my coat at all,” said Mary Hope. “Oh, they’re murdering one another! I should think you’d be ashamed, having a dance like––”
“Coats can be bought––and murdered men don’t swear like that. I’ll have to borrow Belle’s pintos, but we don’t care, do we? Come on. Here they are. Don’t get in until I get them untied and turned around. And when I say get in, you’d better make it in one jump. Are you game?”
“No Lorrigan will ever cry shame on a Douglas for a coward! You must be crazy, taking this awful team.”
“I am. I’m crazy to get you away from here before they start shooting, back there.” He spoke to the team gruffly and with a tone of authority that held them quiet, wondering at his audacity perhaps. He untied them, got the lines, stepped in and turned them around, the pintos backing and cramping the buckboard, lunging a little but too surprised to misbehave in their usual form.
“Get in––and hang on. There’s no road much––but we’ll make it, all right.”
Like the pintos, Mary Hope was too astonished to rebel. She got in.
The team went plunging up the hill, snorting now and then, swerving sharply away from rock or bush that threatened them with vague horrors in the clear starlight. Behind them surged the clamor of many voices shouting, the confused scuffling of feet, a revolver shot or two, and threading the whole the shrill, upbraiding voice of a woman.
“That’s Mrs. Miller,” Mary Hope volunteered jerkily. “She’s the one that was scalded.”