"Havers! I 'll gie ye ma ain whup," he promised. He was back in half a minute with a lash whip whose holly stock never grew in America.
"What a beauty!'" exclaimed Margaret. She ran down the steps, gathered up the lines, and sprang into the buckboard, bracing herself for the inevitable jerk. "Ready," she warned. "Let go."
It was lucky for Mrs. Blake that she had loosened her corset strings and was confined to her room; had she seen the start—and she knew Margaret's skill as well as any one—she certainly would have burst them in her fright. With the three men it was otherwise; they vented their admiration in a ringing cheer. The ponies, gathering speed in the short stretch to the ford, were coaxed over so near the I-Call that Dirty Snow tumbled precipitately from his box and fled around the corner of the saloon; missing the box by a foot, the wheels began a wide arc toward the water through which the rig whirled in an avalanche of spray, to shave the front of the Why-Not as closely as it had the I-Call. To the delighted astonishment of Twin River—by this time the entire inhabitants, excepting only Mrs. Blake, were more or less interested in the proceedings—the team was no sooner going in the straight than Margaret cracked the lash to right and left and the startled ponies bellied to the ground in their efforts to escape an unknown danger. Sandy guffawed in pride of ownership; Slick gazed with his soul in his eyes; the puncher danced up and down in his joy, thumping first one and then the other.
"Did you see it?" he demanded, "Did you see it?" The others admitted eyesight equal to the occasion. "Say," asseverated the puncher, "if I owned all Montany, from here to th' line, I gives it to get that gal. That's th' kind of a hair-pin I am. You hear me!"
* * * * *
Margaret's sudden exclamation hastened the speed of the ponies but she drew them firmly in and approached the group on the trail at an easy lope. Whitby ran up from the river bank as she pulled the team to a stand.
"Who is it, Miss LaFrance? How did it happen?" asked Margaret, guessing the answer to her own questions.
"It is M'sieu Peters, ma'am'selle. He is wounded," replied Rose.
"Just in time, Miss McAllister," said Whitby, coming up at that moment. "We 'll commandeer that wagon as an ambulance."
"Miss McAllister!" exclaimed Buck, wonderingly. Then, energetically: "Whit, you get after that pole-cat. I can get to th' ranch, now. Get a-goin'."