Olaf and Nancy stared at each other for a moment while his anxious face relaxed slowly into a broad grin and she burst out into irrepressible giggles. The strain of the terrible minutes that had just passed broke down suddenly into uncontrollable mirth so that gale after gale of laughter swept over them both. Nancy was so breathless from her desperate climb that laughing was painful, yet she could not check it and was forced to sit down upon the grass and lean against the rock wall in her helplessness. Olaf recovered first, rubbed his eyes, wet with laughter, on the sleeve of his coat, and was able to speak quite soberly.
“After all, it isn’t so funny,” he observed. He leaned far out over the precipice and looked down. “I thought you would go over before I got there.”
“We must look after Dabney Mills,” Nancy reminded him suddenly. “Suppose he had been killed!”
“If he had it would be by no fault of his,” Olaf muttered as he helped her to her feet and walked with her to where the reporter was sitting up, looking about him with a dazed expression.
“You were mighty slow coming,” he said morosely to Olaf. “That brute could have knocked us into kingdom come.”
He was feeling about vaguely, first in his pockets, then among the weeds and stones about him. A great blue bruise was spreading slowly over his face and neck.
“Have you lost something?” Nancy inquired.
“Just my note-book. I—I wanted to put something down in it.”
He seemed still to be somewhat stunned, but he got up and went with them down the hill. For some time he was silent, an unusual condition for him, but before they were halfway home he began to talk again, evidently composing a proper account of his adventure.
“A very dangerous, vicious animal!” he observed. “It was quite touch and go for a time, a very narrow escape! Of course, if I had been carrying any sort of weapon—” Nancy interrupted with an exclamation, and Olaf with a covert chuckle. She was about to declare very frankly that if Olaf had been unarmed and Dabney possessed of the milk-bucket, the affair would not have been very different. Olaf, however, dropped behind and spoke to her in an undertone: