“Will they be poisoned, Mr. Denny?” she gasped.
“Every man jack of them, if your father doesn’t twig it’s a drag, and whip ’em off,” replied Mr. Denny, with grim brevity.
“Couldn’t we catch them up?” cried Mary, almost incoherent from excitement and horror.
“They’ve gone half-a-mile by this, and that brute,” this with an eye of concentrated hatred at the colt, “won’t jump a broom-stick.”
“But let me try,” urged Mary, maddened by the assumption of masculine calm which Mr. Denny’s despair had taken on; “or—oh, Mr. Denny, if you rode ‘Matchbox’ yourself straight to Madore across the river, you’d be in time to whip them off!”
“By Jove!” said Dinny Johnny, and was silent. I believe that was the moment at which the identity of the future Mrs. Denny was made clear to him.
“And you’ll have to ride her in my saddle!” went on Mary at lightning speed, taking control of the situation in a manner prophetic of her future successful career as a matron. “There isn’t time to change—”
“The devil I shall!” said Dinny Johnny, and an unworthy thought of what his friends would say flitted across his mind.
“And you’ll have to sit sideways, because the lowest crutch is so far back there’s not room for your leg if you sit saddleways,” continued his preceptor breathlessly. “I know it—Jimmy said so when he rode her to the meet for me last week. Oh hurry—hurry! How slow you are!”
Mr. Denny never quite knew how he got into the horrors of the saddle, still less how he and “Matchbox” got into the road. At one acute moment, indeed, he had believed he was going to precede her thither, but they alighted more or less together, and turning her, by a handy gap, into the field on the other side of the road, he set off at a precarious gallop, followed by the encouraging shrieks of Mary.