"Pull up please!" cried Philip. "That strip looks quick."
"Nonsense! John comes this way every week; it's all right." Belle gave her pony a cut, making it forge ahead; but it was no match for Suleimân who, unaccustomed to the spur, bounded past her.
"Pull up, please; don't be foolish, pull up!" Philip shouted, hearing the ominous cloop of his horse's feet. Another dig of the spur, a leap, a flounder, and Suleimân was over the creek. Not so Belle's pony; slower, heavier, it was hopelessly bogged in a second, and floundering about, sank deeper and deeper.
"Throw yourself off!" cried Philip; "as far as you can,--arms flat! So,--quite still, please. There is no danger. I can get at you easily, and it is not deep." A minute after his hand closed on her wrist as she lay sinking slowly despite her stillness; for the pony, relieved of her weight, was plunging like a mad thing and churning up the sand and water to slush. "I must get a purchase first; these sands hold like birdlime;" he said after an ineffectual attempt. "Don't be frightened if I let go for a moment." Then with one hand through Suleimân's stirrup he knelt once more on the extreme edge of the firm ground and got a grip of Belle again. "Now then,--all together!" More all together than he desired, for Suleimân, alarmed at the strain, backed violently, reared, and finally broke away, leaving Philip prone on his back in the dirt. "I hope I didn't hurt you," he said, struggling up, rather blindly, to aid Belle's final flounder to safe ground.
"Not much," she replied with a nervous laugh as she shook the curiously dry sand from her habit. "My wrist will be a bit black and blue, that's all. Why, Philip, what's the matter? Philip!"
He had doubled up limply, horribly, as if he had been shot, and lay in a heap at her feet.
"Philip! What is it?"
As she slipped her arm beneath him to raise his head, something warm and wet trickled over it,--blood!
"The wound," he murmured. "My handkerchief,--anything,--I am sorry." Then the pain died out of his face and his head felt heavy on her arm.
The wound! She sought for it by the aid of that ghastly trickle only to find, when she tore the coverings away, that it was no trickle, but an intermittent gushing. That must be stopped somehow,--her handkerchief, his handkerchief, her own little white hands. It had all passed so quickly that it seemed but a minute since he had cried "Pull up," and there she was with his head on her knee, face downwards, and the warm blood soaking over her. People make long stories afterwards of such scenes; but as a matter of fact they derive all their horror from their awful swiftness.