“You’re one fine little guesser, Purdy; I’ll say that much for you. I’ll bet you haven’t had a sled ride since you were a little kid, but you’re going to have one now—the kind that you’ll talk about after you get old and toothless and take your youngest grandchild on your knee to tell it what a daring little old rooster you used to be in your younger days.”
“But, for mercy’s sake, Larry!—it’s a mile down to that timber, and it looks like ten! When we hit those big trees——”
“I know; you’ll say there won’t be anything left of us. But we’ll have to risk something if we want to beat those fellows on the trail. It’s our only chance. And I’m betting largely upon these brake sticks. You take the stick under your arm, so, and lean back hard on it if you find yourself going too fast. The sun’s getting a little work in on the crust now, and I’m hoping that these stubby branches will cut in deep enough to do the braking act.”
“I’m still game,” said Purdick, getting up like an old, old man and helping Larry to swing the cut-down trees into position with the butts pointing down the steep slope. And then, as one who knows he has to be slain and wishes to have it over with: “Let me go first, and you can come along afterwards and gather up the remains.”
“Nothing like it,” said Larry firmly. “I’ve done this thing before, and you haven’t. You watch me go, and then do exactly as I do.” And with that, he straddled his tree, took the steering stick under his arm and shoved off.
Little Purdick had held his breath so many times during the past twenty-four hours that he did it now quite automatically. To his town-bred notion, Larry was simply committing suicide, or so it seemed as the big bunch of evergreen, with Larry riding it, hurled itself down the first steep declivity, utterly out of control—it appeared; and it was not until the tree and its rider were a mere flying dot in the lower distance that Purdick could summon the nerve to mount his own vehicle and push it off.
Of what happened to him in the next sixty seconds or so he never had a very clear picture. There was no working up to speed; no interval in which to grow up to the crowding sensations of the thing. With a slithering hiss the makeshift sled was off, and at the first downward dash the brake stick caught in the crust, ripped a furrow apparently a mile long, and was then torn out of his grasp. With nothing to lean on, Purdick whirled over on his face and took a death grip on the branches of the tree, burying his arms to the shoulders in the foliage. In the one brief glimpse he had of the backward rushing steep he saw great slabs of the snow crust, torn up by the hooking brake stick, following him down in a cataracting procession; the next thing he knew there was a crash as if a blast had gone off under him, and Larry was stooping over him, laughing and trying to break that grim death-hold of the clamping arms.
“Let go, you old cockleburr!” he chuckled. “You can’t take that tree with you where we’re going. Don’t you know that?”
Purdick sat up and made a valiant effort to get once more in touch with things ordinary and commonplace.
“S-say, Larry,” he whispered, “what was it that blew up and stopped me?”