“Stop the coach! Oh, sir, pray stop it!” begged the motherly woman.
“Bless your heart, ma’am, it’ll stop of its own this gait!” grinned Jimmy Yarde.
Hardly had he spoken than a particularly sharp bend in the road proved to be too much for the amateur coachman’s skill. He took the corner too wide, the near-hind wheels mounted a slight bank, and skidded down the farther side into a deep ditch, and everyone inside the vehicle was flung rudely over. There were screams from the women, oaths from the farmer, the cracking noise of split wood, and the shatter of broken glass. The coach lay at a crazy angle with sprigs of thorn-hedge thrusting in through the broken windows.
Pen, whose face was smothered in the many capes of Sir Richard’s drab driving-coat, gasped, and struggled to free herself from a hold which had suddenly clamped her to Sir Richard’s side. He relaxed it, saying: “Hurt, Pen?”
“No, not in the least! Thank you so very much for holding me! Are you hurt?”
A splinter of glass had cut his cheek slightly, but since he had been holding on to the leather arm-rest hanging in the corner of the coach, he had not been thrown, like everyone else, off his seat. “No, only annoyed,” he replied. “My good woman, this is neither the time nor the place for indulging in a fit of the vapours!”
This acid rider was addressed to the spinster, who, finding herself pitch-forked on top of the lawyer’s clerk, had gone off into strong hysterics.
“Here, let me get my dabblers on to that there door!” said Jimmy Yarde, hoisting himself up by seizing the opposite arm-rest. “Dang me if next time I travel in a rattler I don’t ride on the roof, flash-culls or no!”
The coach not having collapsed quite on to its side, but being supported by the bank and the hedge bordering the ditch, it was not difficult to force open the door, or to climb out through it. The spinster had indeed to be lifted out, since she had stiffened all over, and would do nothing but scream and drum her heels, but Pen scrambled out with an agility which scorned helping hands, and the motherly woman said that provided every gentleman would turn his back upon her she would engage to get out by herself too.
It was now considerably after nine o’clock, but although the sun had gone, the summer sky was still light, and the air warm. The travellers found themselves on a deserted stretch of road, a couple of miles short of the little town of Wroxhall, and rather more than thirty miles from Bristol. The most cursory inspection of the coach was enough to convince them that it would need extensive repairs before being able to take the road again; and Sir Richard, who had gone immediately to the horses, returned to Pen’s side in a few moments with the news that one of the wheelers had badly strained a tendon. He had been right in thinking that the reins had been handed over to one of the outside passengers. To tool the coach was a common enough pastime amongst young men who aspired to be whips, but that any paid coachman could have been foolish enough to relinquish his seat to an amateur far gone in drink was incomprehensible, until the coachman’s own condition had been realized.