Back to the house ran Maggie May, and next minute had returned with a delicious slab of well-baked white oatcake, and Larnie was happy for once. “Yes, father, I will gladly go with you; I have merely my cloak to put on.”
. . . . . .
The day was so truly delightful that Mackenzie would have been glad to drive quite leisurely in order to enjoy the sweet spring scenery. But Larnie took another view of the matter. He scented oats at the other end of the journey, and determined to push on and have the business over.
The flowers were nodding in dingle and dell; the young crimson-tasselled larch-trees brightened many a hillside; the rich yellow primroses peeped coyly up at their feet; the silver-stemmed birch-trees were drooping on the braelands, their sweet-scented foliage still weeping with the dews of night; but nothing of all this saw Larnie—his thoughts were on oats intent.
Many a strange and beautiful wild bird made wood and welkin ring with his glad notes, but Larnie heard not the songs. Up yonder in a green corn patch a hare pauses in the act of washing his face, that he may sit up and stare curiously at the fast flying equipage—Larnie takes no heed. Rabbits in little groups of five or six scurry here and there among the boulders on bare hillsides, but Larnie takes not the slightest notice. Oats alone absorb his thoughts, so on he flies.
The road was a very winding one. It kept well away from the river, though sometimes approaching it. It was up hill and down dell too, and Larnie was wise enough to get up extra speed when rushing down a hill, so that the momentum might carry the vehicle half-way up the next hill. This is the Highland plan of driving, and in some ways is sensible enough.
But now they were within half-a-mile of the most dangerous part of all the road, for here there was a terribly steep descent, with a high precipice and sharp curve right at the bottom. More than one fatal accident had already taken place at this place, so Mackenzie set himself to the task of immediately restraining the impetuosity of his Shetland steed. This he might have succeeded in doing without much difficulty, but for once fate seemed against him, for just at that moment a hare suddenly bounded from a bush of broom, and crossed the path almost among Larnie’s feet. So startling an apparition caused the nervous little animal to lose all control over himself. Larnie felt as if under the influence of some dreadful nightmare, and I am convinced this is precisely how horses do feel under such circumstances, and off he dashed at a speed that was perfectly uncontrollable by his driver, and which would have been so even had he been a younger and stronger man.
Death, and a death the most dreadful, loomed before him and his little daughter. When they should make the descent and reach the precipice, nothing on earth could save them!
The ground beneath goes rushing past like a grey bewildering mist, the bank at each side, with its greenery of ferns and its wild flowers yellow and crimson, glides by like a lovely rainbow. Maggie May sits quiet and pale, holding on to the side of the trap; Mackenzie himself has almost ceased his futile endeavours to rein up, and abandoned himself to fate, yet his lips are moving in prayer.
And now they are within a hundred—seventy—fifty yards of the dreaded brae that has death at its foot.