Reuben had stopped short in his surprise. He began whipping the horses now with a seeming air of exultation, and stole a momentary smile-lit glance toward his companion.
“It’s just occurred to me,” he said. “Curious—I hadn’t given it a thought. Why, my girl, it’s like a special providence. You, too, will have your full revenge—such revenge as you never dreamt of. The third man is Horace Boyce!”
A great wave of cold stupor engulfed the girl’s reason as she took in these words, and her head swam and roared as if in truth she had been plunged headlong into unknown depths of icy water.
When she came to the surface of consciousness again, the horses were still rhythmically racing along the hill-side road overlooking the village. The firelight in the sky had faded down now to a dull pinkish effect like the northern lights. Reuben was chewing an unlighted cigar, and the ’squire was steadily snoring behind them. It had begun to snow.
“You will send them all to prison—surely?” she was able to ask.
“As surely as God made little apples!” was the sententious response.
The girl was cowering under the buffalo-robe in an anguish of mind so terribly intense that her physical pains were all forgotten. Only her throbbing head seemed full of thick blood, and there was such an awful need that she should think clearly! She bit her lips in tortured silence, striving through a myriad of wandering, crowding ideas to lay hold upon something which should be of help.
They had begun to descend the hill—a steep, uneven road full of drifts, beyond which stretched a level mile of highway leading into the village itself—when suddenly a bold thought came to her, which on the instant had shot up, powerful and commanding, into a very tower of resolution. She laid her hand on Reuben’s arm.
“If you don’t mind, I’ll change into the back seat,” she said, in a voice which all her efforts could not keep from shaking. “I’m feeling very ill. It’ll be easier for me there.”
Reuben at once drew up the horses, and the girl, summoning all her strength, managed without his help to get around the side of the sleigh, and under the robe, into the rear seat. The ’squire was sunk in such a profound sleep that she had to push him bodily over into his own half of the space, and the discovery that this did not waken him filled her with so great a delight that all her strength and self-control seemed miraculously to have returned to her.