"Her brother."
"Phew-w-w!" A prolonged whistle, very characteristic and significant.
Townsend, in a word, explained the affair.
"All right!" said the Illinoisan. "But, look here, old fellow! You haven't arranged this affair yourself, eh? No meetings on a single track, you know!"
"Not a bit of it!" laughed Townsend at the professional illustration. "Confidence for confidence! Have you not seen more closely than that?"
"Yes, I thought I had!" answered Rowan. "Well, all right! Go ahead! But by Jupiter, if you do not take the best care of that girl, and she gets into any kind of a scrape by riding with a man who can't ride, there will be somebody challenged to something else than ten-pins!"
Townsend laughed and turned away. The time had been, he thought, when incapacity to ride would scarcely have been set down as among his short-comings. But every thing, even equestrianism, was to be reckoned by comparison!
A moment after, all the party were in the saddle; and then commenced a descent still more laborious than the ascent, at least to the tired horses that groaned almost humanly as they slid down the sudden declivities, and to the more timid of the riders. Horace Townsend rode immediately before Miss Vanderlyn, a little forward of the centre of the Indian file (the only possible mode of riding in those narrow bridle-paths)—Rowan half-a-dozen further behind, then two or three others, and Frank Vanderlyn, with his dangerous bay, bringing up the rear.
The lawyer found his fair companion all that her face had indicated, in the desultory conversation which sprung up between them as they made their way downward from the summit, descending the peak of the monarch and riding back over the broad top of Monroe towards Franklin. Clara Vanderlyn conversed genially and easily, and had evidently (in spite of some restrictions already suggested,) enjoyed the day with the full warmth of an ardent nature. She seemed an excellent horsewoman, easy and self-possessed in the saddle, and Townsend observed that she found leisure from the care of picking her way, to look back several times over her shoulder. For a long time he may have been undecided whether her regard was directed at her brother, at the extreme end of the line, or at some one in the middle distance. The one glance of anxiety would have been very natural: the other, compounded of interest only, may have been likewise natural enough—who can say?
They were crossing Monroe to Franklin, over the narrow back-bone of land that has been mentioned in the ascent, and at the very point where Oakes' Gulf, now on the left, and the scarcely less terrible Gulf of Mexico on the right, narrowed the whole causeway to not much more than a dozen of feet,—when Townsend heard a sudden and sharp cry behind him. At that point the descent of the path was very precipitous, and over stones so rugged that the horses kept their feet with great difficulty; and in his anxiety to insure safe footing he had for the moment lost sight of his fair companion—a poor recommendation of his ability as an escort, perhaps, but not less true than reprehensible! At the cry he turned instantly, though he could not so suddenly check the course of his horse down the path without danger of throwing him from his feet; and as he looked around, through the olive brown of his cheek a deadly whiteness crept to the skin, and his blood stood still as it had probably never before done since the tide of life first surged through his veins.