“Klopsh! Klopsh! Klopsh! Klopsh!” And now—now, with that nearing, splashing crescendo mingled other sounds: whistling and complaining of branches, upper branches, the sullen swish of lower boughs, through which a passage was being forced; a rattling of little twigs against.... What?
And not one—not one of the wet and weary girls dared yet even to name it to herself: “Wagon!”?
Then, suddenly, one of them was on her feet and out of the cabin, flash light in hand, in time to see a great, reeking farm horse, eyes rolling, jaws foaming, lip rolled back from the dauntless teeth, plunge forth from the mountain top spruces.
Game leader, he was followed by a sweating, snorting wheel horse!
“Tandem,” gasped Pemrose Lorry—and reeled against a tree, which splashed her all Over.
“Well! I reckon this storm would make the Day o’ Judgment seem a Sunday School picnic, eh?” roared Donald Menzies, who managed the horse-farm for Mr. Grosvenor.
A giant figure, six-feet-four, in oilskins and sou’wester, he wavered before the girls’ eyes—a beatific vision.
“Pile in! Pile in!” he shouted. “Miss Una!... Where’s Miss Una?”
“I guess the rest of us might have dr-rowned before he’d have come all the way up the mountain—after—us,” pouted Dorothy. “Well! if we aren’t the princess, we’re lucky to come in on her innings. Girls! A great hay wagon—dry hay—a rubber covering to spread over us.... Talk of the seventh heaven!”
“I’d rather have this than—heaven.” Lura was creeping under that dark rubber blanket in among the fresh, sweet hay, so dry and warm.