Her eyes very wide—fugitive and dark—her skin, naturally white and transparent, glowing like a filmy lamp shade in the glare—panting—she gave her brimming bucket into the Guardian’s hands.
“Well done, dear! You girls are—doing—splendidly. Look out for the horses, as you run back,” breathed the half-charred older woman, grasping the handle.
The fascinated horses were at that moment making another inquisitive rush. They galloped up to within fourteen feet of the center of excitement, threatening the brush fighters.
Their “wickering” snorts circled round Una in the fiery seconds while she stood waiting—waiting for her bucket to be returned. Awful seconds!
A beam fell in and frightened them—frightened her, too—as flame and sparks flew up; they wheeled and dashed off a hundred yards.
“I wonder if Revel was among them,” breathed the trembling girl to herself. “That sound she made a while ago—I’d know her soft ‘wicker’ anywhere—it sounded just as if she had been caught—caught against her will.... Oh-h! I must save Revel. If the whole pasture were to blaze....”
Grasping the handle of her empty bucket again, she wheeled, too, and made a dash for the distant stream edge. The brilliant patchwork with which it glowed as the beam fell in darkened now into ebony gloom—the red checkers fading out when the flames sank again.
“If the fire spread through the whole pasture, Revel might not think of jumping the fence,” she whispered to herself again, with the soft earth-din of the horses’ hoofs in her ears—in her brain, it seemed, maddening it.
The ground was hummocky here—low mounds! And she was running very fast, as she had never run before, to reach the stream-edge, leaving other girls’ fleet footsteps behind.
In a dark little bush-belt girdling a mound she suddenly tripped—there had been nothing to trip on before. The bucket rolled away from her, down into a hollow, black as a pit.