He put Cartoon at the stony “thermometer”—and in three seconds horse and rider were seeing stars.
Cartoon had slid and fallen. And a young aviator was testing the stones with the back of his head—finding them more heartless than the flower clock into which he had once tumbled.
“Stars, moons and suns!” He sat up, gasping, rubbing his poll, while the whole firmament whirled about him. “Merciful hop.... I hope you’re not done for!” He blinked, half-stunned, at his horse.
But Cartoon, trembling all over, grunting like a cyclone, had escaped with bruises.
“Well! we’re out of it now,” groaned the boy. “But Revelation won’t lose them; he—he’ll come up after them ‘as tight as he can.’”
Dizzily he was leading his horse down on to the trail again—while a girlish cry rang back in piteous accents.
The stony clatter had reached Pemrose. Even with those flying figures ahead, now seen, now unseen, upon the mountain’s lower slopes, she reined in among the baffling little trees.
“It’s all-ll—right. I’m coming—along. Don’t—lose—them!” She heard her companion’s fumbling cry.
And now she knew, as she seemed to have known from the first, that when it came to the last pinch, the last dash for Una’s safety, it would be a race between Revel and Revelation.
She was out on a road now. The trees were taller on either side of her—but with great gaps between them.