It was a girl clinging desperately with both hands to the saddle.
“Whoa! Whoa—Boy! There! There!”
Breathlessly Pem—recovering—put him on to the trail again.
“Goodness! If he didn’t take my breath away. Maybe I haven’t ridden quite as much as I thought I had!” with a little, fluttering grin. “There—there, you old Goose, look at it, so that you’ll know it again; it isn’t any different off the stem from what it is on!” She pushed the horse’s nose downward towards the great, fronded balls of the same weed growing, meek and green, beside the trail.
“Revel took no notice of it,” Una complacently patted her horse’s neck. “Well, we’ll soon be at the Gap now.”
They sighted it, a few minutes later, as they rode up the valley, a narrow, rock-girt pass between two mountains, rising precipitately on either side.
The trail, broad enough in some places to be quite a respectable piece of natural road, had shrunk now until there was scarcely room for two to ride abreast.
On the left was still the green slope, starred with wild flowers—ablaze with hardhack and broad-leaved fireweed.
To the right there was now a curving snake fence, four feet high, the boundary of some estate or farm, with ten feet of grass between it and the beaten trail.
Beyond the fence was a broader grass strip, fringed by a narrow timber belt, a screen for the rugged mountainside that rose behind it.