Suddenly, however, he seemed seized with a fancy for reconnoitering the wild hillside screened by the narrow birch belt, on the other side of the bridle path from that on which he had been winging!
Abruptly he wheeled. As abruptly—as mischievously—he “zoomed” down—until he was only fifty or sixty feet above the trail.
Well! if he was tired of playing mountebank to such lukewarm spectators as the hills, he had lively enough witnesses now.
Every horse was suddenly jumping sidelong—madly—down the slope; those that weren’t backing, crab-fashion, with a frantic show of hind-legs.
Even Revel shied—demoralized.
But all this—all this was too tame for Revelation.
He had saluted tumbleweed by taking to the slope. He greeted an aviator by taking the fence.
Together with the others he had swerved to the left of the trail—and a few feet down that grassy slope—but there he turned and in mad bounds made for the fence upon the right.
The girl upon him felt as if her head and shoulders were being dragged backward—the rest of her going with the horse.
She had never taken a four-foot fence before—or come anywhere near it.