But there was a mischievous boy, up there, who did stunt-flying a thousand feet up.
She set her teeth. Never once did she grip the saddle. Reuniting her body by an inner jerk, as it were, she rose to the leap—and waved her hand to the aviator as she went over.
“Well! by gracious, that girl is an all-round winner,” chuckled the boy in the sky, as he penitently pulled his “joy-stick” towards him and soared again in a great hurry.
Her head back upon her shoulders again, as it seemed, Revelation’s rider galloped him a little way, wheeled him and with a lift of the reins, saucily high, put him at the fence again, bounded back on to the trail—into the scattered group of girls and horses.
“Awfully—awfully sorry to have stampeded the outfit!” It was a boy-aviator advancing, three minutes later, with a merry mixture of East and West upon his tongue.
“So—so you ought to be!” stormed Pemrose, her cheeks blazing. “Didn’t you—you see the riding party—recognize us?”
“Didn’t recognize you until after I had ‘zoomed’ down—and then it was too late,” confessed the daredevil. “I wasn’t paying attention to the riding party. I was stealing a march on somebody else.”
“On who—whom?”
“Merciful—green—hop-toads!” The boy threw up his hands, invoking every hop-toad in the grass. “Oh! the funniest little figure it was, over there on the hill, just back of the trees. I had been spying on her, from aloft, through the glasses. She was standing, still as a stump, upon the mountainside, an umbrella held behind, not over, her—and I caught the flash of something bright, steely, upon her head.”
“Head-phone,” murmured Pemrose. “No doubt she had something bright on her heel, too, and that in a wet spot!”