“Hey there, you!” shouted Hippy, thrusting his head out. “I haven’t got my safety belt on, so don’t take off like that again or you will throw me out.”
“Hang on, Lieutenant!” urged Grace, her laughing eyes peering over the edge of the coach into the red, perspiring face of Hippy Wingate. “That is the way I had to do when I went flying with you in France. If you will recall, you said yesterday that you must have excitement. I am simply providing it for you, and I have an idea you will get all you wish by the time we have done with this journey.”
The lieutenant drew in his head and they heard nothing more from him for some time.
The Deadwood stagecoach swept out with a rattle and a clatter and a groaning in every joint, that aroused the apprehension, not only of its passengers, but of persons on the streets who paused to see the outfit wheel past them, the four horses at a brisk trot.
Leaving the town quickly behind them, the stagecoach swept out into the open. The smoke of the Old Dominion and Inquisition smelting furnaces hung gray against the sky, but the Overton girls were soon past the tall black buildings of cooling copper, riding away toward the west at a pace that caused the stagecoach to complain even more bitterly than before.
It was to be a mere outing, a jaunt in an historic old stagecoach, over an equally historic trail, but that was all, so far as Grace Harlowe and her friends had planned it. What the “jaunt” developed into was an exciting adventure, which had in it all the elements of a real tragedy. Grace already was glorying in the fresh air, the roll of the vehicle under her, and the uncertainty of what the next moment held for her.
“Will our wagon stand a lively run down the grade?” she questioned, as they topped a rise and she saw a stretch of about half a mile of trail falling away and disappearing in the valley below them.
“I reckon it will,” grinned the driver.
“How about the horses?”
“Thet’s all right. Don’t you worry ’bout the nags, Miss.”