Nan sprinkled a handful of shucks on her head.
"I'm going to try," ventured Ruth.
Nan laughed.
Ruth looked around, trying to discover some means by which she might accomplish her purpose. Nan felt so sure that the child could not do what she threatened that she made no effort to dissuade her. She, herself, passed from bough to bough as nimbly as a boy, in spite of her skirts, and in a very short time was almost out of sight among the upper spreading branches. She sat astride one of these, swinging to and fro and luxuriating in her sense of freedom and adventure. Peering down occasionally she saw Ruth standing beneath her and sent repeated showers of nuts spinning through the boughs to keep the child busy. But presently Ruth disappeared. She had spied an old piece of board and she immediately flew to get it, her silly little head filled with the idea of making it serve her as a ladder. She tugged it laboriously across the stubbly field, and her short, panting breaths did not reach Nan's ear, full of the near rustle of leaves and the hum of the scudding wind.
"Ahoy! below there!" she shouted nautically from above.
Ruth was too busy to respond. The board was heavy, and it took all the strength of her slight arms to get it in position.
"Shipmate ahoy!" repeated Nan.
By this time the board had been tilted against the tree and Ruth was scrambling up the unsteady inclined plane, too absorbed and scared in her adventure to reply. She actually managed to reach the top and to stand there tiptoeing the edge uncertainly, her small fingers clasping the tree-trunk convulsively and her arms trying to grapple with it for a surer hold. But suddenly she gave a piercing scream, and Nan, peering down through the branches in instant alarm, saw Ruth lying at the foot of the tree in a pitiful little motionless heap, and knew in a moment that she had tried to do what she had threatened and had failed.
It did not take Nan a minute to reach the ground. Her heart seemed to stand still with fear. She flung herself from bough to bough with reckless haste and dropped to the ground all in one breathless instant.
"Ruth," she cried, bending over the little prostrate figure in an agony. "Ruth, open your eyes! Get up! Oh, please get up!"