Into the water splashed the girl, urging on her spirited horse, that was none the worse for his jump and his long slide.
"Good work! Good work!" cried an assistant director, who was stationed near the stream to see that all went according to the scenario. "Keep on, Miss Brown!"
Estelle bent low over her horse's neck, to escape possible bullets from the Confederate guns, and on and on she raced until she pulled up at the tent of "General" DeVere. Here her mission ended, after the father of Alice and Ruth, in a dusty uniform of a Union officer, had come out in response to the summons from his orderly.
Estelle slipped from her saddle, registered exhaustion, saluted and held out the paper she had brought through the Confederate lines at such risk. Nor was the risk wholly one of the play, for she might have been seriously hurt in her perilous leap.
But, fortunately, everything came out properly and a fine series of pictures resulted.
"I'm so glad!" Estelle exclaimed, when it was all over, and, divested of her padding, she sat in her room with Ruth and Alice. "I want to 'make good' in this business, and riding seems to be my forte."
"Do you like it better than anything else?" asked Alice.
"Yes, I do. And I just love moving pictures, don't you?"
"Indeed we do," put in Ruth. "But we were never cut out for riders."
"I'd like it!" exclaimed Alice. "I'd like to know how to ride a horse as well as you do."