Indeed, as they rode on slowly and silently, side by side, for a few hundred yards, he became not so sure himself that the duel was the joke that he had considered it.
He knew his father to be a man ready in his own defence, and of a high, though controlled temper; and he had not overlooked the fact that the stocks of two guns were protruding from the holster that projected from under the skirt of the Doctor's McClellan. Furthermore, he knew that the German was in deadly earnest.
As these suspicions assailed him, he turned to Sydney and touched the spur to his gray. The girl responded to his look, and they set into the steady gallop that covers much country with but little effort either to horse or rider.
Sydney held out her watch for Bob to see. It was quarter past eleven. Nearly five miles lay before them to the foot of the mountain, and to the summit there was a long, steep mile and a half which was the time-consumer to be reckoned with.
A mile beyond the post-office they turned from the State Road into a less-travelled, and hence rougher, side road. Through a stretch of sandy mud they breathed the horses again, and then on, on, on to the big hill whose vast bulk was beginning to tower mightily before them. Past the old school-house they dashed, without a glance for its forlorn state of decay; past one of the farm gates of the Cotswold estate; past the Baptist Bethel, indistinguishable from a school-house except for the white stones in the graveyard, upon which the sun glinted cheerfully.
Quarter after quarter they left behind them, slowing up only for steep descents or for patches of lengthwise road-mending whose upthrust branch ends are liable to snag a horse's legs. Johnny and Gray Eagle took in their stride the brooks that babbled gayly across the way; they shied at a glare of mica on the red clay of the bank; they dodged ruts, and leaped mud-holes, and pushed for the middle of the road.
At the end of the third mile Sydney asked, not lifting her eyes from the ground before her, "Is the bridle-path open?" It was the first time she had spoken since they left Oakwood.
"I don't know. It may be washed. We'd better keep to the sled-track."
"It's half a mile longer."
"But the other might delay us more."