Another fleeting pause at the top rewarded his endeavor, and then a couple of hundred yards of hardly perceptible upward incline produced again the swift and ready trot.
Five minutes more of easy climbing brought into view the tobacco barn which was one of the mountain's landmarks. Beyond it the grade became much more abrupt, and although it was worn fairly smooth by the sleds of the men who planted aërial cornfields far up on the highest clearings, yet its steepness rendered this last half-mile the truly formidable part of the ascent.
Johnny glanced up it with regretful eye, stopped an instant, took a long breath, shook himself, and went bravely to his task.
Sydney's every thought was a passionate longing to press on,—to hurry, to rush, to fly. Her lips grew white when she saw that the hands of her watch pointed to four minutes of twelve.
"It is not possible to be in time," she agonized. "O God, delay them! O God, stop them!"
She bent forward over the horse's withers, and stretched upward, as if to pull him higher by her buoyancy. She was heedless of the stream that gurgled beside the trail among the evergreen sword-fern—a noisy betrayer of the mountain's angle. She did not observe that she was alone, that Bob was not following her. She was deaf to his cries as he struggled below with the gray, which was plunging against an attack of yellow jackets, and refused to take the trail.
Johnny stopped, his sides heaving pitiably.
"Oh, can I bear it? Oh, go on; do go on! O God, give me strength to wait."
Though she tore off her gloves in nervous impatience, still she left the rein upon the horse's neck, for she knew that the willing beast was doing his best.
He stopped again, and still once more, before they came to the foot of the bald, whose slippery, dead grass added another peril to the climb. The trail ended here, for it was not needed where a sled could go anywhere over the clearing.