He let off a yell that tore its way through every quivering nerve in the mare’s body, and with a shout of, “Round ’em, lad!” sent his dog—a half-trained youngster—barking like a creature possessed, full tilt in pursuit of the sheep.
That settled it as far as the chestnut was concerned. With a bound she leapt forward, scattering the two or three remaining sheep that still blocked her path, and the next moment the light, high cart was rocking like a cockle-shell in a choppy sea, as she tore along, utterly out of hand.
Luckily, for a couple of miles the road ran straight as a dart, and after the first gasp of alarm Jean found herself curiously collected and able to calculate chances. At the end of the two miles, she know, there came a steep declivity—a typical Devonshire hill, like the side of a house, which the British workman had repaired in his usual crude and inefficient manner, so that loose stones and inequalities of surface added to the dangers of negotiation. At the foot of this descent was a sharp double turn—a veritable death-trap. Could Burke possibly got the mare in hand before they reached the brow of the hill? Jean doubted it.
There was no sound now in all the world except the battering of the mare’s hoofs upon the road and the screaming rush of the wind in their ears. The hedges flew past, a green, distorted blur. The strip of road fled away beneath them as though coiled up by some swift revolving cylinder; ahead, it ended sheer against a sky blue as a periwinkle, and into that blue they were rushing at thirty miles an hour. When they reached it, it would be the end. Jean could almost hear the crash that must follow, sense the sickening feeling of being flung headlong, hurled into space.... hurtling down into black nothingness.,..
Her glance sought Burke’s face. His jaw was out-thrust, and she could guess at the clenched teeth behind the lips that shut like a rat-trap. His eyes gleamed beneath the penthouse brows, drawn together so that they almost met above his fighting beak of a nose.
In an oddly detached manner she found herself reflecting on the dogged brute strength of his set face. If anyone could check that flying, foam-flecked form, rocketing along between the shafts like a red-brown streak, he could.
She wondered how long he would be able to hold the beast—to hang on? She remembered having heard that, after a time, the strain of pulling against a runaway becomes too much for human nerves and muscles, and that a man’s hands grow numb—and helpless! While the dead pull on the bit equally numbs the mouth of the horse, so that he, too, has no more any feeling to be played upon by the pressure of the hit.
Her eyes dropped to Burke’s hands. With a little inward start of astonishment she realised that he was not attempting to pull against the chestnut. He was just holding... holding... steadying her, ever so little, in her mad gallop. Jean felt the mare swerve, then swing level again, still answering faintly to the reins.
Burke’s hands were very still. She wondered vaguely why—now—he didn’t pit his strength against that of the runaway. They must have covered a mile or more. A bare half-mile was all that still lay between them and disaster.
And then, as she watched Burke’s hands, she saw them move, first one and then the other, sawing the bit against the tender corners of the mare’s mouth. Jean was conscious of a faint difference in the mad pace of her. Not enough to be accounted a check—but still something, some appreciable slackening of the whirlwind rush towards that blue blur of sky ahead.