“Those rascals!” ejaculated Ned.
“Oh! they are sliding on this side,” cried Dorothy. “Stop them, Ned! Please, Nat!”
“What do you expect us to do?” demanded the latter. “Run out and catch ’em with our bare hands?”
They had come to a break in the path now and could see out over the sloping pasture in which the boys had been sliding for an hour. Their sled had worked a plain path down the hill; but at the foot of it was an abrupt drop over the side of a gully. Dorothy Dale—and her cousins, too—knew that gully very well. There was a cave in it, and in and about that cave they had once had some very exciting adventures.
Joe and Roger had selected the smoothest part of the pasture to coast in, it was true; but the party of young folk just arrived could see that it was a very dangerous place as well. At the foot of the slide was a little bank overhanging the gully. The smaller boys had been stopping their sled right on the brink, and with a jolt, for the watchers could see Joe’s heelprints in the ground where the ice had been broken away.
They could hear the boys screaming out a school song at the top of the hill. Ned and Nat roared a command to Joe and Roger to halt in their mad career; but the two smaller boys were making so much noise that it was evident their cousins’ shout was not heard by them.
They came down, Joe sitting ahead on the sled with his brother hanging on behind, the feet of the boy sitting in front thrust out to halt the sled. But if the sled should jump over the barrier, the two reckless boys would fall twenty feet to the bottom of the gully.
“Stop them, do!” groaned Jennie Hapgood, who was a timid girl.
It was Dorothy who looked again at the little mound on the edge of gully’s bank. The frost had got into the earth there, for it had been freezing weather for several days before the ice storm of the previous night. Now the sun was shining full on the spot, and she could see where the boys’ feet, colliding with that lump of earth on the verge of the declivity, had knocked off the ice and bared the earth completely. There was, too, a long crack along the edge of the slight precipice.
“Oh, boys!” she called to Ned and Nat, who were struggling up the hill once more, “stop them, do! You must! That bank is crumbling away. If they come smashing down upon it again they may go over the brink, sled and all!”