Not for nothing had Betty Ashton been learning to acquire honors in camp craft for the past six months, practicing different kinds of knot tying with the other girls in friendly rivalry hour after hour. In the bottom of her sleigh along with the purse bag which really did contain her key, Betty had remembered that they had fifty feet of new clothes line being taken back to the cabin. In the moment of fumbling under the rug she had quickly tied the much practiced slip noose and then had thrown it with better skill than she could ever repeat.
Polly gave a characteristic laugh to relieve the tension of the situation. “We have caught the enemy and he is ours now, Betty, dear, but whatever are we going to do with him?”
But Betty had gathered up her reins and was quietly urging Fire Star ahead.
So there was nothing for their prisoner to do but to run along by the side of the sleigh. By superior strength the young man could have jerked away from Betty’s and Polly’s hold, but not from the sleigh itself. Now the more he pulled on the clothes line the tighter it bound him. Besides it was difficult to do even this when all his strength was required keeping up with the pony’s rapid gait.
“I have often wondered how it would feel to be a conqueror driving through the streets of Rome with one’s prisoners lashed to their chariot wheels and this is deliciously like it,” Polly sighed before her companion had once spoken, enjoying with all her vivid imagination the retribution that had overtaken the evildoer.
But Betty’s expression was strangely grave and every now and then she kept glancing aside at the figure running along beside them. For, except for a first oath and a few violent threats, the young man seemed to own himself beaten and had since said nothing. There was a horrible droop instead to his head and shoulders, and indeed to his whole figure, and he looked so ashamed that it made Betty sick to look at him, Polly did not seem to have noticed but Betty felt that she had never seen just such an expression before.
“Polly,” she whispered softly, “do you think we ought to drive up to the cabin taking this fellow with us like this? Of course we can turn around and go back to town and even drive up to the jail with him but that is just as bad. After all, he is poor little Nan’s brother, and if we do the child can never hold up her head again! I keep imagining how I should feel if I were to be taken prisoner and carried before a lot of strange boys to act as my judges.” Then Betty shuddered as though her vision were real, but Polly only laughed so scornfully that the boy, overhearing her, cringed.
“It is an absurd supposition, Betty, and I can’t well imagine your putting yourself in this dreadful fellow’s place. You can hardly expect me to conceive of you, even in these advanced female days, suddenly stopping a number of young men and demanding their pocketbooks.”
Notwithstanding Betty appeared deaf to her beloved Polly’s teasing, for instead of answering she slowed her pony down.
“Don’t you think we owe anything to Nan as a member of our Camp Fire circle?” she asked. “It seems to me that allegiance is one of the first things boys learn and it is because we girls don’t feel it toward one another that women have the harder time.”