For a moment Christina hesitated, a moment of weakness. She had suddenly seen through the joke. It was a plan to get Wallace to drive off with the girls right under his mother's nose. She felt too deeply on the subject to take part in any such foolish jest. But she could not very well stop the impetuous young man who had scrambled into the buggy, and was now seated between her and Bell, while Maggie placed herself upon Bell's knee. And while she hesitated he caught up the lines with a gay flourish.
"Now, we'll all likely be killed," he cried. "But what's the difference so long as we die happy!" And he gave Dolly a terrible lash with the whip and shouted, "Get along there, you."
Now in all Dolly's quiet well-ordered life she had never felt anything but the gentlest encouragement from a whip, neither had anything in her memory ever pulled on her mouth in this dreadful manner. There was both terror and indignation in the leap she gave into the air, and the ignorant driver, taken quite unaware, pulled on one line so that the buggy was almost overturned. Then away they went at a gallop up the street, first on the edge of one ditch, then on the edge of the other, while the two plotters left on the veranda, ready to fall over with laughter, suddenly became sober as they saw a chance of their joke ending in a catastrophe.
There was no feigning in Bell's terror now. She had turned pale, and was crying out, "Oh, Christine, take the lines, take the lines!"
But Christina needed no bidding. Already she had caught the reins in her strong brown hands, shoving the young man's aside sharply.
"You, you idiot!" was what she said, though she did not know it until afterwards. She was too angry to say more, too genuinely alarmed. With the firm familiar hand on the lines, and Christina's voice calling soothingly, Dolly's panic began to subside. She came down to a canter, then to a trot.
"Well!" cried the young man in real amazement. "She is some horse. How do you ever manage to drive her?"
Christina was too angry to answer yet. She could never bear to see any dumb animal hurt, and to have Dolly, her pet, struck—she could feel the lash of the whip across her own back and was tingling with indignation. And she was more deeply angry for another reason. She had divined by Wallace's free manner that he understood just as well as any of the girls that this had all been a ruse to capture him and carry him off, and she felt enraged that she had to lend herself to such a humiliation. She would show him that she was no party to the scheme by getting rid of him then and there.
When she managed to get Dolly down to a walk she stopped her altogether just at the foot of the hill, and turned upon the young man with blazing eyes.
"Why did you not tell me you didn't know the first thing about driving a horse?" she demanded.