"What are you goin' to do?" asked the man sharply. He was expecting another bluff, and was in the right mood to call it, since his success with the first.
But Hazel had calculated things to a nicety. She owed this man a good deal already for herself. She owed him more for his impertinent ignoring of Gordon, and also for his disparagement of the ranch life she loved.
Without a word she swung her mare sharply to the left. A dozen strides, a gazelle-like lifting of the round, brown body, and the Lady Jane was on the opposite bank of the stream.
Before David Slosson was aware of her purpose, and its accomplishment, his racing horse, still uneducated of mouth, had carried him thirty or forty yards beyond the spot where Hazel had jumped the stream. At length, however, he contrived to pull the youngster up.
He smiled as he saw the girl on the other side of the stream. He remembered her suggestion of the bridge, and he shut his teeth with a snap. The stream was narrower here, so he had an advantage which, he believed, she had miscalculated. He took his horse back some distance and galloped at the stream. Hazel sat watching him with a smile, just beyond where he should land. His horse shuffled its feet as it came up to the bank. Then it lifted. Slosson clung to the horn of the saddle. Then the horse landed, stumbled, fell, hurling its rider headlong in a perfect quagmire of swamp.
Slosson gathered himself up, a mass of mud and pretty well wet through. Hazel was out of the saddle in a moment and offering him assistance with every expression of concern. She came to the edge of the swamp and reached out her quirt. The man ignored it. He ignored her, and scrambled to dry ground without assistance.
"I told you to take the bridge," Hazel cried shamelessly. "You knew you were on a young horse. Oh dear, dear! What a terrible muss you're in. My, but my daddy will be angry with me for—for letting this happen."
Her apparently genuine concern slightly mollified the man.
"I thought you were putting up another bluff at me, Miss Hazel," he said, still angrily. "Say, you best quit bluffing me. I don't take 'em from anybody."
"Bluff? Why, Mr. Slosson, I couldn't bluff you. I—I warned you. Same as I did about the cat-jumping your horse put up. Say, this is just dreadful. We'll have to get right back, and get you dried out and cleaned. I guess that horse is too young for a—city man. I ought to have given you Sunset. He'd have jumped that stream a mile—if you wanted him to. Say—there, I'll have to round up your horse, he's making for home."