“Oh, she’s a dear,” answered Miss Farnsworth, in a voice as sweet as a flute. “Isn’t she the prettiest thing? She’s a perfect saddle-horse—except for the tricks I haven’t found out yet.”
She was smiling back at him, all traces of petulance smoothed quite out of her face. Her cheeks were brilliantly pink, her hair blown by the breeze. She carried her wide-brimmed straw hat on the pommel of her saddle; evidently it had not proved satisfactory as a riding hat. Altogether, in the brief chance he had for observation, Jarvis was of the notion that there might be two opinions as to what creature was the prettiest thing on the Crofton road that day.
There was not much talk possible. There could be no question that Tim and Tom heard Betty coming on behind them, and were exercised thereby. The mare’s stride was shorter than that of the colts; her hoofbeats reached them in quicker rhythm than their own. As a small clock ticking beside a big one seems to say to the latter, “Hurry up—hurry up”—-so Betty’s rapid trot behind stirred up the young pair in front to greater valor.
If Betty’s rider, being avowedly an expert horsewoman, recognized this, it did not appear in any pains she took to avoid it. Betty danced behind faster and faster; and faster and faster did the blacks strain to draw away from her.
There came at length a moment when Jarvis could not have boasted that he still had them in hand. About the most that he could do was to keep them in the road and on their feet. Two minutes before Miss Agnes Farnsworth appeared at the fork of the road the driver of the blacks could at any moment have pulled them with a powerful hand back upon their haunches and brought them to a quick-breathing standstill. Two minutes afterward neither he nor any other man could have done it.
And yet Jarvis did not make so much as a turn of the head to suggest to Betty’s rider that she call off the race. This, of course, was what he should have done; it was obviously the only common-sense thing to do. Plainly, since he would not do it, there was still one more mettlesome spirit upon the Crofton road to be reckoned with that morning.
II.
Under such circumstances it was nearly inevitable that something should happen. It had seemed to Jarvis, as he was rushed along, that the only thing probable, since Miss Farnsworth had proved her ability to ride the mare, was that he himself should meet disaster in some form. The black team were, to all intents and purposes, and until the cause of their high-headedness should be removed, running away. They were nearing a place which he could see was likely to prove the rockiest and most winding of any part of this rocky and winding New England road.
But, as usual, it was not the foreseen which happened, but the unforeseen. A particularly vigorous lurch of the wagon displaced one of the two trunks from its position, and the next roll and pitch sent it off. The brown mare swerved, but she was so near the back of the wagon that her wheel to the right did not carry her beyond the trunk, itself bounding to the right. The unexpected sheer did not unhorse her rider, but the mare went down in a helpless sprawl over the great obstacle in her path, and the girlish figure in the saddle went with her.
Jarvis had recognized the fall of the trunk, and in the one quick glance back he was able to give he saw the mare go down. His team, startled afresh by the crash, leaped ahead. Although he had been using every muscle more and more strenuously for the last fifteen minutes, new power rushed into his arms. He used every means in his power to quiet the pair, and, after a little, it began to tell. The ceasing of the mare’s hoofbeats upon the road behind withdrew from the situation what had been its most dangerous element, and at length, coming to a sudden sharp rise in the road, Jarvis succeeded in pulling the colts down to a walk. The instant it became possible he turned them about.