"He's going up stream. Oh dear!"
That was precisely what he began to do, and before he had gone a rod he stumbled dreadfully over a stone on the bottom, and the boys on the bridge gave a shout, and Johnny Craddock could hear his mother calling him to "come right back this minute."
Grandmother Medill said something too, and so did Joe Somers's three aunts; but old Lightning had only just settled in Ridgeville, and was not acquainted with either of them. He stumbled right along into still deeper water, and his four riders clung to him and to each other desperately.
"There's the island!" gasped Johnny Craddock. "It's awful deep and swift both sides of that."
A long, low, bushy affair was the island, and the water poured all over it in flood times; but it was dry now, and the grass had a fresh, green, inviting look to the eyes of Lightning. He had been drinking, and he would now eat. He made straight for the island, and his load held on until he got there.
They did not utter a sound while he was pulling his feet out of the mud at the shore, but the moment he was high and dry among the grass and bushes, boy after boy came sliding down, until Lightning's long back was bare again.
"Here we are! Hurrah!"
Three of those boys had been born and brought up in Ridgeville, but not one of them had ever before been to that island on horseback.
There was something almost grand about it until Mrs. Craddock and the rest gathered on the river-bank, within very easy speaking distance, and began to tell what they thought of the performance. There were at least six distinct voices telling Peter Burrows to catch his horse, and bring to the shore the three poor fellows upon whom he had played that wicked trick.
Poor Pete! Just at that moment old Lightning had discovered that all the grass on the island was coarse, hard, speary bunch-grass and swamp-grass, unfit for a horse like himself. He turned willingly away from it, and before a grasp could be made at his halter, he was pulling his feet out of the shore mud again, as he waded away from the island into the river.