The horse halted and lowered his head to the water-level.
"Poor fellow!" Daisy commented, as he drank in great famished gulps, "don't you ever water him, Dex? Aw, quit! Aw-w—you're mean! There, now—see what you've done," and, as Coleman, red and hot-eyed, drew back from kissing her, Daisy pointed to her hat, afloat on the slough.
"That's nothin'," said Coleman, regarding the hat as it slowly floated away from the side of the buggy.
"Oh, no," said Daisy, with sarcasm, "it just means I've got to go home and get another hat, before we start on this trip you were speaking of. I won't go into Toddburn bareheaded—not even for you."
Coleman rose from his seat. "I'll sure get it for you, right now, Sweetness," he said, "if that's how you feel about it."
"Well, you'd better hurry, for it's sailing away," Daisy advised; "no, you can't reach it over the wheel. You'll have to stand out on the step."
Mr. Dexie Coleman, who believed in doing everything with grace and ease, scorned to grip the honest buggy-top for sensible support, as he poised himself on the iron step, like Hermes, tiptoe for flight, and extended an arm out over the water. He calculated, and rightly, that he could just reach the hat and keep his balance.
But he had not reckoned with a gathering force behind him; and perhaps there was no more surprised man in Toddburn than this cavalier of the sewing machine when, a second or two later, just as his fingers closed upon the hat, a strong push from rearward propelled him sprawlingly into the slough. The water was only three feet deep; but, as he fell horizontally, he went right under.
Mr. Coleman's astonishment at the turn events had taken was so intense that he, as one might say, reclined for a moment in the bottom of the slough, with the water roaring in his ears and choking in his throat, before he gathered his wits together sufficiently to grope to his feet. By the time he had regained a wet uprightness, sputtered the muddy water out of his mouth, and blinked his eyes till vision returned, he found that he was alone in the slough. Daisy had driven the horse out on the farther shore, and was just getting out of the buggy. Mr. Coleman, watching in a fascinated way, with too much water still in his windpipe to speak, saw his late companion loop up the horse's lines in the backhand ring, knotting them so they would not fall and tangle the animal; then give the beast a smart little slap on the flank that started it off at a brisk trot down the trail.