After luncheon, they set out for further explorations (having deposited the basket in a secret place) and always Kate Menzies's laugh was the loudest, her jokes the merriest.
'Auld, say ye?' mother Paterson complained. 'A lassie—a very lassie! Ye can skip about like a twa-year-auld colt.'
By and by they made their devious and difficult way down the glen again; and they had tea at the inn; and then they set out to drive back to Glasgow—and there was much singing the while. That is, up to a certain point; for this easy homeward drive, as it turned out, was destined to be suddenly and sharply stopped short, and that in a way that might have produced serious consequences. They were bowling merrily along, taking very little heed of anything on either side of them, when, as it chanced, a small boy who had gone into a field to recover a kite that had dropped there, came up unobserved behind the hedge, and threw the kite over, preparatory to his struggling through himself. The sudden appearance of this white thing startled the cob; it swerved to the other side of the road, hesitated, and was like to rear, and then getting an incautious cut from Kate's whip, away it tore along the highway, getting completely the mastery of her. Ronald got up behind.
'Give me the reins, lass,' he called to her.
'I'll manage him—the stupid beast!' she said; with her teeth shut firm.
But all her pulling seemed to make no impression on the animal—nay, the trap was now swaying and jolting about in a most ominous manner.
'If ye meet anything, we're done for, Kate—run the wheel into the hedge.'
It was excellent advice, if it could have been properly followed; but unluckily, just at the very moment when, with all her might and main, she twisted the head of the cob to the side of the road, there happened to be a deep ditch there. Over the whole thing went—Ronald and Mrs. Menzies being pitched clean into the hedge; mother Paterson, not hanging on so well, being actually deposited on the other side, but in a gradual fashion. Oddly enough, the cob, with one or two pawings of his forefeet, got on to the road again, and the trap righted itself; while a farm-lad who had been coming along ran to the beast's head and held him. As it turned out, there was no harm done at all.
But that, at first, was apparently not Kate Menzies's impression.
'Ronald, Ronald,' she cried, and she clung to him frantically, 'I'm dying—I'm dying—kiss me!'