The Race
“If it weren’t for the trees, we ought to be able to see them now.
But—merciful hop toads! this trail is crooked enough to break a snake’s
back, isn’t it?”
Treff Graham grasped it, ducking low to avoid the tall bushes and small
trees that almost swept him off his plunging horse as he followed
Pemrose down the shoulder of Little Sister mountain.
The girl had started off recklessly at a fast trot—a chameleon-like trot
that was now a slip now a wild plunge—Revelation feeling with his fore
feet for a footing—and now a coasting gait in which he slid upon his
haunches; then the pace slackened, to become again the slip and slide
and plunge in which girl and horse, flashing amid the bright fall
foliage, turned all sorts of colors in the early light.
“Are you—are you coming?” she shouted impatiently over her shoulder.
“Sure—thing! As fast as I can come!” bellowed the boy; and then he swung
his whip and whooped, as the trail grew for a moment easier.
“Camp Fire Girls on top,” he yelled. “Look—there!”
Rising in his stirrups on the plunging horse he pointed to two white
arms stretched in benediction from the tallest tree upon the shoulder of
Little Sister.
“If anybody found a trace of her, he was to signal the other search
parties,” young Treff had said, two minutes before. “The sign was to be
two smokes—or a white cloth waving. We haven’t time for the smokes—and a
handkerchief won’t show up very far.”
“My sweater—my jersey!” Pemrose had gasped. “I can ride on in my
blouse.”
“Camp Fire Girls on top, eh?” Treff let out another Western yell, as he
pointed to the cream-white arms burgeoning in the wind. “And, by heaven!
they are on top,” he cried. “They have crashed through. Una—what this
summer must have been doing for her! And nobody suspected it.... There’s
another bit of blue rag!”
With a rearing swerve of his horse he plucked it from the bush on which
it had lit; the fine bit of cloth, true blue, cut or gnawed from a
girl’s riding habit—perhaps by the teeth of the girl whose brain had
been a fragile flower basket.
“I suppose she felt that there was no use in putting up, trying to put
up, any open fight against that kidnapping relative,” he said. “The only
thing she could do—all that she could do was to leave such clues as she
could behind her. Well! we’re on their track, sure enough. Horses’
prints in that swamp there, Revel’s among them, I’ll be sworn—toes
turning out! They’ve ridden down the mountain on the opposite side from
that on which we came up—and this—this is the blamed ‘cheekyside’,
too—of all the cross trails—”
Already he was falling behind—gnashingly behind—upon the clumsy and
“winded” Cartoon, on the difficult trail that zigzagged over the
mountain’s shoulder among birches and red maples a few inches in
diameter, from twelve to fifteen feet in height.
But the slender little trees, herding together, could screen from view
any riders making headway upon the lower stretches of that corkscrew
trail.
“If only Una could know that we’re after her—hotfoot!” he raged to the
tormenting branches that swept his face.
And one minute later the world rocked to the cry:
“There they—are!”
There they were, visible, plainly visible, at an almost perpendicular
angle, half-a-mile below, the little round-shouldered figure on the bay
cob dragging another dark object along, the hanging-back figure of Una
on Revel—Revel rolling wearily, as the trail widened, and tugging upon
the lead strap.
“Ha-loo!” The yell which the young aviator discharged, then, just tore
at the mountain’s heart, calling on every echo in heaven and earth to
help it to reach the unwilling fugitive, the agonized girl, there below.
Agony was in another girlish heart, too. The whole mountain blazed like
a brush fire, as she saw them.
“Are—are you with me—still? Can you—see-ee....” she called back.
“Yes! I’m—coming. As fast as I can! Careful—now! Better l-late than not
at all!”
But that was the moment, the harebrained moment, when the boy rider, all
burning up within, too, disregarded his own maxim.
The trail, the winding trail, was steep enough, but here and there upon
the mountainside were little precipitous cross-cuts by which a daredevil
could cut corners, gain an advantage, strike in on the trail again, with
a saving of a few hundred yards.
One presented itself at the moment—a mere gash, lined with stones as big
as the rider’s fist.
“Gee whiz! If ’twas a thermometer, the mercury would have hard work
climbing it, even in July,” was his freakish thought, thrown off by the
laboring excitement—the wild heartache, too—within. “Going down, I’ll
risk—it!”
He put Cartoon at the stony “thermometer”—and in three seconds horse and
rider were seeing stars.
Cartoon had slid and fallen. And a young aviator was testing the stones
with the back of his head—finding them more heartless than the flower
clock into which he had once tumbled.
“Stars, moons and suns!” He sat up, gasping, rubbing his poll, while the
whole firmament whirled about him. “Merciful hop.... I hope you’re not
done for!” He blinked, half-stunned, at his horse.
But Cartoon, trembling all over, grunting like a cyclone, had escaped
with bruises.
“Well! we’re out of it now,” groaned the boy. “But Revelation won’t lose
them; he—he’ll come up after them ‘as tight as he can.’”
Dizzily he was leading his horse down on to the trail again—while a
girlish cry rang back in piteous accents.
The stony clatter had reached Pemrose. Even with those flying figures
ahead, now seen, now unseen, upon the mountain’s lower slopes, she
reined in among the baffling little trees.
“It’s all-ll—right. I’m coming—along. Don’t—lose—them!” She heard her
companion’s fumbling cry.
And now she knew, as she seemed to have known from the first, that when
it came to the last pinch, the last dash for Una’s safety, it would be a
race between Revel and Revelation.
She was out on a road now. The trees were taller on either side of
her—but with great gaps between them.
Heavenly in color they skirted the way: orange of a sugar-maple against
the quivering blue-green of a balsam, coral of a swamp maple, the tender
green of soft pines: and all reflected in the dark breast of a mountain
pool past which she galloped like a rocket.
In her breast was the blackness of the water—the brilliant reflections
painted her hopes of saving Una.
This wood road, an old lumber road, in which the zigzagging trail had
given out, wound, now, around the mountain’s side.
And parallel with it—just below—ran a brawling mountain stream.
Pem had a sort of feeling that, as long as she lived, she would never
lose the note of that stream—always it would flow parallel with her—it
and its cry as it umpired the race.
It was going to be a tight race, that she saw. Revelation was lathered
all over—wet as if she had ridden him through the water. In the moment
that she had reined him in, his eyes had been wild and rolling; he had
pranced about among the bushes, neck deliriously arched—nostrils
smoking.
The other two horsewomen were still an eighth of a mile ahead.
Revel seemed to be going blindly, her neck stretched out, almost level;
now and again she slipped back a step and then—again—she rocked like a
boat; a quickly rolling motion that, if slower, would have been a
pathetic wabble—and Una upon her back!
But the creature beside her was whipping her on, lashing her own tired
horse frantically, too.
And the other pursuer, the youth on whom Pemrose had leaned, was now a
hundred and fifty yards behind.
It was as the girl realized this and the blood seemed bursting through
the pores of her skin with the thought, the question, as to what she
should do when her gallop did bring her up with the riders, that the
stream suddenly burst into a jeer ... an awful jeer.
“Don’t you remember that there’s a ‘washout’ ahead,” it said, “where I,
the water, swung in, some time ago, and ate back into the road: now,
there’s no road there, but a steep bank, a wild bank—clumps of sod ...
and Una can’t keep her seat?”
The blood rushed back upon the girl rider’s heart now. Horrible sounds
were in her ears, as of a hurricane raging around her on a darkened
mountain as, standing in her stirrups, cowering forward, she whipped
Revelation on—coaxed him, by his love for her, on—_brave_ Revelation,
coming up after them as tight as he could.
She saw that eaten-out bank descend at an angle of fifty degrees, its
snaring sod-clumps, wild bushes—girlish feet had once climbed it
breathlessly from below.
“Una could never stick on ... and the woman is mad enough to force her
down it.... And can I hold them back?”
But out of the hurricane came the still small Voice: “You are not
alone,” it said. “On this desperate ride you are not two—and one lagging
far behind—but Three. One is, surely, with you who was with Una when she
sent that message.”
“But I can’t even r-reach them,” Pemrose was sobbing, a moment later,
setting her teeth, for though Revelation was gaining, “coming up tight”,
it was not tight enough; that breakdown in the road was very near—that
chewed-out pit-bank.
“Father-r in—heaven!” The cry could not reach the girlish lips. The
figures ahead were but twenty feet from the washout—the deformity of one
plainly emphasized as she bent forward in the saddle, dragging Revel by
the lead strap—Revel with the martyred wabble, the neck so forlornly
straight.
Una—Una realized what was before her now. She was rocking, too, rocking
fiercely, even striking out at her captor, putting up a
fight—ineffectual. But....
Was the rock near her suddenly cleft—the great rock above the brawling
stream?
It seemed so—so sudden, so like a water jet, was the leap of a dripping
figure from behind it.
Capless, coatless, soaking from a climb along the stream’s bed, it swung
before Pemrose’s eyes—and the whole world became a blinking washout.
Its arm was round Una in the saddle. Its hurling grip was on her
captor’s bridle. It was between the two horsewomen. It bore down the
lead strap, like a thread.
“An-drew!” gasped Pemrose—and dropped forward upon Revelation’s neck.