She gave him one glance of scorn--the last of any sort he received
from her for some time to come. "Have you a saddle?" she asked of the
agent.
"Yes, ma'am. Not a very good one, but such as 'tis."
"Will you ride her home for me?" she asked, over a cool shoulder, of
the man beside her.
"Not while you drive the colts," he answered, with a keen glance at
her, in which she might have read several things if she had taken the
trouble.
"Have you a side-saddle?" she demanded of the freight agent.
"Well--if you'll wait five minutes--I 'low I can get one."
As the man disappeared, Miss Farnsworth jumped down from the wagon
once more. She produced a letter, and, from the letter a key. With
this she opened one of the trunks, which yet stood upon the platform,
lifted a tray, dived among sundry garments, and drew out with an air
of triumph something made of dark green cloth and folded carefully.
With this she walked away into the empty, country freight house.
When, after two minutes' absence, she emerged again, she was holding
up the skirt of a riding habit and carrying a bundle of something
which she took to the trunk and hastily stowed away. She said nothing
whatever to Jarvis, but stood awaiting the return of the freight agent
with an averted cheek.
When the mare reappeared upon the scene she wore an old side-saddle of
ancient pattern, and was clumsily bridled with headgear too large for
her. Jarvis gave her one glance, and spoke with decision.
"If you will hold these horses a minute, I'll look that affair over,"
he said.
The other man grinned. "All the same to me," he returned, amicably.
"Like enough you're more used to this sort of business than I be."
Jarvis went at the big bridle, rearranging straps, getting out his
knife and cutting an extra hole or two, tightening it and bringing it
more nearly to fit the sleek, small head of the mare. Miss Farnsworth
looked on silently. If she appreciated this care for her safety, she
did not make it apparent. Only, as Jarvis finished a very careful
examination and testing of the side-saddle and stood erect with a
smile at her, she said: "Thank you"--quite as if she had no mind to
say it. With which he was obliged to be content.
He silently put her upon the mare, held the animal quiet while he
looked for the space of one slow breath gravely up into the girl's
face, meeting only lowered lashes and a scornful mouth, and let go the
bits. An instant later brown Betty and her rider were twenty rods down
the road.
The two men watched her round the turn. Then Jarvis sprang to his
place.
"Load the rest of the stuff in--quick," he said, and the other obeyed.
"Gee!" remarked the station agent to himself, watching the cloud of
dust in which the wagon was disappearing. "Looks like he'd got left.
He can't catch the mare--not with that load. Say, but her and Betty
made a picture--that's right."
* * * * *
The road from Crofton Junction to the Hempstead Farms lay, for the
most part, down hill. The black pair appreciated this fact. They had
been trained in double harness from the beginning, and their ideas of
life and its purposes were identical. They now joined forces to take
the freight home in the shortest and most impracticable space of time.
Jarvis kept them well in hand. If he had had them in front of a light
vehicle of some sort, unencumbered with a miscellaneous and unstowable
lot of freight, he would have enjoyed letting them have their will. As
it was, he was obliged to consider several conflicting elements in the
situation and restrain the colts accordingly. His pace, therefore, was
not sufficiently fast to allow him to gain upon the fleet-footed mare
and her rider, and the winding road gave him no hint of their
whereabouts. He did not belong to the household of boarders at the
Hempstead Farms; his presence there just now was a matter of business
with one of the elderly gentlemen who were taking their vacation upon
the farmhouse porch--that and a certain willingness to attend
carefully and unhurriedly to business which had brought him within
sight of a certain girl.
It was a bit dull driving back alone. He was not familiar with the
road; it was not the one by which he had come. Miss Farnsworth had not
planned this outcome of the trip from the beginning--he gave her
credit for that; neither could he expect a girl who had fallen in love
with, and purchased, a saddle horse within the short space of fifteen
minutes, to wait for it to be sent leisurely home. But it occurred to
him that she might have been willing to let the mare trot lightly
along the road just ahead of the blacks, where Betty's nearness might
least disconcert Tim and Tom, and where she might now and then
exchange a word with their driver over her shoulder--even that cool
shoulder of hers.
All at once he caught sight of the brown mare. As he approached a fork
in the road, Miss Farnsworth and Betty came galloping up the east
split of the fork--the one which did not lead toward Hempstead Farms.
He laughed to himself, for he perceived at once that she had taken the
wrong road and was spurring to get back to the fork before he should
have passed.
But in this she did not succeed. Jarvis reached the corner before her.
He drew up a little to let her in ahead of him, for the road was
narrow. But as she neared him she motioned him ahead, and to humor her
when he could he went on, though he doubted the wisdom of letting the
blacks hear Betty's sharp-ringing little hoofs at their heels.
"How do you like her?" he called, as he passed, managing a shift of
the reins and an uplifted hat. He smiled at her quite as if he had
nothing in the world against her, though he was feeling at the moment
that the brute creation are not the only things which need a certain
amount of taming.
"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.