Chapter 16

"Not in the least," returned Jarvis, making no motion, however, to resign the reins, "provided you can prove that I am authorized to give up my charge."

She looked at him as if she doubted whether she had heard aright. "You know perfectly well that I am accustomed to horses," she declared, moving as if she intended to change places with him.

He looked full down at her, smiling, but he still drove with the air of one who intends to continue in his present occupation. The black colts were going at a spanking trot, making nothing of the decided upward trend of the road. Their shining coats gleamed in the sun; alertness and power showed in every line of them. They were alive from the tips of their forward-pointing satin ears to the ends of their handsome uncropped tails, and they felt their life quiveringly.

"There is no reason in the world why I shouldn't drive," said Miss Farnsworth, with the pleasantly determined air of a girl who intends ultimately to have her own way. "If you had not appeared just at the moment you did, I should have come alone."

"Do you really think you would?" asked Jarvis, studying the left ear of the nigh horse.

"Certainly. Why not?"

"Because I told Joe not to let you go without me."

She colored under her summer's tan.

"May I ask," she inquired, somewhat stiffly, "why you didn't suggest to me an hour ago that you wished to get to the station?"

Jarvis smiled at this way of putting it. "Joe was intending to go with you," he explained.

She looked puzzled.

"Five minutes before you left, Joe came and told me that an accident had happened to one of his men, and that he couldn't go. He said he didn't think the colts were safe for you. I've been here only three days--I don't know anything about them. Joe does."

"Oh--nonsense!" said the girl. "I'm not afraid of them."

"They ran away day before yesterday."

"That makes no difference."

"They are crazily afraid of everything in the shape of a conveyance run by its own motive power, from a threshing machine to an automobile."

"That makes no difference, either," declared the young person beside him with energy. "Not the least in the world."

"Possibly not--to you. It makes an immense difference to me."

She looked away, although the words were said in a matter-of-fact tone hardly calculated to convey their full importance.

"Since you are here to take the reins away from me when I scream," she said, with a curling lip, "it is perfect nonsense to refuse to let me drive. Mr. Jarvis----"

"Put it politely," he warned her, smiling.

"Please change places with me." She said it imperiously.

He looked steadfastly down into her eyes for an instant, until her glance fell. Then he asked, lightly:

"Have you driven them before?"

"No."

"I wonder why," he mused.

She was silent, but her cheeks burned with displeasure.

"I'm glad we're to have a Fourth of July celebration," said he, driving steadily on. His tone became casual, with a pleasant inflection, quite as if there had been no controversy. "It will do the natives good--stir them up. I took the liberty, after you had sent your order, of wiring the dealer to add rather a good lot of explosives on my own account. They will come along with yours. It's lucky the wagon is big--we shall need it for all the stuff."

But the girl would not talk about the Fourth of July. She sat erect, with her very charming head in the air, and let the miles roll by in silence.

Upon the platform of the small freight house at the junction stood several boxes, a long roll and two trunks--all due at the farmhouse. As the wagon drew up to it, the freight agent came leisurely out to attend to business. His eyes fell at once upon the black team.

"Pretty likely pair," said he, with an approving pat upon the nearest shining flank. "Joe Hempstead's, ain't they? I heard he set considerable store by 'em. Well, they're all right--or will be, when they're a little older. I've got a mare now that I cal'late could show 'em a clean pair o' heels. She's round behind the station. I'll bring her out."

"Of course--that's what we came to see," observed Jarvis, as the man disappeared. "Getting our load is a secondary matter."

"Other matters are always secondary to the sight of a good horse," retorted his companion. She was leaning forward and Jarvis did not miss the opportunity to look at her. He gazed intently at a certain conjunction of curves at the back of her neck--a spot which always tempted him tremendously whenever he saw it.

The freight agent appeared round the corner of the station, leading an animal the sight of which made Jarvis' eyes light with pleasure. Agnes Farnsworth caught her breath softly and leaned still further forward.

The brown mare was led back and forth before them, the colts requiring a strong hand upon the reins as she caracoled in front of their exasperated eyes. Jarvis was obliged to give them his whole attention. But the girl slipped down from the wagon. She went up to the mare and laid a coaxing, caressing hand upon the velvet nose--a hand so gentle that the animal did not resent it. She spoke softly to her; inquired her name, and called her by it in a voice of music--Betty. Presently she asked for the halter, and the freight agent, somewhat doubtful, but too full of admiration for the near presence of beauty to refuse, gave it to her. Then, indeed, did Miss Farnsworth prove the truth of her assertion that she was accustomed to horses. In five minutes she had made love to the mare so effectively that the shy and hitherto somewhat disdainful creature was following her with a slack halter and an entreating nose. Incidentally Betty had allowed the slender fingers to open her mouth.

"Of course you are not selling her," remarked Miss Farnsworth, carelessly, as she walked away to examine her freight.

"Well--had an offer of two hundred and fifty for her last week."

She looked around with an astonished face. "And wouldn't take it?"

"Why--no. She's wu'th three hundred if she's wu'th a cent."

"You won't get three hundred for her," said the girl.

"She's as sound as a nut," declared the freight agent, with indignation. Miss Farnsworth laughed.

"She's a pretty creature," said she, "but I have eyes. How did she hurt her left hind ankle?"

The freight agent stared. "Her left hind ankle! Why--there ain't a sign of a limp in it. And her knee action's perfect."

"She was lame two weeks ago," said the girl, and looked at him. Jarvis had brought his colts to a temporary stand-still, and was observing the little scene with amusement.

"Why--she got a stone in that left hind foot," admitted the freight agent, walking the mare toward the corner of the building. "Any horse'll do that. She ain't lame now--wa'n't then to amount to anything. But I'd like to know how you guessed it."

She was still laughing. "I suppose you would let her go for two hundred and twenty-five, now, wouldn't you?"

The freight agent led his mare away without deigning to reply, except by a shake of the head. He came back and loaded the freight into the wagon, leaving the trunks till the last. As he was shouldering the first of these, Agnes stopped him.

"Will you take two hundred and fifty for Betty?" she asked, with perfect coolness, except for a certain gleam in her eyes.

"You ain't buyin' horses yourself?"

"I asked you a question."

"She ain't no lady's horse."

"I asked you if you would sell her for two hundred and fifty dollars," repeated the girl, and prepared to step up into the wagon. Jarvis was not getting down to assist her. The black pair were too restless for that.

"Why--I'd ought to have three hundred for her," the man hesitated.

Miss Farnsworth set her foot upon the step and drew herself up beside Jarvis. She did not look toward the freight agent. Just as the horses began to swing about, the man upon the platform said, haltingly:

"Well--if you mean it, and can pay me cash----"

She looked at him once more, quite indifferently. "I s'pose you can have her. But she's wu'th more."

"Mr. Jarvis," said the horse buyer, "can we lead her home?"

He shook his head. "Not behind the colts."

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.

II.

Under such circumstances it was nearly inevitable that something should happen. It had seemed to Jarvis, as he was rushed along, that the only thing probable, since Miss Farnsworth had proved her ability to ride the mare, was that he himself should meet disaster in some form. The black team were, to all intents and purposes, and until the cause of their high-headedness should be removed, running away. They were nearing a place which he could see was likely to prove the rockiest and most winding of any part of this rocky and winding New England road.

But, as usual, it was not the foreseen which happened, but the unforeseen. A particularly vigorous lurch of the wagon displaced one of the two trunks from its position, and the next roll and pitch sent it off. The brown mare swerved, but she was so near the back of the wagon that her wheel to the right did not carry her beyond the trunk, itself bounding to the right. The unexpected sheer did not unhorse her rider, but the mare went down in a helpless sprawl over the great obstacle in her path, and the girlish figure in the saddle went with her.

Jarvis had recognized the fall of the trunk, and in the one quick glance back he was able to give he saw the mare go down. His team, startled afresh by the crash, leaped ahead. Although he had been using every muscle more and more strenuously for the last fifteen minutes, new power rushed into his arms. He used every means in his power to quiet the pair, and, after a little, it began to tell. The ceasing of the mare's hoofbeats upon the road behind withdrew from the situation what had been its most dangerous element, and at length, coming to a sudden sharp rise in the road, Jarvis succeeded in pulling the colts down to a walk. The instant it became possible he turned them about.

"Now," he said, aloud, to them--and his voice was harsh with anxiety--"spoil you or not, you may go back at the top of your speed," and he sent them, wild-eyed and breathing hard, straight back over their tracks. And as he neared the place where the mare had fallen, he held his breath and his heart grew sick within him.

It was an unfrequented road, and no one had come over it since himself. As he turned the bend he saw just what he had expected to see, and a great sob shook him. Then he gathered himself, with a mighty grip upon his whole being, for what there might be left to do for her.

The brown mare lay in a pitiful heap, her fore legs doubled under her. Beneath her, kept from being thrown over Betty's head by her foot in the stirrup, and caught under the roll of the mare's body, lay the slender figure of her rider.

"Oh--God!" groaned the man, as he threw himself upon the ground beside her. But as he fearfully turned her head toward him, that he might see first the worst there was, two dark-lashed, gray eyes slowly unclosed and looked up into his, and a smile, so faint that it was but the hint of a smile, trembled about her mouth.

In the swiftness of his relief Jarvis had to lay stern hands upon his own impulses. He smiled back at her with lips not quite steady. Then he set about releasing her.

When he had her out upon the grass she lay very white and still again. "Can you tell me where you are hurt?" he begged. Then, as she did not answer, he dashed off to a brook which gurgled in a hollow a rod away, and, coming back with a soaked handkerchief, gently bathed her face and hair. After a little her eyes unclosed again.

"I--don't think I'm--badly hurt. My shoulder and--my--knee----"

"I'll get you home as soon as you feel able."

She turned her head slowly toward the road. Divining her thought, Jarvis quietly placed himself between her eyes and the body of the brown mare. She understood.

"Is she dreadfully hurt?"

"I'm afraid so."

"Alive?"

He nodded. The girl lay still an instant, then she threw one arm across her eyes, and Jarvis saw that she was softly sobbing. He watched her for a little, then he took her other hand in his, holding it close and tenderly, as one would soothe an unhappy child.

"When I have taken you home," he said, very gently, "I will come back to Betty."

She drew her hand away quickly. "Take me home now," she whispered.

So Jarvis, as best he could, took her home. It was a hard journey, which he would have made easier for her if he could have got her to lean against him. But she sat erect, holding herself with a white face and compressed lips, and Jarvis, thinking things he dared not put into words, drove with as little jolt and jar as might be back to the Hempstead Farms.

Joe, coming across the barnyard, saw them, looked at them a second time, and strode hurriedly forward. Jarvis would have given the horses into his charge and looked after the girl himself, but she forestalled him, and it was Joe, the man of overalls and wide straw hat, who helped her to her room, the porch being for the moment mercifully bereft of boarders. It was the sunny hour of the morning there.

But presently she sent for him. He went at once, for he was preparing, with Joe, to go to the injured horse. Mrs. Hempstead took him to Miss Farnsworth's room, and stayed stiffly by while he crossed to the bed where the girl lay, still in her riding habit. As he came to her she held out her hand.

"Please forgive me," she said, with her head turned away. "I might have killed--you."

"No--you couldn't. I've something to live for, so I'm invulnerable--till I get it."

"Will you do something for me?" she asked. As she lay, with her head turned from him, the warm white curves at the back of her neck appealed to him more irresistibly than ever.

"Anything!"

She thrust one hand down under the folds of her skirt, drew out something heavy and shining which had lain there, and put it into his hand. Then she buried her face in the pillow. "Please----" she began--and could not finish.

Jarvis looked around at his landlady, standing by like the embodiment of propriety. He turned again to the girlish figure shaking with its passionate regret. Then he took the little revolver from her, bent and whispered, "I understand," and went quickly and silently away.

* * * * *

When Jarvis returned to Joe Hempstead, getting ready the flat drag known in country parlance as a "stone boat," his first words were eager.

"Joe, I don't know that there's the slightest hope of saving the mare, but I'd like to bring her home and try. It was out of the question to look her over much there. She went down on her knees--smash--and one leg was certainly broken below the knee. But I've a hope the leg I couldn't get at may only be bruised."

Joe nodded. "We'll do the best we can by her--for the little girl's sake," he declared. "She's a high-spirited young critter--the human one, I mean--but I guess she's a-takin' this pretty hard, and I'd like to help her out."

So presently brown Betty, lifting dumb eyes full of pain at the sound of a caressing voice, found herself in the hands of her friends.

"Well--it's a question, Joe," said Jarvis, slowly, ten minutes later. He was sitting with a hand on the mare's flank, after a thorough and skillful examination. Betty's head lay in Joe's lap, held firmly by hands which were both strong and tender. "It's a question whether it wouldn't be the kindest thing to end her troubles for her. I expect she'd tell us to, if she could talk. She'll have to be put in a sling, of course, and kept there for weeks."

"That there sprained leg----" Joe began, doubtfully.

"Yes--it'll be about as tough a proposition as the broken one. But----"

The two men looked at each other.

"If you say so----" agreed Joe.

"Let's try it," urged Jarvis. "It's a question of human suffering, or brute--and there's a possibility of success. I shall be here a day or two longer--over the Fourth. I'll play nurse as long as I stay--I'd like nothing better. I was born and brought up with horses--in Kentucky."