“If it had ha’ been Her, I’d ha’ come within the breadth of a cow’s thumb of shooting Her!”

“But who’s—‘Her’?” The Guardian thrust a peering face forward, benighted merriment in her eyes; so did other lively girls; this was worth a wetting.

“Um-m. If you ask me, I’ll say she’s as rank a witch as ever rode on ragwort—I’ll say so! The wife she was talking about her jest now, when the thunder woke us hoping she’d ridden safe home—with my slippers—posy slippers.”

Pemrose suddenly sat up stiffly—ear-hungry.

“Your—slippers!” It was a hen-like cackle from the hay.

“Um-m.” The farmer caressed his shotgun—growling like a bear with a sore paw.

“But who is She?” put forth the Guardian again; she felt that a lease of the hayloft for the night—perhaps breakfast in the morning—would depend upon the sympathy shown to a highly exasperated man, fresh from an unpleasant “curtain” talk.

“Wal! now, I reckon she’s a stray bird, like yerselves—a stranger, or almost so. She ha’n’t been around these parts much more’n a year—blamed heather cat, always on the roam! The wife she calls her the Little Lone Lady—my wife’s awful stuck on her—an’ I reckon she does come o’ grammar folks—edicate! Other o’ the mountain people call her Magic Margot, jollying-like—or the spell-woman, ’cause she can tell things—put over things—that other folks can’t.” He dropped his voice to a croon of nocturnal mystery.

“Does she—does she ride a bay horse—an umbrella in her stirrup strap, a red handkerchief round her neck—something shiny upon her heel—at times?” Pemrose’s breath came hotly—her hand was to her heart.

“Umph!” The sore bear nodded. “Oh! ’tisn’t the fust time I’ve heard the midnight shog, shog, of her bay cob’s hoofs stoppin’—heard her stealin’ up into this loft, to roost. But—never again, s’ ’elp me!” He brought his unseen feet down upon the ladder, with a vehemence that started a hayquake.

“Why! what has she done now?” It was a general chorus from the guild of glee, excited girls, done to death with weariness, yet tickled all over with the sensation that, much as the vacation had promised them, they had not expected melodrama.

“Gosh! yes. She was at our house to-day, jest a while afore I met you-uns on the valley trail.” The farmer thrust a red lantern up. “I was out diggin’ ’mong the ‘crony hills’, pertater patch; an’ she jest came it all over my wife with some palaver about a good offer we was going to get for this plaguy farm, where rocks grow—an’ every one of ’em rooted out means a back ache,” he mopped his face, “knowledge she didn’t have from no nat’ral source, you understand—the Little Lone Lady. She had some kind of a ‘fore-go’, too, ’bout a great cryin’ out there’d be ’mong all the animals ’fore morning. An’ the wife she was so carried away with her that I’m blessed if she didn’t give her a good fat chicken, to carry home in her saddlebag—she allers has that saddlebag bulging, too—an’ the pair o’ red slippers that she was workin’ with roses fer me—cut ’em down to fit her ... she got the red felt f’om her brother who works in an organ factory.”

So this was the load which the trail-bear had carried upon his sore head when he felt that the valley was beyond “God bless you”! There were smothered shrieks from the hay.

“Poor wronged man! You have all our sympathy—all our sympathy!” The Guardian touched his hand. “Can’t you get them back? Won’t she—disgorge?”

“Not much! Not, when she’s ridden off with ’em to her den, her little cabin on a lonely peak, ’bout nine miles from here. She lived there alone all last winter—when she wasn’t on the go, riding round among the mountains—living on crumbs, the neighbors gave her.... Oh! she’s a sleek-gabbed one, but sometimes I think she’s as cracked as she’s sly—and keen.” He sighed.

“It’s easy to see how she comes by her ‘fore-goes’ about the weather and so forth—a radio receiver in that bulky umbrella,” murmured Pemrose.

“Wall, anyhow, I ain’t ‘cock-bird-high’ to be caught by her chaff.” The farmer stamped again. “The women they go an’ see her an’ come back with tales o’ what they hear and see—my wife with a muslin mouth upon her, all stiff and starched, tellin’ about strange water-burn, little cloudy-bright rings an’ shapes floating up from it—some new brand o’ angels, I suppose, visiting with her, the Little Lone Lady.”

“Um-m. Phosphine, I guess, Daddy would say!” whispered Pemrose to the hay.

“I didn’t see none of it when I went to ask her about Paddy’s cough—you can hear him now underneath you.”

There was a wild burst of laughter at this give-away, mingled with the blowing noise of a windy cougher.

“Wal! as you ain’t Her and want to spend the night here ... you ain’t got no candles nor matches about you?” he asked suspiciously.

“No, nothing that could start a fire,” the Guardian assured him, intent now on seeing that the girls removed their wet shoes.

“Well! good rest to ye on the hay. Mebbe there’ll be a bite o’ breakfast comin’ to ye—for I vum ye can stand more ’n most city folks, though there’s one among ye that looks a dainty piece—not meant for any hard-sleddin’.” He raised the lantern, until its ray singled out Una, yawning upon the hay. “So-o long!” He backed down the ladder—gun and lantern. But, again, he thrust his head up and glared around. “Look out—folks!” he began; “this ’ere hay-loft—.” But, once more, he saw red, the red of his “rosie” slippers. “Gosh!” he gurgled, “lucky fer Her that she warn’t you; I swear to goodness! I’d ha’ come within a grain o’ shooting Her.” The lantern gave a final flash and disappeared.

“Well! now—now that old ‘Bunch o’ Spinach’ has gone, I guess we can settle to sleep,” gasped Lura.

“Don’t call—names,” mumbled the Guardian, who was seeing that Una got out of damp clothing. “Aren’t we lucky not to be Her!”

It was a new flash light, mornie-blink, stealing up the ladder and through the loft transom, some three hours later.

It fell on tired face, trailing limbs, tossing promiscuously upon the hay.

“What’s—that?” Una sat up suddenly.

“Only the rain. Another shower! Sounds—sounds like bricks upon a tin roof!” Pemrose yawned. “Well! ducky, didn’t we have a good night—what was left of it—in spite of that old ‘Hayseed’ and his slippers?”

“Poor old bear! No wonder he called himself beyond God bless you!” mumbled Dorothy. “Last night—didn’t it put the cream on experiences—camping experiences?”

“I’ll say—so.” Pemrose echoed the boy’s slang, cuddling close to her loft-mate, her dearest joke-fellow, Una, careful, in her tickled laughter, not to wake fifteen slumbering girls stretched like trailing plants around their Guardian—their queen of the meadow, raised slightly above them, upon a mouldy dais of hay.

“Isn’t she a—dear? A dear!” Pemrose gazed at the white feather of hair in the brown of the womanly locks, unbound. “Just the woman—I want to be!” dreamily. “The birds, do you hear them? Pecking on the roof!” She pinched Una. “Aren’t they loud—like scratching monkeys? Mercy! what’s—that? A—rat?”

“A rat! Oh! don’t—don’t let me see it,” wailed Una. “And we were so ‘comfy’!”

“A rat! A hor-rid rat, with—oh! tail by the yard,” screamed Dorothy, hopping round, in the dim light, from basement to bank of last year’s hay.

“A rat! Oh! the only thing—the only thing I’d ever want to kill is a rat.”

Did the sinister wish, a rebounding shell, hit Pemrose Lorry, herself—she careering blindly, too?

Had an earthquake struck the barn—or a bomb?

Suddenly the world, the hay, went up; and she went down.

Hay was in her eyes, her ears, her mouth, down her back—she would have made a mule seem a sorry hay-consumer.

She was clutching at it wildly with both hands—and finding it but thin air in her grasp.

In the feeble dawn glimmer she was sinking—being plunged into a shocking world underneath.

And where else she was to go, how far she was to travel in this awful underworld, she did not know, for she had alighted on a horse’s back—alighted in a huddle on a horse’s back!

And there came the scream of Dorothy from the sheep pen, amid a torrent of frightened baas.

“It’s Paddy—the horse with the cough—and he’s trying to rub me off against the stall!”

Even as the knowledge crashed through Pemrose’s brain she was twisting her groping hands fiercely in Paddy’s mane—in the musty gloom of the horse-stall.

Buried alive, she would carry on—as Dorothy was carrying on, judging by the sheep.

She managed to slip one foot from under her, get astride upon the dark, lunging farmhorse—a mountain in the gloom.

“Ha-a! Tha-at’s more like it!” She drew a hissing breath between her teeth.

But if Paddy was drawing comparisons, it was between making hay while the sun shone, greedily pulling down more of it until he was half smothered—and getting rid of the startling burden on his back.

Snorting malignantly, he rocked up against his thrashing stall-mate, Barney, trying to palm that grasshopper burden off on him.

Barney was all reeking excitement, too, in the close, musty quarters.

For a moment, one awful moment, the girl, jammed between their hot, steaming sides, saw herself beneath their mangling hoofs—her life trodden out in the stall.

She was in the lions’ den—and no mistake. For Paddy, great, clodhopping farmhorse, failing to dislodge her thus, swung his dark haunches, lunged with his front shoulder at the dark partition—to crush her there.

But, quick as thought—before his throbbing side could pin her, the girl’s little bare foot, darting forward, was nestling in the hollow of that brutish neck; five tickling, pink toes were stroking it gently—combing it soothingly.

“Treff told me, Treff—Treff,—if ever a horse tries to rub you off, dart your foot forward into the hollow of his neck!” By waves far subtler than radio, she was reaching out now, imploringly to that boy pal with the amber speck of humor in one gray eye—rider of the clouds and rider of the plains.

Across miles of mountain and valley his mantle seemed flung to her, the mantle of his daring, that cock-o’-pluck—so that, with her right leg stretched out, level, across the cross brute’s shoulder and five little toes seductively curry-combing, she was patting the other side of the swollen neck, with a:

“Steady—boy! Steady, there! Easy—now! Who the deuce can parlez-vous a horse? That’s me! Oh-h! five little pigs went to market.”

Was there ever the Paddy, yet, who could resist such treatment?

Two minutes later a farmer, coming in mad haste and trembling to the barn door, beheld, in the dim dawn a girl queening it in dun trappings of hay upon a perfectly docile farmhorse—which rolled the whites of its eyes at him sheepishly—the great jaws grinding upon a sheaf of hay.

“Good—old—Paddy!” Patronizingly she patted the shoulder that would have rubbed her out, rose to a standing position upon the broad back, her up-flung hand gripping the top of the stall.

Coolly she drew herself up, crept along the dark stall-edge, dropped from the partition into the manger and thence, with a light spring, to the barn floor.

“Where are you—Dorothy? Oh-h! where are—you?” she anxiously cried.