“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.