was confounded to find no one
in sight.

Phoebe lay for one moment faint and relaxed upon the ground. The
landscape turned to swimming silhouettes before her eyes, and all sounds
were momentarily stilled. Then life came surging back in a welcome tide
and she rose unsteadily to her feet. She walked as quickly as she could
to where the three horses stood loosely tied by their bridles to a
tree. At any moment the man she feared might appear again at the
opening in the wall.

She untied all three horses and, choosing a powerful gray for her own,
she slipped his bridle over her arm so as to leave both hands free.
Then, bringing together the bridles of the other two, she tied them
together in a double knot, then doubled that, and struck the two animals
sharply with the bridle of the gray. Naturally they started off in
different directions, and, pulling at their bridles, dragged them into
harder knots than her weak fingers could have tied.

She laughed in the triumph of her ingenuity and scrambled with foot and
knee and hand into place astride of the remaining steed. Thus in the
seclusion of the pasture had she often ridden her mare Nancy home to the
barn.

There was a shout of anger and amazement from the road, and she saw the
two men who had elected to walk farther on running toward her.

Turning her steed, she slapped his neck with the bridle and chopped at
his flanks with the stirrups as best she could. The horse broke into an
easy canter, and for the moment she was free.

Unfortunately, Phoebe found herself virtually without means for urging
her steed to his best pace. Accustomed as he was to the efficient
severity of a man's spurred heel, he paid little attention to her
gentle, though urgent, voice, and even the stirrups were hardly
available substitutes for spurs, since her feet could not reach them
and she could only kick them flapping back against the horse's sides.

Her one chance was that she might meet Sir Guy in time, and she could
only pray that the knots in the bridles of the remaining horses would
long defy every effort to release them. As she turned the curve among
the apple-trees, she looked back and saw that the horses had been caught
and that all three men were frantically tugging and picking with fingers
and teeth at those obstinate knots.

Phoebe drew up for a moment a few yards beyond the curve and broke off
a long, slender switch from an overhanging bough. Then, urging the horse
forward again,