in the tops of the pines.

But Ida Bellethorne, the black mare, gave Betty no opportunity of stopping
to listen to the wind mourn. No, indeed! The girl had all she could do for
the first mile or two to keep her saddle and cling to the reins.

When first they set forth from the Candace stables the mare went gingerly
enough for a few rods. She seemed to know that the frozen crust of the old
drifts just beneath the loose snow was perilous.

But her sharpened calks gave her a grip on the frozen snow that the wise
mare quickly understood. She lengthened her stride. She gathered speed.
And once getting her usual swift gait, with expanded nostrils and erect
ears, she skimmed over the frozen way as a swallow skims the air. Betty
had never traveled so fast in her life except in a speeding automobile.

She could easily believe that Ida Bellethorne had broken most of the track
records of the English turf. She might make track history here in the
United States, if nothing happened to her!

Betty was wise enough to know that, had Mr. Candace been at home, even in
this earnest need for a surgeon he would never have allowed the beautiful
and valuable mare to have been used in this way. But there was no other
horse on the place that could be trusted to travel at any gait.

Ida Bellethorne certainly was traveling! The speed, the keen rush of the
wind past her, the need for haste and her own personal peril, all served
to give Betty a veritable thrill.

If Ida made a misstep--if she went down in a heap--Betty was pretty sure
that she, herself, would be hurt. She retained a tight grip upon the
reins. The mare was no velvet-mouthed animal. Betty doubted if she had the
strength in her arms to pull the creature down to a walk now that she was
started.

The instructions Mrs. Candace had given the girl pointed to a descent into
the valley for some miles, and almost by a direct road, and then around a
sharp turn and up the grade by a branch road to the village where Dr. Pevy
lived. Betty was sure she would not lose her way; the question was, could
she cling to the saddle and keep the mare on her feet until the first
exuberance of Ida's spirit was controlled? The condition of the road did
not so much matter, for once the mare found that she did not slip on the
crust she trod the way firmly and with perfect confidence.

"She is a dear--she undoubtedly is," Betty thought. "But I feel just as
though I were being run away with by a steam eng