we could cross the ridge without being seen, and so get through the
brush before they reached it, we were safe. If they followed, it would
only be a stern chase with the odds in our favour.

The huge vehicle swayed from side to side, rolled, dipped, and plunged,
but Bill kept the track, as if, in the whispered words of the
Expressman, he could "feel and smell" the road he could no longer see.
We knew that at times we hung perilously over the edge of slopes that
eventually dropped a thousand feet sheer to the tops of the sugar-pines
below, but we knew that Bill knew it also. The half visible heads of the
horses, drawn wedge-wise together by the tightened reins, appeared to
cleave the darkness like a ploughshare, held between his rigid hands.
Even the hoof-beats of the six horses had fallen into a vague,
monotonous, distant roll. Then the ridge was crossed, and we plunged
into the still blacker obscurity of the brush. Rather we no longer
seemed to move--it was only the phantom night that rushed by us. The
horses might have been submerged in some swift Lethean stream; nothing
but the top of the coach and the rigid bulk of Yuba Bill arose above
them. Yet even in that awful moment our speed was unslackened; it was as
if Bill cared no longer to _guide_ but only to drive, or as if the
direction of his huge machine was determined by other hands than his. An
incautious whisperer hazarded the paralysing suggestion of our "meeting
another team." To our great astonishment Bill overheard it; to our
greater astonishment he replied. "It 'ud be only a neck and neck race
which would get to h--ll first," he said quietly. But we were
relieved--for he had _spoken!_ Almost simultaneously the wider turnpike
began to glimmer faintly as a visible track before us; the wayside trees
fell out of line, opened up and dropped off one after another; we were
on the broader tableland, out of danger, and apparently unperceived and
unpursued.

[Illustration: "STRUCK A MATCH AND HELD IT FOR HER."]

Nevertheless in the conversation that broke out again with the
relighting of the lamps and the comments, congratulations and
reminiscences that were freely exchanged, Yuba Bill preserved a
dissatisfied and even resentful silence. The most generous praise of his
skill and courage awoke no response. "I reckon the old man waz just
spilin' for a fight, and is feelin' disappointed," said a passenger. But
those who knew that Bill had the true fighter's scorn for an