latter, "Hurry up--hurry
up"---so Betty's rapid trot behind stirred up the young pair in front
to greater valor.

If Betty's rider, being avowedly an expert horsewoman, recognized
this, it did not appear in any pains she took to avoid it. Betty
danced behind faster and faster; and faster and faster did the blacks
strain to draw away from her.

There came at length a moment when Jarvis could not have boasted that
he still had them in hand. About the most that he could do was to keep
them in the road and on their feet. Two minutes before Miss Agnes
Farnsworth appeared at the fork of the road the driver of the blacks
could at any moment have pulled them with a powerful hand back upon
their haunches and brought them to a quick-breathing standstill. Two
minutes afterward neither he nor any other man could have done it.

And yet Jarvis did not make so much as a turn of the head to suggest
to Betty's rider that she call off the race. This, of course, was what
he should have done; it was obviously the only common-sense thing to
do. Plainly, since he would not do it, there was still one more
mettlesome spirit upon the Crofton road to be reckoned with that
morning.

II.

Under such circumstances it was nearly inevitable that something
should happen. It had seemed to Jarvis, as he was rushed along, that
the only thing probable, since Miss Farnsworth had proved her ability
to ride the mare, was that he himself should meet disaster in some
form. The black team were, to all intents and purposes, and until the
cause of their high-headedness should be removed, running away. They
were nearing a place which he could see was likely to prove the
rockiest and most winding of any part of this rocky and winding New
England road.

But, as usual, it was not the foreseen which happened, but the
unforeseen. A particularly vigorous lurch of the wagon displaced one
of the two trunks from its position, and the next roll and pitch sent
it off. The brown mare swerved, but she was so near the back of the
wagon that her wheel to the right did not carry her beyond the trunk,
itself bounding to the right. The unexpected sheer did not unhorse her
rider, but the mare went down in a helpless sprawl over the great
obstacle in her path, and the girlish figure in the saddle went with
her.

Jarvis had recognized the fall of the trunk, and in the one quick
glance back he was able to give he saw the mare go down. His team,
startled afresh by the crash