rse was standing
and hailed her with a laugh.

She looked us over with the dimples changing around her funny mouth.
"You are a mean lot," she said, "to be laughing at a lady."

"We are not laughing at a lady," I answered; "we're laughing at the fun
your horse has been having. He's tickled to death."

"Well," she said, looking down at the steaming horse, "I had to get
here."

"You had to get here?" I echoed. "Goodness alive! Nobody but a girl
would run a horse into the thumps to get anywhere."

"Stupid," she said, "I've just had to get here,--there, I didn't mean
that. I meant I had to get where I was going."

"You were in a terrible hurry a moment ago," said I.

"The horse had to rest," she pouted.

"You might have thought of that," I said, "a little earlier in your
seven miles' run." Then I laughed. The idea of resting the horse was so
delicious that Ump and Jud laughed too.

The horse's knees were trembling and his sides puffing like a bellows.
Here was Brown Rupert, the fastest horse in the Carper stable, a horse
that Cynthia guarded as a man might guard the ball of his eye, run
literally off his legs by this devil-may-care youngster. I would have
wagered my saddle against a sheepskin that she had started Brown Rupert
on the jump from the horse-block and held him to a gallop over every one
of those seven blessed miles.

"Well," she said, "are you going to ride on? Or are you going to sit
there like a lot of grinning hoodlums?"

Ump pulled off his hat and swept a laughable bow over his saddle horn.
"Where are you goin', my pretty maid?" he chuckled.

She straightened in the saddle, then dropped him a courtesy as good as
he had sent, and answered, "Fair sir, I ride 'cross country on my own
business." And she gathered up the bridle in her supple little hand.

Jud laughed until the great thicket roared with the echo. Sir Questioner
had caught it on the jaw.

"My dear Miss Touch-me-not," I put in, "let me give you a piece of
advice. That horse is winded. If you start him on the gallop, you'll
burst him."

She lifted her chin and looked me in the eye. "A thousand thank you's,"
she said, "and for advice to you, sir, don't believe anything you hear."
Then she turned Brown Rupert and rode down the way she had come, sitting
as straight in the saddle as an empress. For a moment the sunlight
filtering through the poplar branches made queer mottled spots of gold
on her curly head, then the trees closed in, and