"It wasn't very bad--and I did _want_ to see the whole school so much.

So--so I took one of my pencils to our teacher and asked her if she would ask the other scholars if it was theirs.

"Of course, all the other girls in our room said it wasn't," proceeded Lluella. "Then teacher said just what I wanted her to say: 'You may inquire in the other cla.s.ses.' So I went around and saw all the other cla.s.ses and had a real nice time.

"But when I got back with the pencil in my hand still, Belle come near getting me into trouble."

"Uh-huh!" admitted Belle, nodding.

"How?" asked somebody.

"She just whispered--right out loud, 'Lluella, that is your pencil and you know it!' And I had to say--right off, 'It isn't, and I didn't!' Now, what could I have said else? But it was an awful fib, I s'pose."

The a.s.sembled girls laughed. But Ann Hicks was still seriously inclined not to go into the woods, although she had no idea of telling a fib about it. And because she was too proud to say to the teacher in charge that she feared Miss Mitch.e.l.l's tongue, the western girl joined the greens-gathering party at the very last minute.

There were two four-seated sleighs, for there was a hard-packed white track into the woods toward Triton Lake. Old Dolliver drove one, and his helper manned the other. The English teacher was in charge. She hoped to find bushels of holly berries and cedar buds as well as the materials for wreaths.

One pair of the horses was western--high-spirited, hard-bitted mustangs.

Ann Hicks recognized them before she got into the sleigh. How they pulled and danced, and tossed the froth from their bits!

"I feel just as they do," thought the girl. "I'd love to break out, and kick, and bite, and act the very Old Boy! Poor things! How they must miss the plains and the free range."

The other girls wondered what made her so silent. The tang of the frosty air, and the ring of the ponies' hoofs, and the jingle of the bells put plenty of life and fun into her mates; but Ann remained morose.

They reached the edge of the swamp and the girls alighted with merry shout and song. They were all armed with big shears or sharp knives, but the berries grew high, and Old Dolliver's boy had to climb for them.

Then the accident occurred--a totally unexpected and unlooked for accident. In stepping out on a high branch, the boy slipped, fell, and came down to the ground, hitting each intervening limb, and so saving his life, but dashing every bit of breath from his lungs, it seemed!

The girls ran together, screaming. The teacher almost fainted. Old Dolliver stooped over the fallen boy and wiped the blood from his lips.

"Don't tech him!" he croaked. "He's broke ev'ry bone in his body, I make no doubt. An' he'd oughter have a doctor----"

"I'll get one," said Ann Hicks, briskly, in the old man's ear. "Where's the nearest--and the best?"

"Doc Haverly at Lumberton."

"I'll get him."

"It's six miles, Miss. You'd never walk it. I'll take one of the teams----"

"You stay with him," jerked out Ann. "I can ride."

"Ride? Them ain't ridin' hosses, Miss," declared Old Dolliver.

"If a horse has got four legs he can be ridden," declared the girl from the ranch, succinctly.

"Take the off one on my team, then----"

"That old plug? I guess not!" exclaimed Ann, and was off.

She unharnessed one of the pitching, snapping mustangs. "Whoa--easy! You wouldn't bite me, you know," she crooned, and the mustang thrust forward his ears and listened.

She dropped off the heavy harness. The bridle she allowed to remain, but there was no saddle. The English teacher came to her senses, suddenly.

"That creature will kill you!" she cried, seeing what Ann was about.

"Then he'll be the first horse that ever did it," drawled Ann. "Hi, yi, yi! We're off!"

To the horror of the teacher, to the surprise of Old Dolliver, and to the delight of the other girls, Ann Hicks swung herself astride of the dancing pony, dug her heels into his ribs, and the next moment had darted out of sight down the wood road.

CHAPTER XI

A NUMBER OF THINGS

There may have been good reason for the teacher to be horrified, but how else was the mustang to be ridden? Ann was a big girl to go tearing through the roads and 'way into Lumberton astride a horse. Without a saddle and curb, however, she could not otherwise have clung to him.

Just now haste was imperative. She had a picture in her mind, all the way, of that boy lying in the snow, his face so pallid and the b.l.o.o.d.y foam upon his lips.

In twenty-five minutes she was at the physician's gate. She flung herself off the horse, and as she shouted her news to the doctor through the open office window, she unbuckled the bridle-rein and made a leading strap of it.

So, when the doctor drove out of the yard in his sleigh, she hopped in beside him and led the heaving mustang back into the woods. Of course she did not look ladylike at all, and not another girl at Briarwood would have done it. But even the English teacher--who was a prude--never scolded her for it.

Indeed, the doctor made a heroine of Ann, Old Dolliver said he never saw her beat, and the boy, who was so sadly hurt (but who pulled through all right in the end) almost worshipped the girl from Silver Ranch.

"And how she can ride!" the very girl who had treated Ann the meanest said of her. "What does it matter if she isn't quite up to the average yet in recitations? She _will_ be."

This was after the holidays, however. There was too short a time before Belle Tingley and her friends started for Cliff Island for Ann to particularly note the different manner in which the girls in general treated her.

The party went on the night train. Mr. Tingley, who had some influence with the railroad, had a special sleeper side-tracked at Lumberton for their accommodation. This sleeper was to be attached to the train that went through Lumberton at midnight.

Therefore they did not have to skip all the fun of the dance. This was one of the occasions when the boys from the Seven Oaks Military Academy were allowed to mix freely with the girls of Briarwood. And both parties enjoyed it.

Belle's mother had arrived in good season, for she was to chaperone the party bound for Logwood, at the head of Tallahaska Lake. She pa.s.sed the word at ten o'clock, and the girls got their hand-baggage and ran down to the road, where Old Dolliver waited for them with his big sleigh. The boys walked into town, so the girls were nicely settled in the car when Tom Cameron and his chums reached the siding.

Belle Tingley's two brothers were not too old to be companions for Tom, Bob, and Isadore Phelps. And they were all as eager for fun and prank-playing as they could be.

Mrs. Tingley had already retired and most of the girls were in their dressing gowns when the boys arrived. The porter was making up the boys'

berths as the latter tramped in, bringing on their clothing the first flakes of the storm that had been threatening all the evening.

"Let the porter brush you, little boy," urged Madge, peering out between the curtains of her section and admonishing her big brother. "If you get cold and catch the croup I don't know what sister _will_ do! Now, be a good child!"

"Huh!" grunted Isadore Phelps, trying to collect enough of the snow to make a ball to throw at her. "I wonder at you, Bobbins. Why don't you make her behave? Treatin' you like an over-grown kid."

"I'd never treat _you_ that way, Master Isadore," said Madge, sweetly.

"For you very well know that you're not grown at all!"