“He’s flying in our direction—no, down towards the horse-farm,” said Una. “Probably he means to stay there, for a few days. Hear—his purr! Whew!” She turned suddenly a little pale. “If he comes nearer the horses won’t like it.”
The familiar buzz of the aëroplane was, now, only five hundred feet above the trail. The solitary air king was flying southward, along the route by which the girls had come—but down in the direction of the farm.
Suddenly, however, he seemed seized with a fancy for reconnoitering the wild hillside screened by the narrow birch belt, on the other side of the bridle path from that on which he had been winging!
Abruptly he wheeled. As abruptly—as mischievously—he “zoomed” down—until he was only fifty or sixty feet above the trail.
Well! if he was tired of playing mountebank to such lukewarm spectators as the hills, he had lively enough witnesses now.
Every horse was suddenly jumping sidelong—madly—down the slope; those that weren’t backing, crab-fashion, with a frantic show of hind-legs.
But all this—all this was too tame for Revelation.
He had saluted tumbleweed by taking to the slope. He greeted an aviator by taking the fence.
Together with the others he had swerved to the left of the trail—and a few feet down that grassy slope—but there he turned and in mad bounds made for the fence upon the right.
The girl upon him felt as if her head and shoulders were being dragged backward—the rest of her going with the horse.
She had never taken a four-foot fence before—or come anywhere near it.
But there was a mischievous boy, up there, who did stunt-flying a thousand feet up.
She set her teeth. Never once did she grip the saddle. Reuniting her body by an inner jerk, as it were, she rose to the leap—and waved her hand to the aviator as she went over.
“Well! by gracious, that girl is an all-round winner,” chuckled the boy in the sky, as he penitently pulled his “joy-stick” towards him and soared again in a great hurry.
Her head back upon her shoulders again, as it seemed, Revelation’s rider galloped him a little way, wheeled him and with a lift of the reins, saucily high, put him at the fence again, bounded back on to the trail—into the scattered group of girls and horses.