On the left was still the green slope, starred with wild flowers—ablaze with hardhack and broad-leaved fireweed.
To the right there was now a curving snake fence, four feet high, the boundary of some estate or farm, with ten feet of grass between it and the beaten trail.
Beyond the fence was a broader grass strip, fringed by a narrow timber belt, a screen for the rugged mountainside that rose behind it.
Ahead was the Gap, flanked by its towering peaks, with their silvery rock elbows, framing, as in a miniature, a glimpse of still loftier peaks, beyond; of rich, green bottom lands between—and over all the glory of a lamb’s wool sky, in mid-July.
“Oh! now—now, all the words have got patches on them, indeed. One can’t find any to fill the Gap with!” Una laughed. “But _there_! Oh! look there.” She rose in her saddle so suddenly, so wildly, that even Revel resented it, shook her fair head protestingly.
“Above—above the Gap! Right over it! Against—the sky!” she cried. “That—silver—speck, tumbling speck, what is it?” And now the thong of her riding crop, frantically waving, seemed, from afar, to loop the speck.
“I believe—I believe it’s an aëroplane! Aëroplane doing stunts up there! A—a thousand feet above the Gap!” Pemrose’s heart was stunt-flying too. “Oh-h! now. See there! Turning somersaults! Flying upside down. Maybe it’s Treff! He’s dare-devil—enough.”
Just as the “zooming” bats had wheeled and turned somersaults against the black and blue night-sky, on the girls’ first night out, so this jolly air king was having his free frolic in the sun’s eye, cutting all sorts of festive capers, or flitting, a radiant dragon fly, from peak to peak, above the hills.
It gave the crowning touch to the landscape—and skyscape. For it was Life: Life joyous, dominant—devil-may-care.
“Look! Look, girls! Oh, look!” Una pointed him out to those behind. “Stunt-flying—an aviator! Isn’t that gr-reat?... I guess it is Treff—that ‘nickum’ cousin of mine—and his new ‘bus.’ Oh, I hope he isn’t going to have any more fiery ‘notes’ to-day!”
“I’ll engage that’s who—it is.” The color was flooding Pemrose’s cheek. “When I got his ‘radio’ a few nights ago—radio message—he said something about ‘hopping’ over here for your birthday the day after to-morrow—and the Flower Fuss, as he calls the party. Ha! There he goes now, dropping down—dropping down, a few hundred feet!”