Then he was bumped across the road and shot under the bridge. There was a hill at the end of the run. As he flew up it he became for the first time aware of pace. The toboggan took it like a racing-cutter, and at the top rose six feet into the air, and plunged into the nearest snow-drift.
Winn crawled out, feeling very sick and shaken, and as if every bone in his body was misplaced.
"Oh, you idiot! You idiot! you unbounded, God-forsaken idiot!" a voice exclaimed in his ears. "You've given me the worst two minutes of my life!"
Winn looked around him more annoyed than startled. He felt a great disinclination for speech and an increasing desire to sit down and keep still; and he did not care to conduct a quarrel sitting down.
However, a growing inability to stand up decided him; he dragged out his toboggan and sat on it.
The speaker appeared round a bend of the run. She had apparently been standing in the path that overlooked a considerable portion of it.
She was not a young woman, and from her complexion and the hardness of her thickly built figure she might have been made of wood.
She wore a short, strapped-in skirt, leather leggings, and a fawn-colored sweater. Her eyes were a sharp, decided blue, and the rest of her appearance matched the sweater.
"I don't see, Madam," he remarked slowly, but with extreme aggressiveness, "what the devil my actions have to do with you!"
"No," said the lady, grimly, "I don't suppose from the exhibition I've just been watching, that you're in the habit of seeing farther than to the end of your own nose. However, I may as well point out to you that if you had killed yourself, as you richly deserved, and as you came within an ace of doing, the run would have been stopped for the season. We should all have been deprived of the Grand National, and I, who come up here solely to ride the Cresta, which I have done regularly every winter for twenty years, would have had my favorite occupation snatched from me at an age when I could least afford to miss it."
"I haven't been killed, and I had not the slightest intention of being so," Winn informed her with dangerous calm. "I merely wished to ride the Cresta for the first time unobserved. Apparently I have failed in my intention. If so, it is my misfortune and not my fault." He took out a cigarette, and lit it with a steady hand, and turned his eyes away from her. He expected her to go away, but, to his surprise, she spoke again.