Honest Garrod, the coachman, opened his eyes wide. He knew that this was Mrs Alfred; he had heard that Mrs Alfred was an Australian; but he could scarcely believe his ears.
'No, miss--no, mum--thank you,' he faltered. The 'miss' came much more naturally than the 'mum.'
'I'd rather not, miss--_mum_,' said the coachman.
'What rot!' said Gladys. 'Here--that's it--bravo! _Now_ blaze away!'
The old man had given in, simply because this extraordinary young lady was irresistible. The first result of his weakness was a yell of pain from the stable-boy; the poor lad's face was bleeding where the lash had struck it. Rough apologies followed. Then the old coachman--who was not without mettle, and was on it, for the moment--took off his coat and tried again. After many futile efforts, however, he only succeeded in coiling the lash tightly round his own legs; and that made an end of it; the old man gave it up.
'Show us some more, mum,' said he. 'I've got too old and stiff for them games,'--as if in his youth he had been quite at home with the stock-whip, and only of late years had got rusty in the art of cracking it.
'Right you are,' said Gladys, gaily, when her laughter was over--she had a hearty, but a rather musical laugh. 'Give me the whip. Now, have you got a coin--a sixpence? No? No odds, here's half a sov. in my purse that'll do as well; and you shall have it, either of you that do this side o' Christmas what I'm going to do now. I'm going to show you a trick and a half!'
Her eyes sparkled with excitement: she was rather over-excited, perhaps. She placed the coin upon the ground, retreated several paces, measured the distance with her eye, and smartly raised the handle of the stock-whip. The crack that followed was the plain, straightforward crack, only executed with greater precision than before. Then she had resembled nothing so much as an angler idly flogging a stream; the difference was that now, as it were, she was throwing at a rise. And she threw with wonderful skill; for, at the first crack, the half-sovereign spun high into the air and fell with a ring upon the cement; she had picked it up on the point of the lash!
It was a surprising feat. That she managed to accomplish it at the first attempt surprised no one so much as the Bride herself. This also added in a dangerous degree to her excitement. She was now in little less than a frenzy. She seemed to forget where she was, and to think that she was back on the station in New South Wales, where she could do what she liked.