She was reeling in the saddle, but she gripped the bars with new energy, and raced desperately.  The sun beat on her bare head and hands.  Just when she was choking with dust, and almost prostrate with heat and exhaustion—­crash, she ran into a broken bottle.  Snap! went the tire; the wheel swerved and pitched over.  The Angel rolled into the thick yellow dust of the road and lay quietly.

From afar, Duncan began to notice a strange, dust-covered object in the road, as he headed toward town with the first load of the day’s felling.

He chirruped to the bays and hurried them all he could.  As he neared the Angel, he saw it was a woman and a broken wheel.  He was beside her in an instant.  He carried her to a shaded fence-corner, stretched her on the grass, and wiped the dust from the lovely face all dirt-streaked, crimson, and bearing a startling whiteness around the mouth and nose.

Wheels were common enough.  Many of the farmers’ daughters owned and rode them, but he knew these same farmers’ daughters; this face was a stranger’s.  He glanced at the Angel’s tumbled clothing, the silkiness of her hair, with its pale satin ribbon, and noticed that she had lost her hat.  Her lips tightened in an ominous quiver.  He left her and picked up the wheel:  as he had surmised, he knew it.  This, then, was Freckles’ Swamp Angel.  There was trouble in the Limberlost, and she had broken down racing to McLean.  Duncan turned the bays into a fence-corner, tied one of them, unharnessed the other, fastened up the trace chains, and hurried to the nearest farmhouse to send help to the Angel.  He found a woman, who took a bottle of camphor, a jug of water, and some towels, and started on the run.

Then Duncan put the bay to speed and raced to camp.

The Angel, left alone, lay still for a second, then she shivered and opened her eyes.  She saw that she was on the grass and the broken wheel beside her.  Instantly she realized that someone had carried her there and gone after help.  She sat up and looked around.  She noticed the load of logs and the one horse.  Someone was riding after help for her!

“Oh, poor Freckles!” she wailed.  “They may be killing him by now.  Oh, how much time have I wasted?”

She hurried to the other bay, her fingers flying as she set him free.  Snatching up a big blacksnake whip that lay on the ground, she caught the hames, stretched along the horse’s neck, and, for the first time, the fine, big fellow felt on his back the quality of the lash that Duncan was accustomed to crack over him.  He was frightened, and ran at top speed.

The Angel passed a wildly waving, screaming woman on the road, and a little later a man riding as if he, too, were in great haste.  The man called to her, but she only lay lower and used the whip.  Soon the feet of the man’s horse sounded farther and farther away.

At the South camp they were loading a second wagon, when the Angel appeared riding one of Duncan’s bays, lathered and dripping, and cried:  “Everybody go to Freckles!  There are thieves stealing trees, and they had him bound.  They’re going to kill him!”