the only possible course, but handled the situation in the best possible way.  With a sharp cut of the whip he drove the attached horse down upon the one that was half free, and started the two off at a wild race down the steep coulee, into what seemed sheer blackness and immediate disaster.  The light vehicle bounded up and down and from side to side as the wheels caught the successive inequalities of the rude descent, and at every instant it seemed it must surely be overthrown.  Yet the weight of the buggy thrust the pole so strongly forward that it straightened out the free horse by the neck and forced him onward.  In some way, stumbling and bounding and lurching, both horses and vehicle kept upright all the way down the steep descent, a thing which to Franklin later seemed fairly miraculous.  At the very foot of the pitch the black horse fell, the buggy running full upon him as he lay lashing out.  From this confusion, in some way never quite plain to himself, Franklin caught the girl out in his arms, and the next moment was at the head of the struggling horses.  And so good had been his training at such matters that it was not without method that he proceeded to quiet the team and to set again in partial order the wreck that had been created in the gear.  The end of the damaged singletree he re-enforced with his handkerchief.  In time he had the team again in harness, and at the bottom of the coulee, where the ground sloped easily down into the open valley, whence they might emerge at the lower level of the prairie round about.  He led the team for a distance down this floor of the coulee, until he could see the better going in the improving light which greeted them as they came out from the gully-like defile.  Cursing his ill fortune, and wretched at the thought of the danger and discomfort he had brought upon the very one whom he would most gladly have shielded, Franklin said not a word from the beginning of the mad dash down the coulee until he got the horses again into harness.  He did not like to admit to his companion how great had been the actual danger just incurred, though fortunately escaped.  The girl was as silent as himself.  She had not uttered a cry during the time of greatest risk, though once she laid a hand upon his arm.  Franklin was humiliated and ashamed, as a man always is over an accident.

“Oh, it’s no good saying I’m sorry,” he broke out at last.  “It was my fault, letting you ride behind that brute.  Thank God, you’re not hurt!  And I’m only too glad it wasn’t worse.  I’m always doing some unfortunate, ignoble thing.  I want to take care of you and make you happy, and I would begin by putting your very life in danger.”

“It wasn’t ignoble,” said the girl, and again he felt her hand upon his arm.  “It was grand.  You went straight, and you brought us through.  I’m not hurt.  I was frightened, but I am not hurt.”