But Eve Edgarton falsified the thought before he was half through thinking it.

She swung her horse around, reared him to almost a perpendicular height, merged herself like so much fluid khaki into his great, towering, threatening neck, reacted almost instantly to her own balance again, and went plunging off toward the wild, rough, untraveled foot-hills and—­certain destruction, any unbiased onlooker would have been free to affirm!

Snortingly the chunky gray went tearing after her.  A trifle sulkily Barton’s roan took up the chase.

Shade?  Oh, ye gods!  If Eve Edgarton knew shade when she saw it she certainly gave no possible sign of such intelligence.  Wherever the galloping, grass-grown road hesitated between green-roofed forest and devastated wood-lot, she chose the devastated wood-lot!  Wherever the trotting, treacherous pasture faltered between hobbly, rock-strewn glare and soft, lush-carpeted spots of shade, she chose the hobbly, rock-strewn glare!  On and on and on!  Till dust turned sweat!  And sweat turned dust again!  On and on and on!  With the riderless gray thudding madly after her!  And Barton’s sulky roan balking frenziedly at each new swerve and turn!

It must have been almost three miles before Barton quite overtook her.  Then in the scudding, transitory shadow of a growly thunder-cloud she reined in suddenly, waited patiently till Barton’s panting horse was nose and nose with hers, and then, pushing her slouch hat back from her low, curl-fringed forehead, jogged listlessly along beside him with her pale olive face turned inquiringly to his drenched, beet-colored visage.

“What was it that you wanted me to do for you, Mr. Barton?” she asked with a laborious sort of courtesy.  “Are you writing a book or something that you wanted me to help you about?  Is that it?  Is that what Father meant?”

“Am I writing a—­book?” gasped Barton.  Desperately he began to mop his forehead.  “Writing a book?  Am—­I—­writing—­a—­book?  Heaven forbid!”

“What are you doing?” persisted the girl bluntly.

“What am I doing?” repeated Barton.  “Why, riding with you!  Trying to ride with you!” he called out grimly as, taking the lead impetuously again, Eve Edgarton’s horse shied off at a rabbit and went sidling down a sand-bank into a brand-new area of rocks and stubble and breast-high blueberry bushes.

Barton liked to ride and he rode fairly well, but he was by no means an equestrian acrobat, and, quite apart from the girl’s unquestionably disconcerting mannerisms, the foolish floppity presence of the riderless gray rattled him more than he could possibly account for.  Yet to save his life he could not have told which would seem more childish—­to turn back in temper, or to follow on—­in the same.

More in helplessness than anything else he decided to follow on.

“On and on and on,” would have described it more adequately.