Page:Ruth Fielding at Silver Ranch.djvu/94

84 wrenched herself free from her chum's grasp and leaned forward over the seat-back.

"Give the reins to me!" she cried in Mary's ear, and seized the leathers just as they slipped from the hands of The Fox.

Ruth gripped them firmly and flung herself back into her own seat. Helen seized her with one hand and saved her from being thrown out of the pitching vehicle. And so, with her chum holding her into her seat, Ruth swung all her weight and force against the ponies' bits.

At first this seemed to have not the least effect upon the frightened animals. Ruth's slight weight exercised small pressure on those iron jaws. On and on they dashed, rocking the buckboard over the rough trail—and drawing each moment nearer to that perilous elbow in the canon!

Ruth realized the menacing danger of that turn in the trail from the moment the beasts first jumped. There was no parapet at the outer edge of the shelf—just the uneven, broken verge of the rock, with the awful drop to the roaring river below.

She remembered this in a flash, as the ponies tore on. There likewise passed through her mind a vision of the chum beside her, crushed and mangled at the bottom of the canon—and again, Helen's broken body being swept away in the