"You might wait for a fellow," he grumbled, but already the girl was through, and her white blouse and ruddy hair shone half-way across the unenclosed meadow upon which she had entered. For the first time her pale face impressed Bob. "Looks like she saw something," he thought, with a remnant of old superstition. "I do believe she thinks there's going to be bloodshed." And with a view to reassuring her, he caught up with her in the path through the belt of woods that led from the field to the road. Their horses were nose on tail, and of necessity going slowly. "Sydney!" he cried, "O-oh, Sydney! You don't think it's serious, do you? Because----" Here the path debouched into the open road, and Johnny was off again before Bob could finish, and his question, meant to inspirit Sydney, had sounded to her only like a desire for his own reassurance, and had alarmed her more than ever. A mad feeling within pricked her to tear on without slackening. She felt that she could have galloped to the very top of the mountain without fatigue. Her horsewoman's intelligence, however, warned her to think of her animal, and she took him along quietly through the open place before the post-office, giving Bob a chance to catch up. He was thoroughly out of temper now. Never before had Sydney been so careless of him. He couldn't understand it; but he was beginning to realize that she was taking the adventure seriously, and, with boyish malice, he resolved to make no further effort to undeceive her. Indeed, as they rode on slowly and silently, side by side, for a few hundred yards, he became not so sure himself that the duel was the joke that he had considered it. He knew his father to be a man ready in his own defence, and of a high, though controlled temper; and he had not overlooked the fact that the stocks of two guns were protruding from the holster that projected from under the skirt of the Doctor's McClellan. Furthermore, he knew that the German was in deadly earnest. As these suspicions assailed him, he turned to Sydney and touched the spur to his gray. The girl responded to his look, and they set into the steady gallop that covers much country with but little effort either to horse or rider. Sydney held out her watch for Bob to see. It was quarter past eleven. Nearly five miles lay before them to the foot of the mountain, and to the summit there was a long, steep mile and a half which was the time-consumer to be reckoned with.