“Pardon, ladies! Watch your step!” Ned said. “And don’t get us confused with your ‘beauty-talks’ business. Besides, it isn’t really modest. I always blush myself when I inadvertently turn over to the woman’s page of the evening paper. It is a delicate place for mere man to tread.” “Hooray!” ejaculated his brother, making a false step himself just then. “Wish I had creepers on. _This_ is a mighty delicate place for a fellow to tread, too, my boy.” In fact, they soon had to order the girls off the sled. The way was becoming too steep and the side of the hill was just as slick as the highway had been. With much laughter and not a few terrified “squawks,” to quote Tavia, the girls scrambled up the slope after the boys and the sled. Suddenly piercing screams came from above them. “Those rascals!” ejaculated Ned. “Oh! they _are_ sliding on this side,” cried Dorothy. “Stop them, Ned! Please, Nat!” “What do you expect us to do?” demanded the latter. “Run out and catch ’em with our bare hands?” They had come to a break in the path now and could see out over the sloping pasture in which the boys had been sliding for an hour. Their sled had worked a plain path down the hill; but at the foot of it was an abrupt drop over the side of a gully. Dorothy Dale—and her cousins, too—knew that gully very well. There was a cave in it, and in and about that cave they had once had some very exciting adventures. Joe and Roger had selected the smoothest part of the pasture to coast in, it was true; but the party of young folk just arrived could see that it was a very dangerous place as well. At the foot of the slide was a little bank overhanging the gully. The smaller boys had been stopping their sled right on the brink, and with a jolt, for the watchers could see Joe’s heelprints in the ground where the ice had been broken away. They could hear the boys screaming out a school song at the top of the hill. Ned and Nat roared a command to Joe and Roger to halt in their mad career; but the two smaller boys were making so much noise that it was evident their cousins’ shout was not heard by them. They came down, Joe sitting ahead on the sled with his brother hanging on behind, the feet of the boy sitting in front thrust out to halt the sled. But if the sled should jump over the barrier, the two reckless boys would fall twenty feet to the bottom of the gully. “Stop them, do!” groaned Jennie Hapgood, who was a timid girl. It was Dorothy who looked again at the little mound on the edge of gully’s bank. The frost had got into the earth there, for it had been freezing weather for several days before the ice storm of the previous night. Now the sun was shining full on the spot, and she could see where the boys’ feet, colliding with that lump of earth on the verge of the declivity, had knocked off the ice and bared the earth completely. There was, too, a long crack along the edge of the slight precipice.