“It’s coming,” she said quickly, “and they’ve seen us.”

The expression of the faces of the two girls instantly changed.  A pained dignity and resignation, apparently born of the most harrowing experiences and controlled only by perfect good breeding, was distinctly suggested in their features and attitude as they stood patiently by the wreck of their overturned buggy awaiting the oncoming coach.  In sharp contrast was the evident excitement among the passengers.  A few rose from their seats in their eagerness; as the stage pulled up in the road beside the buggy four or five of the younger men leaped to the ground.

“Are you hurt, miss?” they gasped sympathetically.

Susy did not immediately reply, but ominously knitted her pretty eyebrows as if repressing a spasm of pain.  Then she said, “Not at all,” coldly, with the suggestion of stoically concealing some lasting or perhaps fatal injury, and took the arm of Mary Rogers, who had, in the mean time, established a touching yet graceful limp.

Declining the proffered assistance of the passengers, they helped each other into the coach, and freezingly requesting the driver to stop at Mr. Peyton’s gate, maintained a statuesque and impressive silence.  At the gates they got down, followed by the sympathetic glances of the others.

To all appearance their escapade, albeit fraught with dangerous possibilities, had happily ended.  But in the economy of human affairs, as in nature, forces are not suddenly let loose without more or less sympathetic disturbance which is apt to linger after the impelling cause is harmlessly spent.  The fright which the girls had unsuccessfully attempted to produce in the heart of their escort had passed him to become a panic elsewhere.  Judge Peyton, riding near the gateway of his rancho, was suddenly confronted by the spectacle of one of his vacqueros driving on before him the two lassoed and dusty ponies, with a face that broke into violent gesticulating at his master’s quick interrogation.

“Ah!  Mother of God!  It was an evil day!  For the bronchos had run away, upset the buggy, and had only been stopped by a brave Americano of an ox-team, whose lasso was even now around their necks, to prove it, and who had been dragged a matter of a hundred varas, like a calf, at their heels.  The senoritas,—­ah! had he not already said they were safe, by the mercy of Jesus!—­picked up by the coach, and would be here at this moment.”

“But where was Pedro all the time?  What was he doing?” demanded Peyton, with a darkened face and gathering anger.

The vacquero looked at his master, and shrugged his shoulders significantly.  At any other time Peyton would have remembered that Pedro, as the reputed scion of a decayed Spanish family, and claiming superiority, was not a favorite with his fellow-retainers.  But the gesture, half of suggestion, half of depreciation, irritated Peyton still more.