an' he'd just begun to bite in there when he heard us."

"What murderous work, The sight sickens me!" exclaimed Helen.

"It is nature," said Dale, simply.

"Let's kill the lion," added Bo.

For answer Dale took a quick turn at their saddle-girths, and then,
mounting, he called to the hound. "Hunt him up, Pedro."

Like a shot the hound was off.

"Ride in my tracks an' keep close to me," called Dale, as he wheeled his
horse.

"We're off!" squealed Bo, in wild delight, and she made her mount
plunge.

Helen urged her horse after them and they broke across a corner of the
swale to the woods. Pedro was running straight, with his nose high.
He let out one short bark. He headed into the woods, with Dale not far
behind. Helen was on one of Dale's best horses, but that fact scarcely
manifested itself, because the others began to increase their lead. They
entered the woods. It was open, and fairly good going. Bo's horse ran as
fast in the woods as he did in the open. That frightened Helen and she
yelled to Bo to hold him in. She yelled to deaf ears. That was Bo's
great risk--she did not intend to be careful. Suddenly the forest rang
with Dale's encouraging yell, meant to aid the girls in following him.
Helen's horse caught the spirit of the chase. He gained somewhat on
Bo, hurdling logs, sometimes two at once. Helen's blood leaped with a
strange excitement, utterly unfamiliar and as utterly resistless. Yet
her natural fear, and the intelligence that reckoned with the foolish
risk of this ride, shared alike in her sum of sensations. She tried to
remember Dale's caution about dodging branches and snags, and sliding
her knees back to avoid knocks from trees. She barely missed some
frightful reaching branches. She received a hard knock, then another,
that unseated her, but frantically she held on and slid back, and at the
end of a long run through comparatively open forest she got a stinging
blow in the face from a far-spreading branch of pine. Bo missed, by what
seemed only an inch, a solid snag that would have broken her in two.
Both Pedro and Dale got out of Helen's sight. Then Helen, as she began
to lose Bo, felt that she would rather run greater risks than be left
behind to get lost in the forest, and she urged her horse. Dale's yell
pealed back. Then it seemed even more thrilling to follow by sound than
by sight. Wind and brush tore at her. The air was heavily pungent with
odor of pine. Helen heard a wild, full bay of t