Clementina

The word certainly had its efficacy with the postillion. "Trinkgeldt!"

cried O'Toole, and the berlin rocked and lurched and leaped down the

pass. The snow was now less deep, the drifts fewer. The road wound along

a mountain-side: at one window rose the rock; from the other the

travellers looked down hundreds of feet to the bed of the valley and the

boiling torrent of the Adige. It was a mere narrow ribbon of a road made

by the Romans, without a thought for the convenience of travellers in a

later day; and as the carriage turned a corner, O'Toole, mounted on his

horse, saw ahead a heavy cart crawling up towards them. The carter saw

the berlin thundering down towards him behind its four maddened horses,

and he drew his cart to the inside of the road against the rock. The

postillion tugged at his reins; he had not sufficient interval of space

to check his team; he threw a despairing glance at O'Toole. It seemed

impossible the berlin could pass. There was no use to cry out; O'Toole

fell behind the carriage with his mind made up. He looked down the

precipice; he saw in his imagination the huge carriage with its tangled,

struggling horses falling sheer into the foam of the river. He could not

ride back to Bologna with that story to tell; he and his horse must take

the same quick, steep road.

The postillion drove so close to the cart that he touched it as he

passed. "We are lost!" he shouted in an agony; and O'Toole saw the hind

wheel of the berlin slip off the road and revolve for the fraction of a

second in the air. He was already putting his horse at the precipice as

though it was a ditch to be jumped, when the berlin made, to his

astonished eyes, an effort to recover its balance like a live thing. It

seemed to spring sideways from the brink of the precipice. It not only

seemed, it did spring; and O'Toole, drawing rein, in the great revulsion

of his feelings, saw, as he rocked unsteadily in his saddle, the

carriage tearing safe and unhurt down the very centre of the road.

O'Toole set his spurs to his horse and galloped after it. The postillion

looked back and laughed.

"Trinkgeldt!" he cried.

O'Toole swore loudly, and getting level beat him with his whip. Wogan's

head popped out of the window.

"Silence!" said he in a rage. "Mademoiselle is asleep;" and then seeing

O'Toole's white and disordered face he asked, "What is it?" No one in

the coach had had a suspicion of their danger. But O'Toole still saw

before his eyes that wheel slip over the precipice and revolve in air,

he still felt his horse beneath him quiver and refuse this leap into

air. In broken tones he gasped out his story to Wogan, and as he spoke

the Princess stirred.