About one o'clock we
went on down the hill to Sabbath Day Pond and into the woods beyond
it. The loads were heavy and the horses were plodding on slowly, when,
just round a turn of the road in the woods ahead, we heard a deep,
awful sound, like nothing that had ever come to our ears before. For
an instant I thought it was thunder, it rumbled so portentously:
_Hough--hough--hough--hough-er-er-er-er-hhh!_ It reverberated through
the woods till it seemed to me that the earth actually trembled.
Willis's horses stopped short. Willis himself rose to his feet, and it
seemed to me his cap rose up on his head. Other indistinct sounds also
came to our ears from along the road ahead, though nothing was as yet in
sight. Then again that awful, prolonged _Hough--hough--hough!_ broke
forth.
Close by, lumbermen had been hauling timber from the forest into the
highway and had made a distinct trail across the road ditch. While
Willis stood up, staring, the horses suddenly whirled half round and
bolted for the lumber trail, hogs and all. They did it so abruptly that
Willis had no time to control them, and when the wagon went across the
ditch, he was pitched off headlong into the brush.
Pages:
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295