Aunt Marsh and Cousin May Marsh were here visiting Susie Crane and Livy at our farmhouse.By and by mother Langdon came up the hill in the "high carriage" with Nora the nurse and little Jervis (Charley Langdon's little boy)--Timothy the coachman driving.Behind these came Charley's wife and little girl in the buggy, with the new, young, spry, gray horse--a high-stepper.Theodore Crane arrived a little later.
The Bay and Susy were on hand with their nurse, Rosa.I was on hand, too.Susy Crane's trio of colored servants ditto--these being Josie, house-maid; Aunty Cord, cook, aged 62, turbaned, very tall, very broad, very fine every way (see her portrait in "A True Story just as I Heard It" in my Sketches;) Chocklate (the laundress) (as the Bay calls her--she can't say Charlotte,) still taller, still more majestic of proportions, turbaned, very black, straight as an Indian--age 24.Then there was the farmer's wife (colored) and her little girl, Susy.
Wasn't it a good audience to get up an excitement before? Good excitable, inflammable material?
Lewis was still down town, three miles away, with his two-horse wagon, to get a load of manure.Lewis is the farmer (colored).He is of mighty frame and muscle, stocky, stooping, ungainly, has a good manly face and a clear eye.Age about 45--and the most picturesque of men, when he sits in his fluttering work-day rags, humped forward into a bunch, with his aged slouch hat mashed down over his ears and neck.It is a spectacle to make the broken-hearted smile.Lewis has worked mighty hard and remained mighty poor.At the end of each whole year's toil he can't show a gain of fifty dollars.He had borrowed money of the Cranes till he owed them $700 and he being conscientious and honest, imagine what it was to him to have to carry this stubborn, helpless load year in and year out.
Well, sunset came, and Ida the young and comely (Charley Langdon's wife)and her little Julia and the nurse Nora, drove out at the gate behind the new gray horse and started down the long hill--the high carriage receiving its load under the porte cochere.Ida was seen to turn her face toward us across the fence and intervening lawn--Theodore waved good-bye to her, for he did not know that her sign was a speechless appeal for help.
The next moment Livy said, "Ida's driving too fast down hill!" She followed it with a sort of scream, "Her horse is running away!"We could see two hundred yards down that descent.The buggy seemed to fly.It would strike obstructions and apparently spring the height of a man from the ground.
Theodore and I left the shrieking crowd behind and ran down the hill bare-headed and shouting.A neighbor appeared at his gate--a tenth of a second too late! the buggy vanished past him like a thought.My last glimpse showed it for one instant, far down the descent, springing high in the air out of a cloud of dust, and then it disappeared.As I flew down the road my impulse was to shut my eyes as I turned them to the right or left, and so delay for a moment the ghastly spectacle of mutilation and death I was expecting.
I ran on and on, still spared this spectacle, but saying to myself:
"I shall see it at the turn of the road; they never can pass that turn alive." When I came in sight of that turn I saw two wagons there bunched together--one of them full of people.I said, "Just so--they are staring petrified at the remains."But when I got amongst that bunch, there sat Ida in her buggy and nobody hurt, not even the horse or the vehicle.Ida was pale but serene.As Icame tearing down, she smiled back over her shoulder at me and said, "Well, we're alive yet, aren't we?" A miracle had been performed--nothing else.
You see Lewis, the prodigious, humped upon his front seat, had been toiling up, on his load of manure; he saw the frantic horse plunging down the hill toward him, on a full gallop, throwing his heels as high as a man's head at every jump.So Lewis turned his team diagonally across the road just at the "turn," thus ****** a V with the fence--the running horse could not escape that, but must enter it.Then Lewis sprang to the ground and stood in this V.He gathered his vast strength, and with a perfect Creedmoor aim he seized the gray horse's bit as he plunged by and fetched him up standing!
It was down hill, mind you.Ten feet further down hill neither Lewis nor any other man could have saved them, for they would have been on the abrupt "turn," then.But how this miracle was ever accomplished at all, by human strength, generalship and accuracy, is clean beyond my comprehension--and grows more so the more I go and examine the ground and try to believe it was actually done.I know one thing, well; if Lewis had missed his aim he would have been killed on the spot in the trap he had made for himself, and we should have found the rest of the remains away down at the bottom of the steep ravine.
Ten minutes later Theodore and I arrived opposite the house, with the servants straggling after us, and shouted to the distracted group on the porch, "Everybody safe!"Believe it? Why how could they? They knew the road perfectly.We might as well have said it to people who had seen their friends go over Niagara.
However, we convinced them; and then, instead of saying something, or going on crying, they grew very still--words could not express it, Isuppose.
Nobody could do anything that night, or sleep, either; but there was a deal of moving talk, with long pauses between pictures of that flying carriage, these pauses represented--this picture intruded itself all the time and disjointed the talk.
But yesterday evening late, when Lewis arrived from down town he found his supper spread, and some presents of books there, with very complimentary writings on the fly-leaves, and certain very complimentary letters, and more or less greenbacks of dignified denomination pinned to these letters and fly-leaves,--and one said, among other things, (signed by the Cranes) "We cancel $400 of your indebtedness to us," &c.&c.