There was a heaping pan of Aunt Kate's doughnuts on the table, flanked with the thick china coffee cups and deep saucers. Her uncle and the boys always poured their coffee into the saucers and blew on it to take the first heat off, then gulped it in great draughts.
Nan followed suit this morning, as far as cooling the coffee in the saucer went. There was haste. Uncle Henry had been up some time, and now he came stamping into the house, saying that the ponies were hitched in and were standing in readiness upon the barn floor, attached to the pung.
“We've twenty-five miles to ride, you see, Nannie,” he said. “The boys have to be at Blackton's so's to get to work at seven.”
They filled the thermos bottle that had so puzzled Tom, and then sallied forth. The ponies were just as eager as they had been the day Nan had come over from the Forks. She was really half afraid of them.
It was so dark that she could scarcely see the half-cleared road before them as the ponies dashed away from Pine Camp. The sky was completely overcast, but Uncle Henry declared it would break at sunrise.
Where the track had been well packed by former sleighs, the ponies' hoofs rang as though on iron. The bits of snow that were flung off by their hoofs were like pieces of ice. The bells on the harness jingled a very pretty tune, Nan thought. She did not mind the biting cold, indeed, only her face was exposed. Uncle Henry had suggested a veil; but she wanted to see what she could.
For the first few miles it remained very dark, however. Had it not been for the snow they could not have seen objects beside the road at all. There was a lantern in the back of the pung and that flung a stream of yellow light behind them; but Uncle Henry would not have the radiance of it shot forward.
“A light just blinds you,” he said. “I'd rather trust to the roans' sense.”
The ponies galloped for a long way, it seemed to Nan; then they came to a hill so steep that they were glad to drop to a walk. Their bodies steamed in a great cloud as they tugged the sleigh up the slope. Dark woods shut the road in on either hand. Nan's eyes had got used to the faint light so that she could see this at least.
Suddenly she heard a mournful, long-drawn howl, seemingly at a great distance.