“What?”
“The whistle of a locomotive engine; there it is again! How far off it seems!”
“Sound travels a long way over these plains; there’s nothing to intercept it—but I didn’t hear it.”
“Listen. It will sound again, perhaps, when the train reaches another crossing. It must be way down on the Huerfano. There, didn’t you hear that?”
“Yes; do keep still, Guard.”
Guard, aroused from his nap, was sitting up and looking around with an occasional low growl.
“Seems to me that they must have railway crossings pretty thick down on the Huerfano,” Jessie remarked, after a moment’s silence. “That makes three whistles—if they are whistles—that we’ve heard within as many minutes.”
“That’s true, Jessie—I hadn’t thought of that. It may not be an engine. It sounds louder, instead of diminishing as it would if—keep still, Guard! What in the world is the matter with you!”
For answer, Guard, with every hair on his back erect and standing up like the quills of a porcupine, got up, and wriggled himself under the seat on which we were sitting, making his way to the end of the wagon-box, where he stood with legs braced to keep himself steady, his chin resting on the edge of the tailboard, and his eyes fixed on the darkening roadway over which we had just passed. Every now and then he gave a low, sullen growl, and, even from where we sat, and in the increasing gloom we could see that his white fangs were bared.
“How strangely Guard acts!” exclaimed Jessie, with a sudden catch in her voice, and a dawning fear of—she knew not what—in her eyes. At that instant the sound that I had taken for the far-off, dying whistle of a locomotive, came again to my ears; nearer, more distinct, in increasing volume—a weird, melancholy call—a pursuing cry. The lines were in my hands, and at that instant the horses suddenly sprang forward, faster, faster, until their pace became a tearing run, and then some words of my own, spoken weeks before, flashed into my mind, bringing with them a mental illumination.