The undertaker came up now to announce that the first stage of his labors was completed and that the ambulance wagon was on the road outside, ready to start for the Fairchild homestead.
“We went up by t’other side, lower daown the gulf,” he explained; “’twas easier, ’n’ then there was no shock to yer feelin’s. Ef I might be ’lowed to s’jest, it ’ud look kine o’ respectful to hev all these friends of the remains walk two by two, behine the wagon, daown to the haouse. Yeh might let the carry-all come along arterwards, empty, yeh knaow, ez a sort o’ token of grief.”
The suggestion was passively accepted as the proper thing under the circumstances, and the little procession began to shape itself on the road outside. Seth was moving toward the fence with the others, when the thought of the black mare he had ridden to the scene occurred to him. A farm-boy was holding the animal a little way off, near some bars opening from the meadow to the road. Seth saw Milton getting over the rails—he had been busy on the outskirts of the assemblage gathering accounts from those earlier on the ground—and said to him: “Won’t you get the mare, and ride her home, along with the carry-all. I shall walk—with the rest.”
The cortege had formed just beyond the fateful narrowing of the road, where it crossed the gulf, and the men who were to follow Albert to the homestead, including all the late comers from Tyre and a few neighbors, had looked down the steep declivity, and noted the new breaking away of earth on the road’s edge, before they passed on to fall in line behind the black, shrouded vehicle. The procession had moved some rods when there came sounds of excitement from the rear; at these some of the walkers turned, then others, and even the driver of the ambulance drew up his horses and joined the retrospective gaze.
The black mare was balking again, on the road directly over the gulf, and was crowding back with her haunches tight against the fencing on the side opposite to that over which her late master had fallen. It was a moment of cruel tension to every eye, for the fence was visibly yielding under the animal’s weight, and another tragedy seemed a matter of seconds. Milton appeared to have lost all sense, and was simply clinging to the mare’s neck, in dumb affright. Luckily a farmer ran forward at this juncture, and contrived to lead the beast forward diagonally away from the spot. Milton sat up in the saddle again, turned the mare away from the gulf, and galloped off.
“Dummed cur’ous thet!” whispered Beekman to Seth; “does thet mare ack thet way often?”
“I never knew her to balk before to-day. She acted like that when I first brought her up to the ravine. It is curious, as you say. But animal instinct is a strange, unaccountable thing any way.”
“Hm-m!” answered the Boss of Jay County, knitting his brows in thought, as the procession moved again.