Racketing over the road at a brisk trot, a quarter of a mile below, went the team, David clinging to the seat and wondering how Cameron managed to maintain his swaying poise with both hands on the reins and his mind engrossed with nothing more serious than asking stuttering questions as to what his companion thought the new road—Bump! Judas!—was up to now?
“She’s a-goin’ to break loose in a minute,’ yelled Cameron, as a gust of wind flapped his hat-brim over his eyes. With one hand he reached beneath the seat and drew out a grain sack, which he flung round his shoulders, tucking the ends beneath his suspenders.
“C-c-cant, he-he-lp it now,” replied David. “I want to make that ten-thirty train.”
He cast a glance over his shoulder to where Smoke stood, legs spread to the lurch of the wagon, and a canine grin of fixed intensity gripped between his set jaws.
With the quick chill of air that blew in their faces came the roar of the rain through the leaves.
The broad, round flanks of the horses worked rhythmically, and each huge forefoot rose and fell with trip-hammer precision. A sharp drive of wind bent the tops of the young wayside firs groundward. The wagon pitched over a knoll and took the rutted grade below it at a speed that kept the horses’ flanks quivering with the anticipated shock of the clacking whiffletrees, as the traces slackened and then snapped taut again with a jerk. Then somewhere in the southern sky a long, fiery seam sprang open and winked shut again, followed by a hush in which the battering of the horses’ feet on the shale was like mimic thunder.
A dull grumbling rolled out of nowhere and boomed lazily across the crouching hills, dying away in the distant valleys.
“’Fraid of lightnin’?” asked Cameron, pulling up the horses as they descended a steep pitch in the road.
“No, but I don’t like it.”
“I be,” said Cameron.