Had an earthquake struck the barn—or a bomb?
Suddenly the world, the hay, went up; and she went down.
Hay was in her eyes, her ears, her mouth, down her back—she would have made a mule seem a sorry hay-consumer.
She was clutching at it wildly with both hands—and finding it but thin air in her grasp.
In the feeble dawn glimmer she was sinking—being plunged into a shocking world underneath.
And where else she was to go, how far she was to travel in this awful underworld, she did not know, for she had alighted on a horse’s back—alighted in a huddle on a horse’s back!
And there came the scream of Dorothy from the sheep pen, amid a torrent of frightened baas.
“It’s Paddy—the horse with the cough—and he’s trying to rub me off against the stall!”
Even as the knowledge crashed through Pemrose’s brain she was twisting her groping hands fiercely in Paddy’s mane—in the musty gloom of the horse-stall.
Buried alive, she would carry on—as Dorothy was carrying on, judging by the sheep.