As it happened, one of his sisters had married back in the old neighborhood two years before, and his mother was visiting there now.
So a messenger was sent ahead on a swift horse, to break the news to the family, and make arrangements for the burial two days later.
Two hours after the inquest at Stony Ledge the dismal train set forth, two covered Jersey wagons following the hearse. In them were the heartbroken old doctor and the pallbearers, six young men selected from the dead man’s most intimate friends in the neighborhood.
Slowly and in the teeth of the advancing storm, buffeted by driving wind and rain, the solemn train proceeded along the winding road and up the lonely mountainside, out of sight.
It was not expected to make the journey in a day, or to travel all night. At dark they would stop over at a mountain inn, and proceed on their way at dawn.
But darkness and the advancing storm found them far from the inn, their lamps blown out, in total gloom, wrapped in the fury of the most blinding snowstorm known to the country for several years.
It was dangerous driving over those shelving mountain roads in the broadest daylight. It required a keen eye and a steady hand to hold the horses to the road then, that they might not step aside and go rolling down, over precipices that one shuddered to behold. How much more terrible the journey now to the drivers, as their horses crawled along, guided only by their own keen instincts, for the blackness was such that one could not see his hand before him.
“A gruesome funeral train,” one pallbearer lamented to another, who answered gloomily enough:
“I should not wonder if we all come to our deaths before to-morrow!”
Nothing indeed was more likely, as they all realized in the depths of their heavy hearts.