The bereaved father in the forward wagon roused himself from the apathy of grief in which he was sunk, and muttered:
“If we could have but reached the inn before dark! But it would have been unseemly driving fast with the dead. This is terrible, for we may plunge over the road, and down the precipice, any moment. Might we not better halt until morning?”
“We should freeze! Let us trust to the horses’ instincts to go on and save us!” answered the others, and they continued to crawl along, the old doctor sinking again into his abstraction of grief, with his white beard sunk on his breast.
Colder and more piercing grew the wind, till the cold seemed to strike to the marrow of every one’s bones, and their thick clothing did not seem to keep out the chill any more than coverings of paper.
Too late they repented that they had ventured out in the teeth of the storm, not dreaming it would increase to such unusual violence for the season of the year.
They were just wondering over their whereabouts, and how far they could be from the inn, when the noisy tumult of a river rushing over its rocky bed came to their ears from the base of the mountain, as they wound around its summit.
“Hark! do you hear the river? We are at that dangerous turn in the road, going around the cliffs. God help us if we should go over here! We would be dashed to pieces on the rocks, or go into the water!” cried one of the drivers, and the other one, just ahead, shouted back encouragingly:
“Do you hear the river plunging through the narrows, going to the falls? Well, it is only half a mile from here to the inn! We shall soon be safe!”
Scarcely were the words out of his mouth when terrible sounds came back to them from ahead, where the grim, black hearse was dragging through the snow with two stalwart men on the box, leaving the reins loose on the horses’ backs that the faithful animals might better pick their way in the darkness.
The bewildered beasts had lost their footing and plunged headlong over the cliffs with their human freight of dead and living passengers!