The loud screams of the two men, the agonized snorting of the horses, the grating noise of the overturned hearse as it crashed on its side and hurtled over the rocky road down the hill to the precipice overhanging the river, were sounds of horror to ring in one’s ears till death.
“The hearse has gone over into the river! God help the men!” groaned the men in the wagons.
And in the first one the men had as much as they could do to hold back a half-crazed old man, wild with grief, from springing out into the night, and following his dead son down to the depths where the swollen river thundered far below.
They held him down by main force, their hearts as heavy as lead and their lips dumb with horror, until after what seemed interminable lengths of time their horses guided them safely to the mountain inn.
The people that came out to meet them were not astonished at the terrible story they told. They rather wondered that any had escaped destruction on such a night.
“They went into the river, and are dead before now, but to-morrow we will organize a searching party,” they said, as they warmed and fed the survivors of the strange funeral train.
But to-morrow the snow was drifted to the second-story windows, and no man dare venture forth. Not until the third day did the sun peep forth again with renewed warmth and splendor, melting the snow into sluggish rivulets, running down the mountainsides to the valleys below, and swelling all the streams till they overflowed their banks.
On the fourth day the searching party went back to the scene of the accident.
The shattered remnants of the hearse were found, and the horses, dead and crushed to pulp, on the cliffs above the river. Splinters of the heavy oaken casket were discovered also, and, when no trace of the corpse was found, it was agreed that it must have bounced from the cliffs in a terrible recoil down to the river’s depths. But strange to say, the two drivers had escaped death and contrived to exist under the cliffs.
They had jumped from the box when the hearse toppled over, then they rolled down the mountain and through a fissure in its side, down under the cliffs, where it was warm and dry.