Within these walls

by Rupert Hughes

There were sad memories for the RoBards twain on every hand. Herealong they had walked and wooed; at this house or that they had met for dinner or dance, and now the homes where carriages had been packed for balls, were hushed with dread, or shaken with the outcries of woe.

It seemed good to turn away from Broadway at Madison Square, and join the dust-misted Post Road, with its huge stages lurching perilously, and racking the bones of the tossed passengers bound for Harlem, New Rochelle, Rye, and all the towns beyond to Boston.

From here on, the highway ran through farmland, broken now and then by dwellings, or by warder trees that sheltered mansions in the garden deeps; but the heat was ruthless and beat with oven-glow upon grain and grass praying in vain for relief.

Past the cattle marts of Bull’s Head Village, on up Murray’s Hill, and down through the village of Odellville, their horses trotted doggedly, threaded McGowan’s Pass, and climbed Breakneck Hill, the scene of so many fatal mishaps that Patty was in a panic. She clung to her husband’s arm with such anxiety that he could hardly manage his team. But to their surprise they got down alive into the plains of Harlem.

RoBards had counted on resting his bride and his horses at Harlem Village while they took dinner there at three. But Harlem was in even direr estate than New York, and a pallid negro, who brought water to the horses, stammered a warning against the accursed spot. Families had been annihilated by the cholera in a night. Under the big willow by the church a corpse had been found, and of the coroner’s jury of twelve, all were dead in a week save one. The firehouse at Harlem was a fearsome place, as RoBards could see; for it was a morgue where two overworked black men nailed together pine boxes, and nailed the dead into them in dozens. The rumor had spread that in their haste they were burying some of the villagers alive in the churchyard.

Patty implored her husband to drive on, and he lashed the horses to a run to outrace her fears. He would not have hurt animal or man, except for her; but for her he was strangely capable of anything, cruel or sublime.

Not long the gallopade lasted before the jades fell back into a dogged trot. They pushed on through Bronxdale, and rejoined the Boston Post Road at McTeague’s Caves. Soon a great flying stage of the new Concord type, with its huge body swung on great leather thoroughbraces, rolled by at better than the wonted six miles an hour. It passed RoBards’ weary horses, and hid them and its own seasick passengers in a smoke of dust.

Coaches like these had been established in New York only a few months before, to run on rails. RoBards had ridden on one of the first trips, the whole distance from Prince to Fourteenth Street. The rails made it easier for the passengers and the horses. Indeed, the legislature had incorporated a wonderful company that proposed to build a railway from the Harlem River to White Plains, and pull the coaches with steam engines, like those on the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad, which had gone tearing through space at the incredible speed of twenty miles an hour. Some doctors said it would blind the passengers to see the landscape shoot past at such an ungodly speed. But this was the age of wonders.

If the Boston stages threw up such a blinding dust, what would the steam engines do?

It was good to turn off at the head of Black Dog Brook, and take the less frequented highway to White Plains, past Tuckahoe, and through the scenes that Mr. Cooper had described in his novel, The Spy. RoBards had read it as a boy one Saturday night, and it had kept him awake until he heard the Sunday church bells toll, and heard the chains rattle as they were drawn across Broadway to keep the ribald infidels from disturbing the orderly by driving horses on Sunday.