“Eric, stay up there, and take care of the horses,” he said, and was soon out of sight.
Eric secured the horses, and then crept to the place from which the doctor had disappeared. He found, just beneath him, a long line of large troughs, open at both ends, and overlapping each other like shingles. It extended entirely down the side of the mountain, and to his horror Eric saw at its foot a lake.
“O, Johnny, Johnny! my dear little cousin! And uncle Charlie, too—they will surely be killed!” he cried, in agony. For he knew at once that they had gone down a timber slide, and was afraid they would be drowned in the lake.
And now I suppose I must tell you what a timber slide is.
The Black Forest Mountains are covered with large and valuable trees, which are felled and sold by their owners; and as it would be decidedly inconvenient to take horses and carts up the mountain, and utterly impossible to get them down with a heavy load of those giant trees with sound necks, an ingenious Swiss invented the cheap and rapid way of getting the trees off the mountain by means of a slide, formed of immense troughs lapped together, and terminating in the lake, where the heavy logs are chained together and floated to a railway or wharf, just as they are done in our own country by the loggers of the Maine forests and other woody regions.
Of course a descent in one of these slides, under ordinary circumstances, would be extremely dangerous to human life and limb. But it fortunately happened that neither the doctor, Johnny, nor Jack were seriously injured, for the slide had been disused for some time, and in consequence of an accident, somewhat similar to Johnny’s, had been partially removed, and a high, soft bank of sand lay at its new terminus.
Johnny and Jack were pitched violently into this, and rescued from their very uncomfortable position by a party of English travellers encamped near by.
Many were the exclamations uttered at the marvellous and sudden entrance of our young friend upon the quiet beauties of the twilight scene, and bewildered Johnny scarcely knew whether to laugh or cry.
His first anxiety was for Jack, but the English gentleman who drew him from the sand-bank would pay no attention to the horse until he was convinced that Johnny was unhurt. Assured about this, he patted and soothed poor frightened Jack, and walked him carefully over the soft greensward, to see if he appeared at all lame; and then Johnny was delighted enough to hear the horse pronounced all right.
Johnny had several pretty bad bruises, which the Englishman, who was a physician, dressed for him.