"Stop him!" yelled Sam. "Whoa!"
"Whoa!" sung out Steve, a-hanging on to the sleigh back for dear life. "We've go-go-gone far enough."
But there wasn't any whoa to that horse. And Steve made up his mind that he'd ridden about as long as he wanted to, and so he dropped off. He fell flat, and slid for as much as a rod on the ice before he stopped. "Took every one of his wesket buttons off," says grandfather, "slick and clean as you'd cut 'em with a knife."
But that didn't stop the horse—no, sir! On he went, with the old sleigh clattering at his heels, and the ice his shoes cut up flew like sleet into the faces of the two boys. All Charley could do was to keep him in the road, and that's more than a good many would, I say. And the horse kept going faster and faster.
"Whe-ew!" said Sam, catching his breath. And he jumped out, and turned two first-class summersets before he struck on his head in a snow-bank beside the road. And there he was.
Then Charley, my grandfather, was left all alone. That's why I call it "Charley Otis's Ride." And the horse kept going faster and faster. And Charley couldn't see a rod ahead of him, for the wind blowing and the bits of ice flying, until, pretty soon, he began to go up a little hill. And because for a minute the ice didn't fly so thick, Charley saw, just ahead, and hobbling along as fast as his two poor shaky legs and his knotty cane would carry him, old Grandsir Herrin, who wasn't anybody's grandfather really, though everybody called him so. And Grandsir Herrin was as deaf as the deafest kind of a post—and right in the middle of the road! Now, sir—
No use to ask me what I'd have done if I'd been there. I wasn't there. But I can tell you what Charley did, and I don't believe anybody could have done any better. His heart thumped so he could almost hear it through all the noise of the bells. But, quick as a flash, he put all his strength on the right rein, and pulled that horse with a flying jump into a big bank of snow drifted up against the road fence. And Charley kept right along.
He picked himself up in a minute, and looked around. The horse was deep in the snow, standing quiet enough, but trembling like a leaf. Charley unharnessed him and got him out of the snow, and turned the sleigh, and harnessed up again, and led the horse back to where he started from. Sam and Steve were waiting by the gate.
Charley hitched the horse, and just then another man drove along, and stopped.