A WEIRD FUNERAL.
When old Doctor Ludington in his young manhood inherited the pretty
estate, Fernside, from an uncle, and went there with his young wife
to live, he left a home twenty miles away that had sheltered the
Ludingtons for several generations, and where, in their near-by burial
grounds, rested every scion of the race that had died in America.
So it was deemed meet and right that Rupert Ludington be taken back to
the old-home place to rest among his kindred.
As it happened, one of his sisters had married back in the old
neighborhood two years before, and his mother was visiting there now.
So a messenger was sent ahead on a swift horse, to break the news to
the family, and make arrangements for the burial two days later.
Two hours after the inquest at Stony Ledge the dismal train set forth,
two covered Jersey wagons following the hearse. In them were the
heartbroken old doctor and the pallbearers, six young men selected from
the dead man’s most intimate friends in the neighborhood.
Slowly and in the teeth of the advancing storm, buffeted by driving
wind and rain, the solemn train proceeded along the winding road and
up the lonely mountainside, out of sight.
It was not expected to make the journey in a day, or to travel all
night. At dark they would stop over at a mountain inn, and proceed on
their way at dawn.
But darkness and the advancing storm found them far from the inn,
their lamps blown out, in total gloom, wrapped in the fury of the most
blinding snowstorm known to the country for several years.
It was dangerous driving over those shelving mountain roads in the
broadest daylight. It required a keen eye and a steady hand to hold the
horses to the road then, that they might not step aside and go rolling
down, over precipices that one shuddered to behold. How much more
terrible the journey now to the drivers, as their horses crawled along,
guided only by their own keen instincts, for the blackness was such
that one could not see his hand before him.
“A gruesome funeral train,” one pallbearer lamented to another, who
answered gloomily enough:
“I should not wonder if we all come to our deaths before to-morrow!”
Nothing indeed was more likely, as they all realized in the depths of
their heavy hearts.
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!
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.