passed through the city.
Just beyond Boston, you know, is the Atlantic Ocean.
At this point in my meditations we started down the slope to the big creamery.
The building is located to the right of the road. On the left, a rather steep grassy embankment drops perhaps thirty feet to the little river.
On this beautiful sunny afternoon, the creamery's milk cans, something like a hundred in number, were airing by the roadside, just on the edge of the embankment; and as we thundered down I smiled grimly to think of the attractive little frill Maud might add to her performance by kicking a dozen or two of the milk cans into the river as she passed.
Maud, however, as she approached the cans, kept fairly in the middle of the road—and stopped!
Heavens! She stopped so short that I gasped for breath. All in a twinkling the steel rods dropped into position beside her legs, the cuffs snapped, and the Hawkins Horse-brake had worked at last!
Poor old Maud! She slid a few yards with rigid limbs, squealing in terror, and then crashed to the ground like an overturned toy horse.
Hawkins shot off into space, and at the moment I didn't care greatly where he landed. I was vaguely conscious that he collided head-on with the row of milk-cans, but my main anxiety was to shut off my power, set the brake, point the auto into the ditch, and jump.
And I did it all in about one second.
After the jump, my recollection grows hazy. I know that one of my feet landed in an open milk-can, and that I grabbed wildly at several others. Then the cans and I toppled headlong over the embankment and went down, down, down, while, fainter and fainter, I could hear something like:
“Whoa! Whoa! Gol darn ye! Ow! Stop that hoss! Bang! Rattle! Rattle! Bang! Whoa! Stop, can't ye?”
Then a peculiarly unyielding milk-can landed on my head and I seemed to float away.
I have reason to believe that I sat up about two minutes later. The crash
Prev.
Back
Top