The Bay and Susy were on hand with their nurse, Rosa.  I was on hand, too.  Susy Crane’s trio of colored servants ditto—­these being Josie, house-maid; Aunty Cord, cook, aged 62, turbaned, very tall, very broad, very fine every way (see her portrait in “A True Story just as I Heard It” in my Sketches;) Chocklate (the laundress) (as the Bay calls her—­she can’t say Charlotte,) still taller, still more majestic of proportions, turbaned, very black, straight as an Indian—­age 24.  Then there was the farmer’s wife (colored) and her little girl, Susy.

Wasn’t it a good audience to get up an excitement before?  Good excitable, inflammable material?

Lewis was still down town, three miles away, with his two-horse wagon, to get a load of manure.  Lewis is the farmer (colored).  He is of mighty frame and muscle, stocky, stooping, ungainly, has a good manly face and a clear eye.  Age about 45—­and the most picturesque of men, when he sits in his fluttering work-day rags, humped forward into a bunch, with his aged slouch hat mashed down over his ears and neck.  It is a spectacle to make the broken-hearted smile.  Lewis has worked mighty hard and remained mighty poor.  At the end of each whole year’s toil he can’t show a gain of fifty dollars.  He had borrowed money of the Cranes till he owed them $700 and he being conscientious and honest, imagine what it was to him to have to carry this stubborn, helpless load year in and year out.

Well, sunset came, and Ida the young and comely (Charley Langdon’s wife) and her little Julia and the nurse Nora, drove out at the gate behind the new gray horse and started down the long hill—­the high carriage receiving its load under the porte cochere.  Ida was seen to turn her face toward us across the fence and intervening lawn—­Theodore waved good-bye to her, for he did not know that her sign was a speechless appeal for help.

The next moment Livy said, “Ida’s driving too fast down hill!” She followed it with a sort of scream, “Her horse is running away!”

We could see two hundred yards down that descent.  The buggy seemed to fly.  It would strike obstructions and apparently spring the height of a man from the ground.

Theodore and I left the shrieking crowd behind and ran down the hill bare-headed and shouting.  A neighbor appeared at his gate—­a tenth of a second too late! the buggy vanished past him like a thought.  My last glimpse showed it for one instant, far down the descent, springing high in the air out of a cloud of dust, and then it disappeared.  As I flew down the road my impulse was to shut my eyes as I turned them to the right or left, and so delay for a moment the ghastly spectacle of mutilation and death I was expecting.

I ran on and on, still spared this spectacle, but saying to myself:  “I shall see it at the turn of the road; they never can pass that turn alive.”  When I came in sight of that turn I saw two wagons there bunched together—­one of them full of people.  I said, “Just so—­they are staring petrified at the remains.”