Husband and wife -- Fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
Mary Donahue had indicated for Augusta the spring and the camping
place. A high wall of hill stood up above the road on the right and out
of the hill came the spring. On the river side of the road a fringe of
trees screened the little flat promontory in the centre of which the
wagon stood. Occasionally the purring of a swiftly driven automobile
on the hard road within a few yards of them told them that the world
still ran its hustling way, but they were as effectually hidden and
private as if they had been securely housed in the middle of some vast
estate of their own. And when the dishes were washed and everything put
in shape for the night, Augusta brought blankets and they sat perched
out on the very edge of the cliff looking down to where the "Central"
trains thundered along some two hundred feet directly below them, and
out across the broad, dark expanse of the river.
The Albany boat came gliding up the silent path of the river, her
tiered, warmly lighted decks looking like a series of summer porches,
the steady, even motion of the boat giving to the watchers on the hill
the pleasant feeling that she was standing and that they were being
gently carried past her.
The searchlight from the boat playing along the hill bank caught the
figures of the boy and girl struck out in enormous silhouettes above
the rim of the cliff and a merry cheer came up from the boat.
"Go on and mind your own business," scolded Jimmie. "We are no mooning
young couple. And we are no subject for flash-light pictures. We are
sober married folks, with our home in the background and a respectable
horse in the middle distance."
The flashlight held them for a moment and then swung off overhead and
went to peer into the windows of a moving train on the "West Shore."
The band on the now receding boat broke into an old fashioned waltz
tune which, sweetened and mellowed by the distance and the echoing
chording of the hills, came up to them with the softness of a gentle,
kindly dream of forgotten people.
The breaking contour of the river soon hid the lights of the boat, and
Jimmie and Augusta were left to the great, solemn thinking silences
about them, and to themselves, very content.
In the stark blackness of the closed wagon, in the middle of the night,
Augusta found herself standing on the floor. She did not know how, or
why, she had gotten out of the little string hammock that was her bed.
But now she was shocked into full wakefulness. The wagon seemed to be
moving and she gave a little scream of terror as she thought of the
cliff and the terrible broken fall to the tracks below.
But the roar of the wind and swish of driven rain drowned her scream
and she realized that what she thought was movement was just the
swaying of the wagon body on its springs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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