II.The Living-wagon In The Storm.
A week after the events depicted, a living-wagon drawn by four horses and conducted by two postboys, left Pont-a-Mousson, a pretty town between Nancy and Metz. Nothing like this caravan, as show people style the kind, had ever crossed the bridge, though the good folks see theatrical carts of queer aspect.
The body was large and painted blue, with a baron's insignia, surmounting a J. and a B., artistically interlaced. This box was lighted by two windows, curtained with muslin, but they were in the front, where a sort of driver's cab hid them from the vulgar eye. By these apertures the inmate of the coach could talk with outsiders. Ventilation was given this case by a glazed skylight in the "dickey," or hind box of the vehicle, where grooms usually sit. Another orifice completed the oddity of the affair by presenting a stovepipe, which belched smoke, to fade away in the wake as the whole rushed on.
In our times one would have simply imagined that it was a steam conveyance and applauded the mechanician who had done away with horses.
The machine was followed by a led horse of Arab extraction, ready saddled, indicating that one of the passengers sometimes gave himself the pleasure and change of riding alongside the vehicle.
At St. Mihiel the mountain ascent was reached. Forced to go at a walk, the quarter of a league took half an hour.
Toward evening the weather turned from mild and clear to tempestuous. A cloud spread over the skies with frightful rapidity and intercepted the setting sunbeams. All of a sudden the cloud was stripped by a lightning flash, and the startled eye could plunge into the immensity of the firmament, blazing like the infernal regions. The vehicle was on the mountain side when a second clap of thunder flung the rain out of the cloud; after falling in large drops, it poured hard.
The postboys pulled up. "Hello!" demanded a man's voice from inside the conveyance, "what are you stopping for?"
"We are asking one another if we ought to go on," answered one postillion with the deference to a master who had paid handsomely.
"It seems to me that I ought to be asked about that. Go ahead!"
But the rain had already made the road downward slippery.
"Please, sir, the horses won't go," said the elder postillion.
"What have you got spurs for?"
"They might be plunged rowels deep without making the balky creatures budge; may heaven exterminate me if——"
The blasphemy was not finished, as a dreadful lightning stroke cut him short. The coach was started and ran upon the horses, which had to race to save themselves from being crushed. The equipage flew down the sloping road like an arrow, skimming the precipice.
Instead of the traveler's voice coming from the vehicle, it was his head.
"You clumsy fellows will kill us all!" he said. "Bear to the left, deuce take ye!"
"Oh, Joseph," screamed a woman's voice inside, "help! Holy Madonna, help us!"
It was time to invoke the Queen of Heaven, for the heavy carriage was skirting the abysm; one wheel seemed to be in the air and a horse was nearly over when the traveler, springing out on the pole, grasped the postboy nearest by the collar and slack of the breeches. He raised him out of his boots as if he were a child, flung him a dozen feet clear, and taking his place in the saddle, gathered up the reins, and said in a terrifying voice to the second rider:
"Keep to the left, rascal, or I shall blow out your brains!"
The order had a magical effect. The foremost rider, haunted by the shriek of his luckless comrade, followed the substitute impulse and bore the horses toward the firm land.
"Gallop!" shouted the traveler. "If you falter, I shall run right over you and your horses."
The chariot seemed an infernal machine drawn by nightmares and pursued by a whirlwind.
But they had eluded one danger only to fall into another.
As they reached the foot of the declivity, the cloud split with an awful roar in which was blended the flame and the thunder.
A fire enwrapped the leaders, and the wheelers and the leaders were brought to their haunches as if the ground gave way under them. But the fore pair, rising quickly and feeling that the traces had snapped, carried away their man in the darkness. The vehicle, rolling on a few paces, stopped on the dead body of the stricken horse.
The whole event had been accompanied by the screams of the woman.
For a moment of confusion, none knew who was living or dead.
The traveler was safe and sound, on feeling himself; but the lady had swooned. Although he guessed this was the case, it was elsewhere that he ran to aid—to the rear of the vehicle.
The led horse was rearing with bristling mane, and shaking the door, to the handle of which his halter was hitched.
"Hang the confounded beast again!" muttered a broken voice within; "a curse on him for shaking the wall of my laboratory." Becoming louder, the same voice added in Arabic: "I bid you keep quiet, devil!"
"Do not wax angry with Djerid, master," said the traveler, untying the steed and fastening it to the hind wheel; "he is frightened, and for sound reasons."
So saying, he opened a door, let down the steps, and stepped inside the vehicle, closing the door behind him.
He faced a very aged man, with hooked nose, gray eyes, and shaking yet active hands. Sunken in a huge armchair, he was following the lines of a manuscript book on vellum, entitled "The Secret Key to the Cabinet of Magic," while holding a silver skimmer in his other hand.
The three walls—for this old man had called the sides of the living-wagon "walls"—held bookcases, with shelves of bottles, jars and brass-bound boxes, set in wooden cases like utensils on shipboard so as to stand up without upsetting. The old man could reach these articles by rolling the easy chair to them; a crank enabled him to screw up the seat to the level of the highest. The compartment was, in feet, eight by six and six in height. Facing the door was a furnace with hood and bellows. It was now boiling a crucible at a white heat, whence issued the smoke by the pipe overhead exciting the mystery of the villagers wherever the wagon went through.
The whole emitted an odor which in a less grotesque laboratory would have been called a perfume.
The occupant seemed to be in bad humor, for he grumbled:
"The cursed animal is frightened: but what has he got to disturb him, I want to know? He has shaken my door, cracked my furnace, and spilt a quarter of my elixir in the fire. Acharat, in heaven's name, drop the beast in the first desert we cross."
"In the first place, master," returned the other smiling, "we are not crossing deserts, for we are in France; and next, I would not abandon a horse worth a thousand louis, or rather priceless, as he is of the breed of Al Borach."
"I will give you a thousand over and over again. He has lost me more than a million, to say nothing of the days he has robbed me of. The liquor would have boiled
