Page:The Wreck of a World - Grove - 1890.djvu/40

24 until on the 6th of June, 1949, an hour before sunrise, there galloped into the market-place a man mounted on a panting and foam-flecked roan, evidently in the last stage of terror and exhaustion. When this wild figure dismounted, or rather fell into the arms of the bystanders, it was some time before any coherent meaning could be extracted from his disjointed words. Soon, however, a whisper passed from mouth to mouth of the gathering crowd—"The Engines,"—"the Engines!" The messenger was eventually taken in to the Town Council, which was sitting, the writer among them, self-summoned at the general alarm, to whom, with pale face and gestures of madness, he told his tale. The night before he had retired to rest about ten o'clock in his lonely farm-house of Bellow's Gully, when he was aroused after a short sleep, and as he supposed about midnight, by sounds of a kind he could not describe. His first thought was that he had been visited by a party of Indians, or white rascals out on a cattle lifting expedition, but as the sounds grew more defined and more peculiar he softly stole from his bed and proceeded towards the stable. All appeared to be safe, though the sounds continued with