The Waters of Kronos Read Online Free Page B

to Unionville.” The driver spat heavy tobacco juice over the wheel and waited.
    “But Unionville—” John Donner said and stopped. He had almost said that Unionville was gone, drowned out, never to be seen by human eye again. Careful, careful, he repeated to himself, then aloud, “You mean you’re going down there—to Unionville—tonight?”
    “Farther’n that. I got to go over the mountain.”
    So that was why he had three horses in his team. John Donner remembered that the mountain road was steep. He edged closer.
    “May I ride with you?” he asked.
    “If you’re going to Unionville, you can walk it,” the driver said. “It ain’t far.”
    “I’m afraid,” John Donner confessed, “I couldn’t make it alone.”
    “Afraid of what? You can’t miss it. You could close your eyes and you’d run right into it.”
    “I’d like to ride with you, if I may,” the man in the road requested. “I’ve not been too well.”
    “Well, it’s that much more for the team to hold back. But I guess I can take you.” The driver looked at the stranger as at a difficult person, but he made room on the seat.
    As he climbed over the wheel, John Donner glanced back into the wagon box. He saw it filled to the sideboards with the deep product of the earth, the residue of life that had flourished countless years ago. So that was the scent he had noticed standing there, the faint, almost imperceptible, yet unmistakable taint of wet, freshly mined anthracite, a mysterious smell, not quite chemical, yet something as a boy he had often detected in the miners’ trains and even from men with blackened faces trotting home from the station, the odor of a buried world, very difficult to describe, native to the mouth of the Primrose slope and the dripping depths below. He recalled that when the colliery closed down, they had been mining from the eighth or ninth level, each level eighty yards apart, which meant that he was riding now with a cargo drawn from beneath the level of the sea.
    The driver waited till his passenger settled himself on the wooden seat. Then he released the brake and they started down into the chasm.
    At every turn John Donner looked for the road to peter out. He thought they must surely come upon spots scraped by the bulldozer to nothingness, must reach the edge of the water. But the old shale road continued to stretch beneath them and around their heads the soft country dusk sweet with the farming scents of early September. A lantern shone in Blinkley’s unpainted barn as they passed. He could smell cows. A field of corn shocked in the old-time fashion came down to the rail fence. A horse and buggy went by close enough to be touched by his outstretched hand. Then they came out of the hollow to a familiar level stretch.
    This, he knew, was the Breather, where teams coming up the Long Stretch could get their wind before the next grade. And now the lights of the old town were coming into view directly below them, not the bright glitter of electric bulbs but the mildness of oil wicks sending their steady yellow beams among the trees. As a boy he had often coasted to town from here. This was the steepest descent of the Long Stretch, and the horses let themselves into it gingerly, the wagon tongue rising and the horses’ collars thrusting out in protest. John Donner had the feeling he was descending from where he could never return.
    They passed the white Shollenberger house high on itslong flight of wooden steps, passed the light and dark brown house of Mr. Kirtz, who drooled on his beard and the green-groceries he sold in the basement of the Eagle Hotel, passed the curious blue house where lived the girl in his school who would never speak above a whisper in class. Years afterward he heard that she had married and had twins, and he had always pictured her in his mind whispering to her children while other Unionville women shouted and threatened.
    The wagon was almost down, crossing the alley which the Uptown