Rut

“ The soft, dry soil crumbles away, the light dust is stirred up by every passing vehicle, leaving deep ruts, so that the same road is often on different levels, and a car runs along at a sharp angle, with one wheel poised on the edge of a rut, and the other in a hollow. ”

“ Each rut moreover has a voice of its own; not only in its first formation, but at every period of depression in the muggy weather, or rough rebellion in a fine black frost, and above all other times in the loose insurrection of a thaw. There always is a bit of something hard and something soft in it; jags that contradict all things with a jerk; and deep subsidence, soft as flattery.
There scarcely could be a finer sample of ruts than was afforded by a narrow lane, or timber-track, at the extreme north-western outskirt of Stow Forest. ”

“ Sometimes they expanded to a three-foot hole, into which the car descended with a heart-rending thump. Once in a rut, it was impossible to get out. The mud, of the consistency of modeling clay, would have made the fortune of a dealer in art supplies. At last, a wrong choice of ruts pulled us into this stiff mass to our hubs, almost wrenching the differential from the car, and we found ourselves stopping. ”

“ If it is on a perfectly hard road, in dry weather the road will almost be a mere tangent to the circle; but on a soft road, in damp weather, the wheel will make more or less of a rut, and the average depth of the rut will give the average for the segment. ”

“ When a road is made of 116ill-prepared materials, the wheel piles them up one upon another, and that forms a very narrow rut, which just holds the wheel; but a rut made by wear upon a smooth surface, is rather a concave hollow than a rut, and will present no difficulty to a carriage in travelling, and that is the difference between a rut produced by wear in a very well-made road, and that produced by displacing the materials. ”

“ One day, I remember, was particularly unlucky: three times we got ‘stuck’ in the mud up to the axles of the wheels; my driver was continually giving up one rut and with moans and grunts trudging across to the other, and finding things no better with that. ”

“ Will the increasing breadth of the wheel render slipping in ascending a hill more or less likely to take place?—I rather think that will increase the friction, because that does not tend to make a rut. In making a rut there is a very great difficulty in the wheel getting out of that rut, for there is no footing ”

“ These stones do not wear uniformly with the rest of the material, but produce bumps and ridges, and in nearly every case result in making two holes instead of one. Every hole or rut in a roadway, if not tamped full of some good material like that of which the road is constructed, will become filled with water, and finally with mud and water, and will be dug deeper and wider by each passing vehicle. ”

“ Six or seven times at least, the horse, painfully dragging us the whole way by the strain of every nerve and sinew, got stuck in the mud, and was to be flogged till he plunged out of it. More than once we tottered upon ridges of incrusted mud, when a very little matter would have turned us over. I say nothing about Rutland—I abhor and disdain a pun—but we did nothing but cross ruts to avoid puddles, and cross them back again to avoid stones, and the ruts were all so deep as to leave but one semicircle of the wheel visible. ”

“ Let's build a rousing fire."
"How?" demanded Helen. "Where can we get fuel? It's all under the snow."
"There's plenty of kindling right under us," declared Jennie Stone, vigorously. "And Ruth spoke about the under branches of these trees being dry——"
"And so they are," declared Ruth, struggling to her feet. "We must do something. A rousing fire against this rock will keep us warm. We can heat the rock and then draw the fire out and get behind it. ”

“ Ruth made hers instantly. She took the baby from the front seat, wrapped him close to her in all the blankets she had, and started forward toward a deserted miner’s cabin built in a draw close to the trail.
Half a mile is no distance when the sun is shining and the path is clear. But near and far take on different meanings in a blizzard. Drifts underfoot made the going slow. The pelting wind, heavy with the sting of sleet, beat upon her, sifted through her clothes, and sapped her vitality. More than once her numbed legs doubled under her like the blades of a jackknife. ”

“ She called Ruth's attention to it.
"Maybe the snow will come quicker than Long Jerry thought," declared the girl from the Red Mill. "See! there's another."
"Oh, pshaw! what's a little snow?" scoffed Belle Tingley. ”

“ Who knew at what moment the tunnel might cave in, burying her beneath a smothering weight of dirt and rock? Ruth knew that this was an actual and imminent peril.
She tried to turn with some vague idea in her mind of returning to the comparative safety of the place she had left.
But the movement of her shoulders against the sides of the tunnel brought with it such a terrifying rattle of stones that Ruth decided to push on at any cost.
“There must be an outlet somewhere!” she gasped sobbingly. “There must be! There must!” ”

“ He let out the impatient mare then, and the mud spattered from his wheels as he flew up the road toward Cheslow.
CHAPTER IX THE CREST OF THE WAVE
The rain could not last forever; Nature must cease weeping some time. Just as girls, far away from their old homes and their old friends, must cease wetting their pillows with regretful tears after a time, and look forward to the new interests and new friends to which they have come.
Not that Ruth wept much. ”

“ After she had driven from the foothills into the cañon, Ruth stopped to wrap an extra blanket around the baby, for the sun was painting only the upper walls as yet, and down by the creek there was an inch-thick ice at the edges. The early fall snows were melting on the sunny slopes above, and Hill Creek was pouring down in a flood. The road crossed the creek twice, but after she was on it Ruth discovered that the second bridge was very shaky. The car got over safely, but she decided to take the high-line road home, even though it was a few miles longer. ”

“ They will here meet with ruts, which I actually measured, four feet deep, and floating with mud only from a wet summer; what, therefore, must they be after a winter? The only mending it receives is the tumbling in some loose stones, which serve no other purpose but jolting a carriage in the most intolerable manner. These are not merely opinions, but facts; for I actually passed three carts broken down in these eighteen miles, of execrable memory. ”

“ It is not necessary to wait for any one to come to us. The snow is now covered with a crust which will bear our weight. I have thought of a way in which we can [156] slide down the mountain-side, which, from a spot where I have been standing this morning, is no steeper than some coasting-hills, though very much longer. In a few minutes we can pass from this region of snow, where death from cold and starvation must soon overtake us, to a grassy valley where there is no snow, and where we shall be within walking distance of a house in which people are living."
Ruth grasped my arm. ”

“ Up-stream of the cove was a great mass of rock—not one rock, but several huddled together and the cracks between overgrown with brush and vines. Chess brought into use the electric torch again.
He shot the spotlight into the crannies. Was there a path there between two of the big boulders? He drew Ruth’s attention to it with a touch on her arm. She saw that some of the bushes were broken—the vines torn away and dead. 166
“Somebody has been here,” she murmured.
“Of course. That is what we came to find,” said the young man. “We are on the verge of a discovery, Ruth.” ”

“ Had she worn caulks on the soles of her boots, as did the foreman who had cut the boom, and been practised as he was in "running the logs," Ruth would have stood a better chance of escaping the plunging avalanche. As it was, she was not wholly helpless.
She had picked up a peavey one of the timbermen had left on this bank and was using is as a staff as she watched the "freshet" start. Warned now of the danger she was in, the girl of the Red Mill seized this staff firmly in both hands and poised herself to leap from the boulder to which she had stepped. ”

“ I can't feel my feet at all——"
"Come across to the fire," urged Ruth. "We girls are lost from Snow Camp. But we're all right so far. My! how the snow blows."
Facing the storm they could hardly make headway at all. Indeed, the youth fell within a few yards and Ruth was obliged to drag him through the drifts. ”

“ Creeping feebly along the lonely little path--without seeing the man on the mountainside above--crouching as he walked with a hunted, fearful air--the poor creature moved toward the point of the spur around which the trail led beneath the spot where Rutlidge sat. ”

“ Day after day they creep along, rarely covering more than six or seven miles a day. Every four hundred yards they rest, but the loads are taken off only at noon and night. At other times they relieve themselves for a moment from the intolerable strain by placing an iron-shod crutch under the load. ”

“ Fill, fill with the rising tide of night;
While the sunset with gold-dust bridges
The black-ravined ridges,
Whose mighty muscles curve in its light.
In our weary climb, while night dyes deep,
Down the broken and stony steep,
How our jaded bodies are shaken
By each step in half-blindness taken —
One's thoughts lie heaped like brutes asleep.
Open the door of the dismal hut,
Silence and darkness lone were shut
In it, as a tidal pool, until returning
Night drowns the land, — no ember's burning, —
One is too weary the food to cut. ”

“ We came out on the old road to the cove, and rough enough passage we made, for a hill burn that crossed the bare rock o' the road had frozen and melted and frozen again, so that on the worst o' the hill we took our hands and knees for it, and even that comedown to a hillman was better than breaking our necks over the rocks on the low side, for the track was whiles no more than a scratch along a precipice. ”

“ The mountain torrent is a boss of palest emerald ice against the dazzle of the snow; the pine-stumps are capped and hooded with gigantic mushrooms of snow; the rocks are overlaid five feet deep; the rocks, the fallen trees, and the lichens together, and the dumb white lips curl up to the track cut in the side of the mountain, and grin there fanged with gigantic icicles. You may listen in vain when the train stops for the least sign of breath or power among the hills. The snow has smothered the rivers, and the great looping trestles run over what might be a lather of suds in a huge wash-tub. ”

“ A passage has been formed from the road to a point which just overhangs the fall, and here, securely parapeted round, you look down over a grand sheer fall of some eight hundred feet, in the course of which the torrent which goes to feed the threadlike Lira down below us in the valley, and just now roaring in bold volume underneath our road, loses itself in soft, delicate, and fairy-like spray, and ere it reaches the rock below, seems like some delicate mist falling from the sky for ever in endless and exquisite change of form. ”

“ But to my story.—It was the custom in this season, when the snow fell heavily on the high passes, to transmit the little weekly mail between Reute and Inspruck by an old and now disused road, which led along the edge of the river, and generally, from its sheltered situation, continued practicable and free from snow some weeks later than the mountain road. It was scarce worthy to be called a road—a mere wheel-track, obstructed here and there by stones and masses of rock that every storm brought down, and not unfrequently threatened, by the flooding of the river, to be washed away altogether. ”

“ The road, like an afterthought, clung for dear life to the edge of a series of hills, now dipping like a swallow to the river bed, then after the usual chuck-hole at the bottom, rising in dizzy turns to the top of the next hill, unwinding before us sometimes for miles. Steep cliffs, and narrow gorges at times shut us completely from the world. ”

“ It is na beauty's fairest bloom,
⁠It is na maiden charms consign'd,
And hurried to an early tomb,
⁠That wrings my heart and clouds my mind;
But sparkling wit, and sense refin'd,
⁠And spotless truth without disguise,
Make me with sighs enrich the wind
⁠That fans the grave whare Mary lies. ”

“ From ledge to ledge rushes the stream, making falls innumerable, decked with living fringes of foam, and as the noisy current hurries onward it engirdles the boulders with foamy rings, or hangs upon them a long white train that flutters and glistens as sunbeams drop down through the wind-shaken leaves. ”

“ As it crosses the wall, there is a fall below, and a bad rapid, filled with boulders of trap; so we stop to make a portage. Then on we go, gliding by hills and ledges, with distant walls in view; sweeping past sharp angles of rock; stopping at a few points to examine rapids, which we find can be run, until we have made another five miles, when we land for dinner.
Then we let down with lines, over a long rapid, and start again. Once more the walls close in, and we find ourselves in a narrow gorge, the water again filling the channel, and very swift. ”

“ The dry dust and sand filled their eyes and mouths to the point of suffocation, but luckily the rubble was so soft that they dug deeply into it, impeding their progress to such an extent that they were able to stand up, braced against the hill and work their way down. ”

“ We are glad you find The Great Round World interesting.
Editor.
Dear Mr. Editor:
I have had only two of your papers. I like them very much. I am going to save them and have them bound. It is so muddy here, and it was muddier last week; the mud was half a foot deep. There is a man that runs a dray-wagon here, and he has two little mules. He whips them almost to death.
A little while ago a poor dog went by with a tin can tied to his tail; the boys that did this filled it full of dirt, and the poor dog was half scared to death. ”