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Updated: May 21, 2025
Half of it lies under water for six months of the year; but in the summer a rutted ride projects from stony sand-pockets framed in velvet moss, with tidal-waves of bracken surging up from the dells at the road-side and low branches meeting to net the sun-shine. At the end of the three miles Swanley Forest seems to have paused for breath.
A desolate wilderness of rolling sand-dunes, beach grass, huckleberry and bayberry bushes, cedar swamps, and small clumps of pitch-pines. Through this desert the three or four rutted, crooked sand roads, leading to and from the lights, turned and twisted. Along their borders dwelt no human being; but life was there, life in abundance.
Jack fired off his revolver, shooting high purposely. He wanted merely to frighten their pursuers into desisting. Then the car gathered momentum, and was soon out of range. Presently Frank, who had been driving the flivver as fast as it would go, with the result that they were all tossed about while the car lurched precariously over the rutted road, slowed down to a more moderate pace.
"This" was a narrow rutted lane, half-obliterated in the encroaching underbrush, at the end of which a weather-beaten shack squatted in a clump of zapote trees. As they drew up in the little cleared space before it the door opened and a shriveled, white-haired woman peered out, a light held high in her trembling hand. "Madre de Dios!" she cried. "José!"
Mollie shut her eyes and listened to Aunt Mary, who just then began to sing Mollie could hear the words quite plainly: "Oft in the stilly night, Ere slumber's chain hath bound me, Fond memory brings the light Of other days around me." They were standing on a rough deeply rutted cart-track high up on a hill-side.
He went through the wood with his chin lifted, half smiling, almost happy, an integral part of the wild, glad, wistful spring. It was not until the afternoon when he was nearing the station just, in fact, before he left the wood-trail for the rutted, frontier road that his mind was caught as sharply as a cloth by a needle, by the light sound of following steps.
Once more I stood in the rutted street, searching its brief length for a human form. I had the feeling that the inhabitants of the town were somewhere about, that they had just stepped out, leaving their doors unlocked against their early return. Perhaps there was a dance or a celebration of some sort in the neighboring village. Strange some one didn't stay behind.
That was the day we drove out the Appian Way, glorious in legend and tale, but not quite so all-fired glorious when you are reeling over its rough and rutted pavement in an elderly and indisposed open carriage, behind a pair of half-broken Roman-nosed horses which insist on walking on their hind legs whenever they tire of going on four.
Cart, omnibus, cab, van, barrow, donkey-tray, went by in strings, broken here and there, and he could not induce his legs to take advantage of the gaps; he listened to a warning that he would be down again if he tried it, among those wheels; and his nerves clutched him, like a troop of household women, to keep him from the hazard of an exposure to the horrid crunch, pitiless as tiger's teeth; and we may say truly, that once down, or once out of the rutted line, you are food for lion and jackal the forces of the world will have you in their mandibles.
One could not go astray on that broad highway, for the eye could follow the many parallel trails, where new ones had been broken when the old ones wore deep and rutted.
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