Times
of Uncle Ernest -
Chesapeake City and Beyond– Bill
Chapter 5
Then, Nina, that old Bill started rummaging around in his
box of junk, so I ran over to the fence to watch Babe as she grazed. She had a
buzzing flock of flies and gnats pestering her, and all of a sudden a black
horse fly about two inches long and as thick as a man's thumb landed on her
shank. Babe kept grazing but quivered and rippled her skin just where that ugly
fly was. The shiver didn't do any good so she swished her tail with a quick
slash and knocked the bugger off. He wasn't fazed though, because he landed on
her again, forward, just out of the tail's reach. Babe shivered again and again
and stamped her hooves hard a few times—no good. That thing had dug in, clung
tight, and buried its head into Babe's hide. So I slid under the fence rail,
ran over, and smacked the sucker as hard as I could. Babe jumped and moved
ahead a little, and I saw the smashed fly embedded into her side. Then I looked
at my hand. The palm was sopped with rich, bright blood—sticky and glistening
in the sun—an oozing mess extending even in between my fingers.
"Come away from that horse now, boy, and get over
here," Bill shouted, so I ran on over to his pump trough, washed off the
mess, dried my hands in the grass, and sat down next to Bill again. "Think
of the craftsmanship it took to build this arch, boy," he said, showing me
the photo. "Why, she'll be there till doomsday. But, you know, they
stopped building those arches, even though they had hundreds of stones that
they got from the quarry and dressed them for use. They ended up using the
stones to build the iron railroad bridge over the Big Elk Creek in 1876."
"But what happened to the old feeder canal?"
"Well,
they ran out of money, and there was still a lot of bellyaching about where to
locate the main canal. But they did
run water into the feeder and test it with some small barges. The feeder went
from the Elk Mills forge to an area about a mile west of 
No comments:
Post a Comment