Run To Seed | Page 8

speed, and the grind as the wheels slid along under the brakes.
Then they stopped with a bump which jerked them out of their seats,
set the lamps to swinging, and sent the things on the table crashing on
the floor. No one was hurt, only shaken, and they crowded out of the
car to learn the cause. They found it. The engine was half buried in wet
earth on the other side of the little washout, with the tender jammed up
into the cab. The whole was wrapped in a dense cloud of escaping
steam. The roar was terrific. The big engineer, bare-headed and covered
with mud, and with his face deadly white, was trying to get down to the
engine. Some one was in there.
They got him out after a while (but it took some time), and laid him on
the ground, while a mattress was got. It was Jim.
Carry had been weeping and praying. She sat down and took his head
in her lap, and with her lace handkerchief wiped his blackened and

bleeding face, and smoothed his wet hair.
The newspaper accounts, which are always reflections of what public
sentiment is, or should be, spoke of it--some, as "a providential"--others,
as "a miraculous"--and yet others as "a fortunate" escape on the part of
the President and the Directors of the road, according to the tendencies,
religious or otherwise, of their paragraphists.
They mentioned casually that "only one person was hurt--an employee,
name not ascertained." And one or two had some gush about the
devotion of the beautiful young lady, the daughter of one of the
directors of the road, who happened to be on the train, and who, "like a
ministering angel, held the head of the wounded man in her lap after he
was taken from the wreck." A good deal was made of this picture,
which was extensively copied.
Dick Rail's account, after he had come back from carrying the broken
body down to the old Upton place in the country, and helping to lay it
away in the old enclosure under the big trees on the hill, was this:
"By ----!" he said, when he stood in the yard, with a solemn-faced
group around him, "we were late, and I was just shaking 'em up. I had
been meaner'n hell to Jim all the trip (I didn't know him, and you all
didn't neither), and I was workin' him for all he was worth: I didn't give
him a minute. The sweat was rolling off him, and I was damnin' him
with every shovelful. We was runnin' under orders to make up, and we
was just rounding the curve this side of Ridge Hill, when Jim hollered.
He saw it as he raised up with the shovel in his hand to wipe the sweat
off his face, and he hollered to me, 'My God! Look, Dick! Jump!'
"I looked and Hell was right there. He caught the lever and reversed,
and put on the air and sand before I saw it, and then grabbed me, and
flung me clean out of the cab: 'Jump!' he says, as he give me a swing. I
jumped, expectin' of course he was comin' too; and as I lit, I saw him
turn and catch the lever. The old engine was jumpin' nigh off the track.
But she was too near. In she went, and the tender right on her. You may
talk about his eyes bein' bad; but by ----! when he gave me that swing,
they looked to me like coals of fire. When we got him out 'twarn't Jim!

He warn't nothin' but mud and ashes. He warn't quite dead; opened his
eyes, and breathed onct or twict; but I don't think he knew anything, he
was so mashed up. We laid him out on the grass, and that young lady
took his head in her lap and cried over him (she had come and seed him
in the engine), and said she knew his mother and sister down in the
country (she used to live down there); they was gentlefolks; that Jim
was all they had. And when one of them old director-fellows who had
been swilling himself behind there come aroun', with his kid gloves on
and his hands in his great-coat pockets, lookin' down, and sayin'
something about, 'Poor fellow, couldn't he 'a jumped? Why didn't he
jump?' I let him have it; I said, 'Yes, and if it hadn't been for him, you
and I'd both been frizzin' in h--l this minute.' And the President standin'
there said to some of them, 'That was the same young fellow who came
into my office to get a place last year when you were down, and said he
had "run to seed."